Aurelien (4) Weak Military

Political weakness is compounded in the West by military weakness. The West has invested too much in the wrong weapons. It has also over-extended its attempts to control other nations at a time when the fragility of its weapon's choices is being exposed.

Given that they worked in World War 2, the United States has focused its defense on aircraft carriers and attack aircraft and helicopters. This has worked reasonably well because all its wars since World War 2, have been expeditionary attacks against weaker nations and rebellions in other parts of the world. Actually it did not work that well in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the current world, missile technology makes aircraft carriers and airplanes vulnerable, and this is an area where the US has underinvested.

In spite of spending a collective fortune on defence capabilities, the West is only capable of operating successfully in a limited number of scenarios, and it is not obvious how this can change. We can list some of the principal ones. (Nuclear forces exist in a different conceptual category, and I’m not going to say any more about them here.) Western aircraft could successfully gain and hold air superiority against, say Russia or China, provided the enemy agreed to limit the engagements strictly to air-to-air combat out of the range of anti-aircraft missiles. Western submarines, surface ships and carriers could probably prevail against, say the Chinese Navy, provided the latter agreed to fight outside the range of land-based missiles. Reasonable amounts of force could be projected by sea and air into permissive environments where air superiority could be guaranteed. This could include combat operations with mechanised forces and artillery, provided that operations did not last for more than a few weeks. And peacekeeping missions could still be undertaken, though probably not on a large scale. There are, of course, very important differences and nuances among western nations, but all of them, at different levels, are trapped in a process of smaller and smaller forces with smaller and smaller numbers of increasingly expensive and sophisticated equipment which is more and more expensive to maintain, and impossible to replace once a conflict has begun. The latter point has political consequences that are often ignored: under what circumstances are you going to risk your entire fleet of perhaps 100 front-line combat aircraft in a war which could leave you disarmed in a few days, and unable to rebuild your forces in less than a decade?

These force structures today did not develop by accident: they reflected beliefs about the missions that military forces would be likely to undertake. Essentially, western forces have a lot of super-sophisticated capabilities, and a fair amount of low-intensity and counter-insurgency capabilities, but not a lot in between. But they cannot fight a major conventional land/air war, or even a limited one that goes on for more than a few weeks. They also face the twin problems of the widespread proliferation of relatively cheap and accurate cruise and ballistic missiles capable of overwhelming defences and destroying highly expensive and complex weapons systems on the one hand, and their own lack of investment in sustainability, on the other. There is nothing magical about the technology involved in the new missiles; it is just that the West saw no virtue in developing that technology itself. Likewise, the West saw no virtue in large and expensive stocks of ammunition. As a result, from now on, the West will simply not be able to rely on automatic air superiority in any serious conflict, nor will its navies be able to operate safely anywhere near an enemy coast, or within the range of air-launched stand-off missiles, nor will it be able to conduct sustained operations on land...

To repeat, none of the above would necessarily have been a problem, provided the overall security policies of western nations had been consistent with these limitations. But they weren’t, and in essence they have provoked a situation where military problems are starting to arise to which the West has no adequate response.

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-west-is-weak-where-it-matters