They should have 100,000 people in their National Guard. All civilians but in the event of the Russian invasion, they can call them up. That's what they may have to do if they want to keep their freedom.
Posted on 06/01/2024 5:47:05 PM PDT by hardspunned
Absolutely true, with the Sickfurt school of pseudophilosophers. Even in the US, one of the worst of this lot, Horkheimer (of accursed memory) continued to spew his poison. Imagine now how much worse it was over here.
The French? Who attacked us 22 times from 876 to 1870? You have a great sense of humor 🙂
And World War One was directly caused by this moon calf Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices in Sarajevo.
It is. But I don’t think Germany could get 900,000 young men to willingly join the reserves. They’re to busy enjoying all that sweet EU party life - Spain, France, Italy, Ibiza vacations, etc. Especially if the primary reason is to be put on the front lines when they have to deal with the Big Bear....
I think you are very accurate on that prediction.
NATO doesn’t need to surrender because Russia is not and has no interest in a war for Europe. Ukraine is a different story…
There is no “total war” and “unrestricted warfare” between industrial nations today and this is very unlikely to happen, with only one possible exception, the PRC vs. US.
The destruction is too great. No different than the use of a nuke.
WWII was the last war of it’s kind and that was 80 years ago.
When this war in Ukraine started, Russia had 257,000 active duty in their army (55% our size). That will swell because of the needs they have today (also Syria, Libya, Armenia, along the border in the Balkans). Like us in 2003 they are maxed out. The point being that this big threat does not exist with the Russians (period). The Russians are not even CAPABLE of being the threat we make them out as today. They will hurt us back of course in the coming years albeit not in a huge conventional war.
It is in fact because Russia is weak, a has been conventional world power, that we are going after them. They aren’t invading our sphere of influence, we are invading theirs, in every single respect: former Soviet republics, border states, oil producing nations aligned or even formally allied with them.
Regards the Chinese (PRC), I would argue that scenario is long term possible (they have the industry, GDP, population, etc) and may come to a point where our interests diverge and they see an advantage in using force, but as of today there is no political will for this on either side.
There has to be a political and economic incentive, and that isn’t there regards China even though they are literally everything we pretend the Russians to be. China is a human rights abuser of the worst kind, they are a single party communist regime, they are expansionist, militant, and will not respect the sovereignty of Taiwan.
However!!! China is where much is manufactured, for US based/HQed firms. It’s a major market for US goods and services. They have been courting the US media for years and in some limited ways even have a direct ownership of some media outlets. China holds onto a huge amount of US securities. We know China is a frigging monster today, the only true near peer military force: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/China-Military-Budget-Graphic.png?x85095 (we respect force).
China has a lot of influence on US politics. Through contributions from their US based subsidiaries for political campaigns and to the parties, hiring lobbying groups (plural) and big names like the Podesta Group, they can shape the political arena. They know how to leverage their expats (a vast population in the US), they are extremely patient and have a coherent long term plan unlike us where we change course every 3 years. If Trump pisses them off, they just do damage control for a while and get their way with the next guy.
There is zero political will in the US regards confronting China. In fact, Trump was pretty much the only one to take on some of the unfair trade, IP violations, etc in earnest. Most of our political leadership does no more than a little lip service as after Tiananmin square or the de facto blockade of Taiwan recently. Our leadership shy’s away from any sort of lasting policy shifts which as you may guess would impact those in the US profiting from manufacturing in China or selling there. Biden literally reassured China that nothing will change as the Taiwan crisis was unfolding.
Point being that the only place where such a conflict could occur, there is no desire to have it, on either side. There are some valid points to the Lexus and the Olive Tree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree. (The economic interests between the US and China prevents conflict).
That said, every war we find ourselves in, for the last 80 years, has been a limited conflict, expeditionary, often with questionable economic or political motives. Post 1991 things have only gotten worse with our willingness to use military force to achieve our political goals. FORCING people’s kids into the military would cause serious political back pressure. Also, forcing these men to serve would cause morale issues.
Today, much of the military hardware, the tactics, everything is far more complex than in the past. In WWII my grandfather cleared rooms by chucking a grenade into them. Doing that today would get you court-martialed!
Today we find ourselves in asymmetric war, with civilians on what is a battle field essentially. Complex weapon systems. Operations where you have small units deciding the outcome. That NCO or company grade officer is the decision maker in operations where they are in small units and often far away from a flag pole. You NEED that professional army that is trained and experienced with many of the troops having 2, 3 or even more combat rotations under their belt. Many of these troops have a functional use of the language, they may have already been in that exact same location and know the lay of the land, local leaders, or how much to trust and use locals that are working with us or whom we are training etc. Just the instability caused by having a lot of conscripts that come a go quickly is a horrible idea in such scenarios.
Most of these militaries that have conscripts end up having a military inside a military, one extremely well equipped and highly trained force for the real world operations that are constantly happening, and a larger territorial force for national defense. This is bad because the smaller force ends up being over used while the bigger force is not up to task, any task really. Most conscripts are usually only rudimentary trained and assigned limited roles so that some utilization is possible in what amounts to a 18 month service. In the most extreme cases it’s 3 years conscription and that is still substantially less than a standard 4 year enlistment. On the other extreme are nations that have conscripts serving less than 12 months. Those are nearly worthless.
For Ukraine or Israel, conscripts make sense. You’re fighting for what you see as your land, for the defense of your own family in Israel’s case. People (most) will have some degree of motivation and society will support the idea of conscripts and their losses. But that is not the situation we are in.
I suspect you have an ulterior motive, and in this case if it’s for what I think may be the reason, it’s actually for a very good cause. If we had a conscripted military, politicians would not be so quick to use them like they are today. As things stand, it always comes back to the argument that these folks are volunteers and knew what they were signing up for, so don’t complain.
The flip side is that conscripts are used as a cheap way out and the Germans do not want to spend on defense. They just don’t. In the era of Ronald Reagan we had an Army approaching 775,000 active duty and that with an all volunteer force. But to do that, you have to fork out some serious dough, and even we have been giving 3.5% pay raises when inflation is in reality over 10% one year. The military’s pay and benefits have been falling behind as is usually the case under Democrats. In Germany’s case, having them commit to spending at least the absolute minimum required by NATO as per agreement is an accomplishment: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/17/germanys-scholz-commits-to-spending-2percent-on-defense-over-next-10-years.html
As to 900,000 reservists. Achieving that with any sort of a well equipped and trained force is something suited for comedy. Not even remotely feasible. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann is simply jumping on a bandwagon, singing today’s top chart song a little louder than those around her and grabbing attention with that.
” There is no “total war” and “unrestricted warfare” between industrial nations today and this is very unlikely to happen, with only one possible exception, the PRC vs. US.
The destruction is too great. No different than the use of a nuke.
WWII was the last war of it’s kind and that was 80 years ago.”
This reminds me of the thinking of politicians on the eve of WW1, when they thought the war would be limited because it would be too expensive and destructive to extend it to an industrial level.
Not only did WW1 exceed everyone’s worst case scenario, after the “War to end all Wars” they went for an even bigger one 20 years later.
Well now they all think that joining gigantic alliances with 30+ countries will prevent war. But all it does is suppress small wars, but when war actually comes it will be the gigantic world war that everyone most fears !
Unlikely. What we will see is a bunch of skirmishes. Putin will conclude that Biden has no backbone. So he makes his move on the Baltics. Then NATO troops will retreat. Then the Russians will conquer the Baltics.
Now is the time for Putin to make that move.
Wrt a direct challenge to NATO/USA the Russians and Chinese just have to wait.
The West is in a downward spiral, and even if Trump is elected it won’t change the trajectory long term.
If the Baltics want to remain independent, they're going to have to find a way to get 100,000 soldiers to man the front to deter the Russian invasion.
Die Fahne hoch!
The whole Latvia Armed forces, for example is 17,000 regular personnel and 35,000 reservists.
Latvia is the most obvious Baltic invasion route.
Army Group North came the other way thru Latvia in 1941.
They should have 100,000 people in their National Guard. All civilians but in the event of the Russian invasion, they can call them up. That's what they may have to do if they want to keep their freedom.
Hey, if we can’t trust Bill Clinton, who can we trust? /s
WWI and WWII didn’t have nukes.
Today the average Joe is aware, even in the US, that given the right enemy, they are not untouchable.
The casualness by which people make decisions for war are over since both in the political sphere and layperson there is an awareness that if you push things to far, you’ll end up with mutual destruction.
We have been in the era of “limited warfare” for a long time, all the Cold War (which wasn’t really all that cold given all the proxy conflicts) is an example.
Again this is the pre-WW1 mentality that “it would be so destructive it would never happen”.
The Bible speaks of End Times with wars and rumours of wars, and armies of 200,000,000.
Modern weapons and gigantic alliances don’t make big wars “impossible”. They just make them more destructive when they do come.
The idea that that we have returned to an era of 18th century “Cabinet War” is just a cope.
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-end-of-cabinet-war
Imagine this scenario:
The US and Russia have been in a struggle over control of the oil and gas rich nations of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela and Niger. We have been trying hard to strip them from Russia and get them under our control. In many of these places, you have both Russian and US forces in country.
If we could weaken Russia that would benefit us greatly in this struggle.
Now, this might be a stretch in your mind since we’re obviously only interested in spreading democracy, human rights, ridding the world of WMD and terrorism.
1). Could it be that in Ukraine we instigated a war?
2). And that this war has the Ukrainian’s doing the bleeding and the euros flipping 1/2 the bill while we stand to benefit on the world stage?
But, probably just a crazy conspiracy theory.
Let me ask you this, if the Chinese were to build bases along our Mexican border and base an undisclosed amount of troops there, for an indefinite time, nukes, missiles, mechanized forces, ships, bombers, fighters... Do you think we would allow this? Why are we not building bases in Taiwan, China’s back yard? Why do we treat two very similar cases very differently?
Here’s a clue. No major power wants another playing on their border. It’s unacceptable and we were willing to go to war over this very exact idea twice, once with the Cuban missile crisis, and the other with the invasion of Grenada. What we did in October 2021 ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/) was so ridiculous over the top, that it is likely that we wanted this war. We wanted the Russians to react.
And if course the “bad guy” is the one who fired the first shot, at least in the eyes of the layperson.
This isn’t like the article you provided except the concept of “war of extermination,” which as the article points out is not genocide. A good read BTW, thanks.
This is more like the Cold War, where you have smaller conflicts all around the world in what amount to proxy wars.
You have a never ending war where people die in countries most people can’t find on a political map.
That game is back on, and in full swing:
Niger
Sudan
Yemen
Ivory Coast
Chad
Syria
Libya
Venezuela
Iraq
Here’s a funny story (current events) related to this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68949809
Russia will back anyone wanting to hurt us, we will help anyone willing to hurt them.
This isn’t going away either. You don’t just elect Trump, end the Ukraine war, and say “let bygones be bygones” and move on.
We reopened a chapter in history that was closed 89-91. More rational minds were in charge back then, not kids like Sullivan, dementia Joe, Russian hating Nuland, a moron Blinken. We are not stacked with an “A team” on our side and some of the decisions made more than raise a brow.
What is true, is that Russia will render Ukraine incapable of raising a military force in the future (extermination). By the time this ends, Ukraine will have a destroyed military, there will be structural changes in Ukraine’s government, foreign partners and their meddling in Ukraine, to where Ukraine will not be able to pose a threat to Russia in the future. This isn’t 2014 which ended in a face-slap for Ukraine (a warning). Ukraine will be one of many battlefields in chess game between the US and Russia.
The winner will be the one to economically prevail. It’s a war of economics in the end where the military component in this war (Vietnam and Afghanistan in the Cold War) merely are battlefields depleting the enemy. Defense and Intel budgets, foreign military aid will swell, unconventional operations will pick up pace, and it will be a balancing act of guns vs. butter: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/guns-butter.asp#:~:text=%22Guns%20and%20Butter%22%20describes%20the,or%20family%20assistance%2C%20the%20butter
The Soviet Union lost not on a battlefield, but economically, where these proxy wars helped drain their resources. Ukraine is merely the first act in a show that will have many more acts following.
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