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Thread: Combat Power, Conflict Resolution, and US Economy

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  1. #25
    Council Member Firn's Avatar
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    Just a quick comment from my point of view.

    1. Military power is a somewhat sketchy concept and depends on many variables, which have been already mentioned in this thread. It is of great importance to distinguish military power in the short term and the long term potential as well as it quality. For example the US had relative low military power in the years of the Great Depression but it's military potential was huge - in the long run. History gives us plenty of examples in which in the end the greater potential won, but also a great deal of cases in which it could not be brought to bear as the war was already lost.


    2. Economy, to pick up the area of greatest interest, is one of those variables it is interesting to take a look how it supports military power.

    GDP, GNP and PPP are in aggregation and per capita highly useful metrics but is obviously not a one to one measure of economic capabilites nor potential for war. For example a relative higher share of manufacturing tends to be positive, but financial (and military) strength can enable a state to outsource parts of it's production and secure it's ressources by trade if the military situation allows it. An highly productive agriculture, a highly productive manufacture and perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree service industry , if sustainable, allow to shift a relative large amount of the population into the military and to equip them with a high amount of physical and human capital as well as technology.

    The relative high investement into military power into the US and the dedicated industries should of course enable it in general to mobilize its long term potential if needed in a relative short time. It would be however highly interesting to analyse the overall ressources needed for it's war economy and to discover bottlenecks. Those could go from prime materials over specific industrial products to whole sectors. In our world of global supply chains it is no trivial task.

    Some interesting stuff:



    I guess the metric of Value-added tends to underweight China war economy potential due to the particular nature of the global value chain, which is obviously countered by an unknown degree by the size of the military-industrial complex of the USA and it's advantage in technology. Other then that it is important to put it into the context of what I wrote before, especially the ability to secure the ressources for all that manufacturing capability and it's built-up.
    Last edited by Firn; 01-06-2014 at 06:55 PM.
    ... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"

    General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
    Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935

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