French military (catch all)

[Distiller]

Food for thought:

...

I believe that this "there will be no war between nuclear powers" is ideology.
A (kind of) war between nuclear powers on the terrain of a third nation already happened; Russian fighter pilots flew over Korea and fought against U.S. fighter pilots. The intensity of this was greater than the Kosovo Air War.

Never say never, you'll be caught unprepared if you do.

The threat of nuclear arms didn't make us save our conventional forces in the Cold War, why should that be a good idea today?

Our potential challengers are just not ready to strike us within few years, but it might happen in 5-10 years.


That's why the ability to expand military power quickly and launch that project with little lag is so important.

Korea is a bad example. I wouldn't speak of "nuclear powers" till about the late 1960's. But that's not the point.

You're German, right? Clausewitz talked about war as "die Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln". You have to ask: what could be so drastic as to cause a direct war among the 3-4 major powers? And: what could realisticly be achieved by such a war? I'm about the opposite of a peacenik, but I fail to come up with an answer.

And the argument with WW1 and 2 is flawed, since there was no qualitative leap ahead in "Bedrohungspotential" during the 1920's and 30's. Despite airpower and Panzerwaffe - just new toys.

The ability to annihilate whole chunks of land by automated systems (from about the late 1960's) was such a qualitative leap in Bedrohungspotential. And that leap made old lessons at least suspect. As long as MAD works between the major powers, conventional forces play only third fiddle.

Did conventional forces change anything during the Cold War? Tactical nukes would just have made them chared skeletons. And it was the nuclear options that kept Ivan from sunbathing on La Côte d'Argent, not the NATO Panzer Divisions.

[Fuchs]

Hitler knew that at least his chemists had developed the first nerve gas.
The threat was increased by increased payload & range of bombers and their assumed ability to always reach their target.

I know some factors that make a war between nuclear powers on a third nation's soil more likely than you seem to believe.

Geography:
Georgia, Ukraine, Taiwan, arctic - ideally suited for the scenario

Deterrence:
The belief that a war could end mankind is gone. Exactly because the conflict level is less than all-out preparation for WW3. We wouldn't assume that the Russians use nukes immediately if we came into conflict with them on 3rd party soil, for example.
The aging and increasingly worn-out Western equipment inventories pose a lesser deterrence as time goes by.

Alliances:
NATO continues to exist for convenience. European politicians don't want to play alliance games as in 19th century, but focus on other topics.
The WEU is actually a sufficient defensive alliance for Europe's security.

NATO might fall apart if the foreign policy of the USA remains so alien to the European's ideas of a responsible and good policy. The USA hasn't enhanced, but degraded their European allies' national security in the past ten years.
The Eastern European an British friends would have to side with the close European core nations when NATO falls apart, leaving the USA basically only Australia, Turkey and at least for air defense also Canada as allies.
This could happen in less than five years.


I really don't know why European powers degrade their forces to expedition forces voluntarily.
A collective defense based on assumptions and memories of a past time doesn't seem to be very solid.

[Ken White]

...I really don't know why European powers degrade their forces to expedition forces voluntarily.
A collective defense based on assumptions and memories of a past time doesn't seem to be very solid.

you don't -- or they could just have opinions that differ from yours. Either way, everyone from the Albanians to even the normally and nominally neutral Swedes and Swiss and to include your own country are doing just that. So they're all wrong and you're correct?

Same thing holds true for the collective defense based on the past; while the EU bureaucracy and a couple of nations seem to agree with you on the surface, most of the rest of Europe does not...

[Fuchs]

The political dynamics even of a parliamentary democracy don't necessarily yield the correct actions.
They even don't necessarily follow the people's will.
The German government's stance to Afghanistan is consistently against a majority of the Germans population, for example.

Granted, lots of governments thinking differently than me is a reason to question my stance.
A dozen influential German politicians who coin our foreign and defense policy standing against a 55-80% majority of their 82 million citizens is a reason to question their stance as well.
So I'm not really alone or part of a minority.

Back to the dynamics; the German military ops "out-of-area" (outside of NATO territory) have not benefited the nation visibly.
The appearance (and the speak) of our responsible politicians hints very much into the direction that they PLAY with the Bundeswehr, as an asset to use in foreign policy games just like we used money in earlier times.
Inf act, our military missions overseas have degraded our national security by adding foes and have cost a lot of money and military readiness.

And then there's the small detail that I assume to have a better general and military history knowledge than most if not all the top 20 politicians who define that policy (some of which were never in armed forces, none of them has officially studied history afaik - so they have no professional background superiority concerning this, just briefings).

Finally, some of our military missions overseas were ordered by Scharping, a douchebag who has been exposed to be a liar since then and who fell into deep disgrace. He's now denying doping troubles in the doping-infested national bicycle association that he leads now.


France has a history of small expeditions and many befriended African nations that depend on this kind of assistance to keep their defense expenditure bearable. They have the expeditionary capability and there's no real need to expand that imho.

[Ken White]

The political dynamics even of a parliamentary democracy don't necessarily yield the correct actions. They even don't necessarily follow the people's will.

True of course, though I'd suggest the latter is probably generally a good thing; people can be unduly selfish -- and fickle.

The German government's stance to Afghanistan is consistently against a majority of the Germans population, for example.

Which may be a case of good leadership overcoming a little selfishness...

Back to the dynamics; the German military ops "out-of-area" (outside of NATO territory) have not benefited the nation visibly.

I don't think benefit to Germany is why you have troops in Afghanistan. It certainly is of little to no benefit to the US to have troops there or in Iraq. Maybe there's another reason? Maybe they think it's necessary for the good of Afghanistan...

The appearance (and the speak) of our responsible politicians hints very much into the direction that they PLAY with the Bundeswehr, as an asset to use in foreign policy games just like we used money in earlier times.

I think that's why most nations have forces larger than necessary for a mobilization base in times of apparent peace.

Inf act, our military missions overseas have degraded our national security by adding foes and have cost a lot of money and military readiness.

Isn't that a shame -- try to do good and suffer for it. We know the feeling, we hate it when that happens -- but we've gotten used to it. You probably will also. Don't lose too much sleep over the foes; we've got tons of 'em.

And then there's the small detail that I assume to have a better general and military history knowledge than most if not all the top 20 politicians who define that policy (some of which were never in armed forces, none of them has officially studied history afaik - so they have no professional background superiority concerning this, just briefings).

Does your alleged superiority in this regard extend to all their advisers? Do those briefings tell them things you aren't privy to? Do they make decisions based on different criteria than you would use?

France has a history of small expeditions and many befriended African nations that depend on this kind of assistance to keep their defense expenditure bearable. They have the expeditionary capability and there's no real need to expand that imho.

True, and the British have a colonial legacy to worry about and deploy for. OTOH, you'd think the Danes and the Swedes have been out of the colonial business long enough not to bother but they're into it also. And the Dutch -- the Poles; the list goes on...

[Fuchs]

The Dutch and Danes have so little troubles ... life as government would be boring without overseas adventures, I guess.
The Poles clearly do it for bargaining.

There ARE reasons for those missions, I just don't approve them.

And as a proponent of more basic and less parliamentary democracy: The Swiss do very fine with it. The fears about it were proved to be wrong on many occasions.
Anyway - a citizen majority against the mission in Afghanistan impresses me more than the generally despised "Germany is being defended at the Hindukusch" of former defence minister Struck.

The whole expeditionary stuff would be less worrying if we had demonstrated the ability to deploy at least one of our three divisions fully to the new Eastern NATO border on short notice and sustain it during some weeks of exercises.
Such basic collective defense skills were afaik never demonstrated.

[TT]

Ken White posted: Maybe they either know something
________________________________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuchs
...I really don't know why European powers degrade their forces to expedition forces voluntarily.
A collective defense based on assumptions and memories of a past time doesn't seem to be very solid.
you don't -- or they could just have opinions that differ from yours. Either way, everyone from the Albanians to even the normally and nominally neutral Swedes and Swiss and to include your own country are doing just that.

Fuchs, allow me to take a short stab at answering your question, for as Ken rightly notes, ‘everyone is doing it’. I have had the good fortune to lead a team of researchers that looked at seven European states with respect to ‘transformation’ (something else they are all ‘doing’) – specifically, the focus was on expeditionary warfare, EBAO, and Network-enabled operations (closest to the US Network Centric Warfare) -- and the answer to why depends on the state in question, and usually there are several reasons.

A common reason across the seven states was the changing security environment – European military organizations recognize that the prospect of an armed invasion of Europe by a hostile state military a la the cold war is currently very remote and that what their governments had been tasking them to do, through the 1990s and into the 2000s to the present, is what are in essence expeditionary operations (ranging from war fighting through to humanitarian relief) which they were not very well configured to undertake. Thus there was a perceived need to develop the capabilities to be deployable and usable. In some cases there is evidence that some were at least in part driven to undertake the shift to being more expeditionary by the national military organization’s perception that they needed to be seen by their governments as being deployable and employable, or, to put it another way, politically usable/useful if you will. Worth noting that in some cases the mil orgs themselves took the lead and in other cases the political leadership at least pointed them towards expeditionary operations.

This last points to a second driver, which is that if the mil orgs in question continued to focus on defending their or NATO’s borders absent a clear and present threat then, then they ran the real risk of their governments starting to cut funding even more than they have already. Very much related to this is that undertaking change to become more expeditionary confers ‘legitimacy’ on the organizations, confers the perception that they are a modern military like other military organizations (in other words, other mil orgs are doing it, so they need to do it) - for both internal and external purposes. So important to why they are making this change is budget share (or maybe just retaining budget share), which legitimacy helps with this internally but legitimacy as well helps externally in term of the perception of fellow and/or allied military organizations (professional respect - and yes, self respect plays here). And yes, as noted already, in part the external legitimacy issue is with respect to NATO (and the US).

And third, and related to the first, for some states all current and recent operations are NATO ‘out of area’. In short, operational experience has forced them to identify a need to become more expeditionary capable (this is probably particularly true of states such as Poland, which only in the last year or two has started to undertake ‘transformation’).

That noted, this does not mean that the various national militaries are all on the same path – some are farther along to becoming more expeditionary capable than others. Moreover, in some cases, while the 'narrative of change' is that they are becoming more expeditionary capable, in practice the changes (org, procurement) suggest otherwise – in other words, they more ‘talk the talk than walk the walk’ (so the narrative confers internal and external legitimacy). Finally, this also does not mean that the changes being undertaken are necessarily the most appropriate changes (whether this be doctrine/concepts, procurement, organizational structural change) - but this is another discussion.

Oops, not so short……