I recently came across an interview of Evgeny Volnov by Mark Solonin.

Briefly: it describes the organization of a business process for the decentralized volunteer production of consumables to supply the army. Toward the end, Solonin inevitably reflects on libertarianism, so it’s worth me reflecting a bit as well.

The question that concerns me is: can an ancap community already provide all the necessary ingredients for conducting a full-scale war?

Volunteers are capable of mass-purchasing everything necessary for logistics, nutrition, and daily living on the free market and delivering it to the combat zone. The production of small arms and explosives are developed civilian industries. In the absence of government orders, they will not wither away, and in conditions where the state is not getting in the way, they are capable of responding to increased demand by increasing production. Distributed production, similar to what was described in the interview, is capable of saturating the army with light combat mechanisms. Heavier specialized mechanisms can also be produced by volunteers; it’s just that 3D printers on a balcony will no longer suffice—small workshops will be needed instead. The Ukrainian war demonstrates to us that this is also not a problem. Such mechanisms also include long-range drones, including high-speed ones.

Private entities already know how to provide communications and satellite intelligence data excellently.

What about people? Volunteer units are performing excellently at the front and, compared to their state counterparts, demonstrate far fewer problems finding people willing to join them. The better the unit’s reputation, the higher the competition.

Coordination between units is also showing results at least as good as state chains of command, and authoritative commanders are capable of rapidly expanding their sphere of influence, taking responsibility for increasingly larger areas of work.

What private suppliers are not ready to provide today is manned combat aviation. However, today a combat aircraft is de facto a platform to lift a radar and missiles into the sky, and then to ensure that the pilot sees the radar data and launches missiles accordingly. A pilot is no longer needed to perform high-level aerobatics during an aerial dogfight between planes. Given a stable communication channel, the pilot can actually be on the ground, and a stable communication channel can be ensured if there are many planes in the air forming a relay network. A plane’s radar is something comparable in complexity to a Starlink terminal—it also needs to track multiple satellites and somehow make sense of a jumble of signals. That is, a private entity can produce it without an exorbitant price tag. Consequently, under ancap, a combat aircraft looks like a plump propeller-driven carrier of several missiles and many drones, flying in swarms that hover in the air around the clock, analyze the situation a couple of hundred kilometers from the swarm’s perimeter, and clear out everything interesting they find—and as fuel and/or ammunition are exhausted, they fly back to base in automatic mode, calling for a replacement in advance. However, this is still an unrealized fantasy.

Two questions remain.

First, motivation. States are breeding grounds for patriotism, and patriots are precisely the fuel of war. Will an ancap community be patriotic enough to organize large-scale resistance against a state? The example of the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine shows that the chances are quite high: the primary resistance to the sudden attack in areas where hostilities had not occurred since 2014 was mainly volunteer-based, and at the very least, it thwarted the blitzkrieg.

Second, economic sanctions. Sanctions are an insult to the element of the free market. They are imposed by states, and states monitor their compliance, while the market ensures that sanctions work poorly. It can be stated with considerable confidence that sanctions as a tool for influencing an opponent under ancap will have an extremely weak effect, representing isolated examples of refusing deals for moral reasons. Simply put, some will be actively donated to and worked for out of conviction, while others will be provided services only for good money. Since each side may have a quite diverse composition, there will be both volunteers and mercenaries on both sides. And victory will go to the side that is more effective in this resource confrontation. But in the long run, efficiency will be determined by how many ideological and talented people work for the victory of one side or another. And this, in turn, will depend on whose side the majority believes justice lies.