Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
5. Something else I see (the technology factor)
There’s one more thread that seems worth adding. Modern technology
makes war both harder and less rewarding in some cases:
Drones and cheap precision weapons allow even small countries to
inflict significant damage on larger powers.
Economic sanctions, while imperfect, can be deployed faster and with
more coordination than in the past.
Supply chains are global, which means that aggressors risk cutting
themselves off from the very technologies and markets they depend on.
In other words, the tools of modern globalization — finance, trade,
tech — double as tools of deterrence. You don’t need a world
government to stop wars; you just need a world that is so
interconnected that aggressors quickly pay unbearable costs.
I don't remember (either) exactly where I read it or what was the
author's opinion and what is mine... I think it was Shirer's Berlin Diary
however:
the salient point made was that both WWI and WWII were executed
somewhat because the "normal" balance of power is in favor of
defensive technology... but that at every technological leap
forward, there is a brief period where the favor flips so it becomes
acutely advantageous to prosecute an invasion for a short while.
Germany's Wermacht, not only in terms of hard technology (planes,
tanks, bombs) but also soft (tactics) gave them a temporary
advantage as an aggressor.
On the other hand, Shirer's accounts also lead me to look into the
asymmetry of industrial and human input to WWII and see how the
Allies ultimately overwhelmed the Axis with industrial might. I
forget how big the British Empire was at the time... between Canada
and Australia and beyond, they were *much* more than a tiny island
nation... and of course their biggest (former) colony of all was the
US. I think i read that the amount of hardware we through at
Germany (and Italy and Japan) was ultimately about 10x that mounted
by them..
Ukraine's acutely effective defense reflects (IMO) the combination of a
strong tech-indusrial base and aesthetic, a strong "homeland defense"
motivation and the emergence of new modes of defensive warfare (Drone
range for example, being naturally asymmetric in favor of defensive
use. The trick they pulled "smuggling" a host of them deep into
Russian territory notwithstanding.
Just to harp on one of my hobby-horses, I suspect the large scale
conflicts of humanity amongst ourselves to be a reflection of the sheer
forces between the goals of the individual/family/community and larger
scales like city/nation-states, multi-national corps, global-religions,
etc. A natural tension between scales.
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