In the Stalag Null channel, Sonya Shirogorova, first apologizing for moving from the eternal to the immediate, states that since roughly the time of the First World War, the strategic component of warfare has degraded terribly—that is, the art of employing the armed forces and other national resources to achieve military victory. Many countries have top-tier tactics, and operational art has also actively developed, but strategy is frankly sagging. Sperry UNIVAC is reflecting on a similar topic, and I will first give him the floor:
The ongoing clown show of what is currently called war compels me to comment on this marasmus. It is clear even to a blind person that military art has degraded completely and finally: weaponry is becoming smarter and exponentially more expensive, Skynet-style hunter-killers are practically flying over us, an F-35 wing has its own internet with 4K real-time video support, Musk is providing network coverage for the entire planet, the invisible B-2 drops a MOAB on the adversary, yet the utility of all this is many times less than that of a grandfather with a Mosin-Nagant in a quilted jacket in 1943. The most important thing is—no one understands what the hell is happening? Why have people, possessing far more effective means of killing than our ancestors, begun to be so desperately obtuse? Why have their balls fallen off, and why haven’t the likes of Kyiv or Tehran yet turned into Dresden or Hiroshima?
It is not at all about some terrible military technologies, like FPV; after all, the legendary butchers Cadorna, Joffre, Nivelle, Haig, and von Falkenhayn sent 200-300 thousand men into machine guns per wave, repeating this 10-20 times in a row, and people went quite briskly for years. Nor is it about the absence of certain technologies; “Bomb them all” LeMay and Bomber Harris together turned about 100 cities to dust, killing millions with airplanes that were not far removed from the Wright brothers’, which significantly accelerated the end of WWII. Now, in theory, we have everything to wage war on a completely apocalyptic scale of destruction, which is exactly what should have made wars fast (and incredibly bloody, even without the use of non-conventional weapons). The desire to wage war hasn’t evaporated either; people still passionately want to engage in it, it’s just that they do it so absolutely clumsily and stupidly.
Where does such a bias in people’s consciousness come from? Why, at the peak of Modernity, were people ready to suffer and die on scales unimaginable today, whereas now the Yanks were forced to fight so delicately in Afghanistan (and because of this, with such monstrous overhead costs that they dragged the matter out for 10 years) that they lost only 2.4 thousand—less than one person per day (from a wild, monstrous mobilization reserve of 120 million!), and this was enough to make them throw up their hands and leave ignominiously. The gold standard of meaningless slaughter in the 21st century is the war in Ukraine, where the maximum estimate of lethal losses over 4+ years is around half a million people. It is often compared to WWI, but let me tell you—Haig killed that many in a month in one operation for 10-15 km of land. At Verdun, as many fell in less than a year (and half a million were left disabled) with zero result (only 2 forts out of 28 were taken, Voumont and Douaumont, both were retaken, they didn’t even reach Souville), after which both the Germans and the French fiercely continued. Essentially, we see the same picture in Iran, just on maximum settings—only a few dozen Americans have died so far, but the people are already wailing and groaning that everything should be wound up because it’s somehow too costly.
What do we see now? Do people want war? Yes. Can they win it? With certain caveats—quite. The gist of the caveats is that in practically every country, the great military industry of the Cold War was dismantled almost to zero over the next thirty years. For example, in the USA, only one plant remains that produces RDX, and 90% of the armada of 700 B-52s were decommissioned and dismantled, so first, all of this needs to be restored. We won’t even mention the state of the RF Armed Forces. Have the methods of achieving victory changed? Not really—in the case of Iran, not only the missiles, but the population would run out faster than the bombs of the Yanks from the golden era of the Cold War (Japan showed that it is quite difficult to fight on “banzai” alone without cities, ports, roads, bridges, factories, and generally when a country is turned into a burnt-out wasteland). Do people want to pay a fair price in their own suffering for such a victory? Not at all; they don’t want to pay at all.
As a result, every modern war degenerates into a farce: spitting and loud wailing by politicians, banging a slipper on the podium, vows to crush another axis of evil (regardless of whose—Western or Eastern), the main thing is not to forget to season it with promises that everything will end by Christmas. At the beginning of WWI, they thought so too, but when it didn’t end—they tightened their belts, cursed everything in existence, and set to work for several more years. Now, in response to the desperate attempts of the EU to whip up the people for a war with Russia, Zoomer Germans claim that Putin is better than war, and NATO allies tell Trump to get lost when he hints that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to also join the mess in Iran. Only Russia and Israel have managed to somehow mobilize relative masses for a long and very bloody confrontation, but even their scales are incomparable to how people fought previously.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a fairly large shift in collective thinking, deforming many concepts familiar to our grandfathers much more strongly than the period from 1945 to 1990. How does the situation at the beginning of the 20th century differ from the beginning of the 21st? Why did the transition to Modernity quickly slide into a monstrous global slaughter that cumulatively destroyed hundreds of millions, while the transition to Postmodernity slid into a state where a government, theoretically capable of putting thirty million soldiers under arms, is unable to even conduct a ground operation on a scale that would cause Homeric laughter in Ludendorff?
Questions of this kind, generally speaking, should be answered not by military science, but by economics, because its primary profile is the study of human motivation. (Note from Ancap-chan: I would rather speak of praxeology, but that is an extension of the concept of economics, so overall everything is correct) People are complex things, managed by a dozen instincts upon which the eternal white noise of consciousness is layered; however, what remains constant is that any action a person undertakes is in accordance with what they perceive (regardless of how rationally) as their greatest benefit at the current moment (which is what allows the behavior to be categorized as a subject of economics). Thus, everyone always does exactly what they truly want in the moment; the only difference is the duration of the calculated forecast (those very instrumental and terminal values) and the extent to which a person realizes how they are thinking. The same is true for human societies, because they consist of people and generally move toward where people believe (regardless of how justified) moving to be best for themselves.
The modern person is pulled in one direction by an inextinguishable desire to gain power through war (which is indeed eternal and unchanging), and this desire is bolstered by the existence of increasingly powerful tools of war. But in the other direction, the Postmodern person (unlike their colleague from Modernity) is pulled no less strongly by a completely different desire—more accurately, a complete absence of desire to suffer and bear all the cumulative costs of war in all forms. Where ancestors were ready to rot in trenches for years and work three shifts, pouring TNT into bombs for a bowl of plastic porridge, the modern person falls into hysteria because gasoline might increase by a couple of bucks a gallon, and driving a Dodge Ram to the McDonald’s on the corner will become costly.
That is exactly why selling a war becomes almost impossible. As is known, even Trump started a Special Military Operation against Iran, copying the homework of Uncle Pu. By design, both Kyiv and Tehran must definitely fall in three days; there is no other way. The only thing Trump proved smarter in is that once a week he declares that his SMO is completely won, and the fact that the ayatollahs aren’t letting tankers through the strait is not his problem and generally they are meanies, while the Yanks have already won.
The next reasonable question is—why has motivation changed so strongly? It is difficult to answer briefly, but we will try to outline the main line. Firstly, the nightmare peak of Modernity played its part—both world wars. Whatever you say, they were an apocalypse that remained imprinted in memory for generations and prevented the world from sliding into a similarly destructive Third World War (despite the fact that there were fanatics on both sides who wanted it—every time, attempts toward it were effectively halted). The horror of the word “war” itself was so imprinted on people’s consciousness that it became deeply obscene, and openly admitting that we are waging war became something completely unacceptable, like admitting to coprophilia or incest. The words “Nazis” and “fascists” have long since ceased to be politically significant terms and have become simply dirty swear words.
Secondly, after WWII, the world changed radically and completely. All the things that Modernity glorified—the state, the nation, faith, the Führer—became very, very suspicious to all postwar generations (which ultimately resulted in the great rebellion of the sixties and the birth of postmodernism). The result of this was that two great blocks waged leisurely proxy wars for 45 years. The fever of the holy crusade against communism/capitalism of the 1950s burned out in literally 10 years. People grew tired of living in a besieged fortress and preferred sex, drugs, and rock and roll (in the USSR, the process dragged on somewhat until its very collapse). Due to the local wars of the 1970s, the Great Western economic rise was briefly replaced by a crisis, and people truly became afraid of the destruction of that beautiful way of life to which they had become accustomed. When the Union fell in 1990, there was incredible rejoicing among the masses on both sides (of course, marred by the wild nineties in Russia, but the spiritual lift at the very beginning was still great).
People were so glad of the end of the Cold War that they didn’t even bother to clean up all the loose ends left over from it, or somehow sort out the mess—whether in the Middle East or in the territories of the post-USSR—and this is haunting us to this day. Overlaid on this was the second demographic transition already in full swing in the West: the fewer children born, the more sacred the life of each of them becomes, and the more hyper-protection those who are born receive (which gave birth to the phenomenon of life-unadapted Zoomers, falling into hysteria over a wrong pronoun in a chat). Factually, only the dinosaurs continued to perceive war as a normal means of resolving conflicts: look at the old marasmatics at the helm of the USA, Israel, and Russia. Netanyahu was born in 1949 and grew up during continuous war; Putin was born in 1952 and grew up in devastated postwar Leningrad; the record-breaker Trump was born in 1946, and his entire youth coincided with the hysteria of McCarthyism, Korea, and the war against the red threat. It is not surprising that in all these countries, the main percentage of the population approving of their führers currently is aged 50 and older.
And so we come to the logical finale. Zoomers prefer to have a choice of 20 smoothies and to fight only on imageboards, which is why selling a classic war to the majority of voters is quite problematic. The problem can be dealt with in different ways: in Russia, it is solved by the fact that a clique of old madmen is in power, relying on powerful grassroots ressentiment from the nineties on the part of those over 50; in Israel and Iran—a crowd of religious fanatics (from similarly half-mad old men), relying on the status of a besieged fortress and a holy war for survival; in the USA, a similar gerontocracy of old sick bastards is in power (the average age of a senator is 67, a congressman 60), but there the desire to fight is somewhat restrained by numerous counterweights established by the founders, which prevent the country from becoming fully totalitarian for long. Will the world change when Trump, Putin, and other grandfathers finally die? The problem is that a new generation will grow up, which has already grown up amidst their wars. The only thing that is slightly comforting is—as we said—the scale of current wars is much more toy-like, so perhaps the politicians of future times will be slightly softer.
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