patches70 wrote:dukasaur wrote:Bring back mandatory military service
I think quite a few European nations already have mandatory military service and that's why Europe can't project power very well.
If Europe were to ever gain the will to build a truly professional army again, it should be with a volunteer force. History has shown that forcing men into service makes a substandard army. The US learned her lesson in Vietnam.
Four things.
First. Yes, man for man, a professional and/or all-volunteer army is superior to a conscript army. That's man for man. But size does matter, and even if one professional soldier is worth ten conscripts, still that means that a conscript army of 1,000,000 beats a professional army of 50,000. In every major war, the participants who began with volunteer armies at the beginning had to switch to conscription part way through, because there simply was no other way to build the army to the requisite size.
Of course, professional armies aren't always better, either. The well-motivated French citizen-army laid quite a few beatings on British, Austrian, and Italian professional armies during Revolutionary and early-Napoleonic times.
Second. Your information is out of date. Yes, most European countries had conscription until the end of the Cold War. Since then, most of them have abandoned it. There's no more mandatory service in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands. The Even once-militaristic Serbia. Even the once-famous citizen army of Sweden is gone! See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#/media/File:Conscription_map_of_the_world.svg That basically leaves nobody at all in Europe who could field a decent sized army on short notice. A decent-quality army yes, but quality only partially compensates for lack of quantity. (And yes, there are weird examples you can come up with where five men held off a battalion or whatever, but weird outliers don't disprove a normal trend. Generally big armies beat little ones, even when the little ones are superior in quality. Stalin did eventually beat down the Finns, even if the Finns gave him quite a scare at first.)
At present, only two EU members have mandatory service: Estonia and Greece. Doesn't exactly fill me with hope of stopping the Red Army anywhere short of the Pyrenees.
Third, the U.S. in Vietnam is a terrible, terrible example. The U.S. Selective Service at the beginning of the war engaged in systemic class warfare. Poor and working-class people, especially if black, went to front-line units to get shot at. Middle class people went to supply and ordnance depots in low-risk areas, and upper-middle and upper class people didn't have to go at all. As the war went on the situation improved somewhat, especially for the racial aspect, but the class aspect remained. To the end, wealthy Americans could get access to service deferments that the working class could not, either through continuing at university or through getting their civilian jobs classified as essential. (Rudi Giuliani's law clerking comes to mind as a particularly egregious example.)
The Selective Service did nothing to promote pride in citizenship. Traditional European citizen armies, on the other hand, did. Compulsory military service was seen as a rite of passage in the road from boy to man. To some degree, the army was seen as an extension of the public school system, a giant Civics class where the citizen learned both life skills and pride in his country. (And yes, as a libertarian I understand that this includes dangers as well as benefits. Many swords have double edges.) Class-based service deferrments are almost unheard of. Egalitarian deployment was almost a religious law in most European armies. The son of the Chairman of the Board of trade would be in the front lines with the son of his janitor.
In the larger countries, military service was a salve that blunted regional rivalries. The animosity between Northern and Southern France, between England and Scotland, between Catholic and Protestant Germans, between the Flemish and the Walloon, all these were reduced (no, not eliminated, but much reduced) by people from disparate regions serving together. (More about this later.)
patches70 wrote:When you have people freely signing the dotted line knowing full well that they will be called on to go anywhere, do anything that their country tells them, they can't very well make much of a fuss when their country sends them to some middle east hell hole, can they?
On the other hand, if you got some guy who by law has to join the military for a two, three or four year stretch and their country tries to send them to some middle east hell hole, then people rise up and start saying "Hey! Wait a minute! I'm only here because I was forced to. I'll defend my country from invasion but damn if I'm going to some shithole to fight for some ill defined objective!"
It makes a difference and its part of the reason why Europe can't really project force all over the world like the US can.
And why do you see this as a bad thing?
Yes, it's true. A citizen army is powerful when defending its homeland, but it can develop serious morale problems when sent on foreign adventures which have no popular support. This is democracy Working As Designed. A professional army has always been the tool of tyrants. The change from a citizen army to a professional army changed the Roman Republic to an evil empire, and it has done the same to every empire since then.
Some degree of foreign deployment may be needed even in a defensive war, but I trust the citizen soldier to know when he's going on an essential mission in support of his nation's interest, and when he's going on some ego-building exercise for a tyrant. Napoleon's troops in Italy fought with relish, because they knew that the Allies were preparing Italy as springboard to gut France. Napoleon's troops in Spain fought poorly, because they knew (at least once the initial propaganda wore off) that they were engaged in suppressing a nation that had done them no harm.
patches70 wrote:dukasaur wrote:Develop a unified command structure independent of the U.S.
I think the perfect solution is for the US to just give NATO to Europe. Then the US won't be on the hook for the cost of NATO or supplying all the manpower. NATO has long outlived what it was created for, time to close the page on that book. Europe taking control of NATO has the advantage that all the leg work has been done already, command structures, force level modeling, tactics and everything else has already been worked out. All Europe has to do is take over the cost and replace all the US personnel that would have been in place when used.
I don't disagree. Probably by far the neatest and most efficient solution.
patches70 wrote:The problem with an EU army is that European politicians will have to convince their citizens to give up on national sovereignty and be willing to fight and die for other nations. Such as convincing the French to fight and die for the Germans. Or God forbid, convince the Germans to fight and die for the Greeks and such.
[etc...]
I don't think so. The European politicians have to convince the citizens to stop viewing themselves as "German" or "French" and view themselves as ??????, and that is the problem.
Europe has always had to form coalitions to survive. Everybody knows that Europe is small and the individual nations even smaller. Here again the citizen army shines. Of course, Giuseppe from Salerno won't go fight for the Germans if they want to start some foreign war of aggression and take over Ceylon or whatever. But if Europe itself is threatened, they will remember that only broad coalitions saved Europe against foreign tyrants in the past. There are regional differences, but overall there's a basic ideal of a European way of life, a social democracy with certain rights and freedoms, and people will see their self-interest and if put to the test they will fight.
patches70 wrote:Dukasaur, when you talk to someone from the US, how often do you hear them refer to themselves as "Virginian" or "Carolinian"? Or do Americans most often refer to themselves as "American"?
Now when you talk to a European, how do they refer themselves as most often? Do they say "European"? Or do they say "I'm French" or "I'm Italian" or "I'm German"?
In the US there was a time when people referred to themselves by the State of which they lived or where born, pre-civil war days. Its not like that anymore, and it wasn't until the US went through the civil war that we changed. Before that time the US was States that viewed themselves as sovereign and to those States was how they identified and related themselves as. Europe is as the US saw herself a hundred sixty years ago. How Europe moves forward to the point of being able to stop referring to themselves based on their nationality I have no idea nor how that change would come about. It took a bloody, dirty and horrible civil war that left 600K dead for the US to change her perception of herself.
I don't think the civil war in and of itself fixed anything. I think North - South hatred was stronger after the war than before, and probably East - West animosity was strengthened as well. I think America came together once once the worst wounds of the war had healed.
What America did to itself once, Europe has done to itself many times. The Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and II, etc., have all been cataclysms proportionately greater than the American Civil War. Well, at least four of those were, and some of the others came close.
It's not the cataclysm that counts, or even the sincere-at-the-time protestations of "Never Again!" It's what practical steps you take after the dust has settled. The wars might provide a graphic display of WHY you need to come together, but it's the peace that shows you HOW.
patches70 wrote:Ignoring ethnonationalism, tribalism, nationalism is a mistake. That's the reality of the human species and just because someone says "well it shouldn't be that way" doesn't mean that it isn't a reality. These ties that bind are also fragile as the identity the US citizens have as "Americans" is being eroded now as well.
This same cycle has repeated time and time again throughout human history and it will keep playing out the same. Because human beings tend to divide themselves along ethnic, national and tribal lines. All the past multicultural civilizations degrade and destroy themselves and end up dividing along ethnic lines. If the sword is the only thing holding a civilization together then that civilization is doomed to fail eventually. And forcing free men into military service against their will is the same as putting a bayonet against their back and ordering them to "march!". That never ends well.
If the European Union formed a Grand European Army tomorrow, its first task would be to smash resistance in all the European countries that were opposed to the idea. In other words, the Grand European Army's first task would be to fight Europeans, not Russians or any other external enemies. It would be focused inward first and foremost. And that should give people some pause.
No, I think the Grand European Army's first task would be to bring Europe together, not through oppression, but through education. The powerful effects of men from different places serving together. And here we've come full circle to a subject that I promised to come back to earlier.
Common military service is an important part of the American melting pot. When the boy from backwoods Arkansas goes to Camp Pendleton and meets his peers from downtown Chicago and the laid-back beaches of Hawaii and the snotty beachhouses of Connecticut, he is exposed to all those cultures and brought together with them. This is even going on today, when we superhighways and the Internet, but it's a big part of what built the melting pot in the days of horse-and-buggy and expensive surface mail being your main lifelines to the outside world.
I would make it a rule that nobody trains in the European Army in a place where they speak his language. I would send Croatian boys to training camps in Germany, and German boys to training camps in Ireland, and Irish boys to training camps on Sardinia. These are kinds of things that break down tribal barriers and bring people together.
From 2000 to 2013 EU had no military threats to enlarge its military. But current EU armies are no match for Russian one. I presume if Ukraine crisis is resolved quickly EU will keep its solders and equipment at current level(US will complain but who cares).
