Quotulatiousness

December 13, 2025

“Europe must prepare for ‘scale of war our grandparents’ endured”

Filed under: Europe, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @InfantryDort responds to the NATO Secretary General’s announcement that Europe should gird its collective loins for combat on a scale similar to the World Wars:


Fighting Like Our Grandparents, Without Becoming Like Them?

What a strange moment it is to belong to the warrior culture in the West.

To watch your society fracture in real time. To see cohesion traded for comfort. And to be told to prepare for wars of national survival while the nation itself dissolves at home.

Europe, in particular, has already spent its strongest men. Bled out across the killing fields of the 20th century. Now it is warned to fight like its grandparents once did.

The warning is correct, but not in the way people think.

Violence, chaos, entropy … these are the default state. They pull on human societies the way gravity pulls on matter. Left alone, everything falls.

Function requires resistance. A rocket escapes gravity only by burning fuel. An exoskeleton works only by pushing back. Civilization is no different.

You cannot fight a war of national survival abroad when the nation no longer coheres at home. When families are exposed, trust is gone, and the social fabric has been cut to make the room feel larger.

It’s not strength. It is just removing load-bearing walls and mistaking openness for stability.

The lesson: Our grandparents didn’t just fight with weapons. They fought with unity, discipline, restraint, and shared purpose.

Without those, you don’t get their victories. You only inherit their destruction. And all without the moral scaffolding that survived it. Wars are not won by nostalgia. They are won by societies that still function.

TLDR: Few sane men will go off to war in a far away land when hordes of their previous battlefield opponents have moved into their neighborhoods.

Update, 13 December: On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter responds to Rutte’s speech:

These are just empty rituals indulged in by the clerisy of hermetically sealed institutions. They have no ability to mobilize for war. The financialized economies they preside over have been hollowed out by deindustrialization, over-regulation, and climate hysteria. The populations of their countries are deracinated, alienated, and ethnoculturally fragmented. They did all of this themselves, deliberately and systematically, over decades, because it benefited them to do so. It made the institutions stronger, and enriched them as a class. That it came at the expense of the viability of their societies didn’t bother them in the slightest.

Membership in the institutional theocracy is predicated on absolute alignment with internal narratives. Those narratives are simply whatever the theocracy needs to believe at any given moment to justify itself. At the moment, they need to believe that nothing fundamental has shifted in Western countries since the end of WWII, in particular that it is still in principle possible to mobilize a (non-existent) industrial base for wartime production, and that it is possible to motivate an alienated population to fight. They also need to believe that the loathing with which native populations regard them is inorganic, a function of narrative warfare from the troll farms of foreign adversaries, and that this resentment can be effectively curtailed with censorship and propaganda.

Internally they see themselves as very serious people, statesmen and generals, guardians of the moral order.

From the outside, they are clowns engaged in a pantomime.

December 9, 2025

The age of Trump – “America has ‘walked away’ from its allies”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney talks about last month’s annual Halifax International Security Forum, where the biggest change from previous events was the official absence of US government representation:

Late last month, attending the Halifax International Security Forum, I was having the damndest feeling. Can you have déja vu for something that you only experienced via fiction? Because it was kind of like that.

The fiction in question was a novel by an Australian, published during the Second Iraq War. Anti-American sentiment was running rampant all over the world. The premise of the novel is out there in the realm of sci-fi — America disappears. Specifically, Americans disappear — some mysterious wave of energy scours most of North America clean of life. Virtually all of the U.S. is wiped out; most of Canada and Mexico, too. Somewhat to the surprise of the anti-Americans, this does not result in an improvement in life on Planet Earth.

Standing around at the forum, eating the delicious snacks and drinking the good coffee and chatting with friends old and new, that was what I kept thinking about. Where are the Americans? And what the hell are we going to do without them?

And, in case you’re wondering what’s up with that headline, here’s another question — what will we do if they one day try and come back?

The forum is an annual gathering of senior military officers, defence and intelligence officials from across the free world, and representatives from the media, think tanks, large companies and civil society organizations whose work relates to defence and security issues or in some way seeks to promote and preserve a healthy democratic world. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, the event is a major part of Canada’s “soft power” offering to our allies — we host the big party and show everybody a good time. The actual schedule is split between on-the-record panel talks or presentations, off-the-record sessions, and informal time for mingling and schmoozing. I am grateful to have been invited to participate again this year.

Especially this year. I’ve been going to the forum for years, and the event always had a strongly American flavour.

Not anymore! Yankee went home.

Like, literally. He was ordered to go home, or stay there. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to avoid a series of high-profile annual defence summits. That includes Halifax, and others in places like Munich and Singapore, and even inside the United States itself. The reason, according to the Pentagon’s press apparatus, was that, and I swear to God this is the actual quote, such events promote “the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States”.

Oh. Well, then.

That’s what made the forum so fascinating this year. As I told my colleague Jen Gerson while I was in Halifax, the entire event felt a little bit like the first Thanksgiving after a divorce. It’s great to see everyone, but there’re some notable absences, is the thing.

November 21, 2025

The EU (with NATO) as a substitute empire

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Lorenzo Warby discusses the European Union (and its essential military support, NATO) as an imperial subsitute in a post-imperial age:

Historian Timothy Snyder makes an argument in various lectures and on his Substack that what became the EU was a replacement for empire. I think he is right, but not in the way he suggests. Prof. Snyder holds that what became the EU is an economic replacement because he appears to believe that empire was economically beneficial to their metropole economies.

This seems clearly wrong. Every maritime imperial metropole got richer after it lost its empire. This is true whether they were part of what became the EU or not: the obvious example of the latter being Japan and its dramatic postwar economic success after being stripped of its empire and devastated by American bombing. For the economies of all the former maritime-empire states, access to the US market, and the US-led maritime order, was much more valuable, and way cheaper, than empire.

It is not clear that even Britain made a “profit” from its Empire, once you consider military and administrative costs. Portugal had the largest maritime empire — relative to the size of its metropole — for longest and is the poorest country in Western Europe. Compare that to rather wealthier land-locked Switzerland, which never had an empire.

Empires are what states do.1 It is foolish to presume that any particular state action is beneficial to those that a state rules. Having an empire increases the power of state, and the opportunities within the state apparat. That is more than enough to motivate territorial imperialism, whether by land or by sea.

Conspicuous absences

A conspicuous absence from Prof. Snyder’s analysis of what-became-the-EU is NATO. There are a lot of regional economic cooperation organisations around the word. None of them are remotely as integrated as the EU because none of them have the equivalent of NATO.

In order to pool sovereignty within the EU, states first have to have their territorial sovereignty guaranteed. This guarantee is precisely what NATO provides.

The post-Versailles European order of 1919-1939 was unstable because it interspersed between Germany and the Soviet Union a series of small states that the victors of 1914-1918 could not readily reach. NATO has two huge advantages that the nation-states of Eastern Europe did not have in the 1919-1939 period — NATO is a geographically contiguous alliance and it includes the United States. The purpose of NATO, in the famous words of its first Secretary-General, being:

    to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

In other words, the purpose of NATO was to provide a comprehensive solution to the structural weakness of the 1919-1939 Versailles order. A solution that the countries of Eastern Europe availed themselves of as soon as they could.2

The other conspicuous absence from Prof. Snyder’s analysis of the EU as a substitute to empire is Oceania. His analysis is deeply “(North) Atlantic”. It looks much less impressive from a Pacific perspective.

Japan was a maritime empire which lost the Second World War. It did not join anything like the EU. Australia gave up its (small) maritime empire. It also did not join anything like the EU. Both are very much postwar economic success stories. Participating in the maritime order with good internal institutional structures was enough: no other substitute for empire was needed for economic success.

  1. The Conquistadors were a mixture of private adventurers and state agents, but their conquests were incorporated by the imperial Spanish state. The use of corporations as instruments of imperial expansion — most famously the Dutch and British East India Companies — was an unusual feature of European imperialism, but such companies were licensed by their state and their territorial holdings were eventually fully incorporated as state possessions.
  2. For all sorts of reasons, we should distinguish between the postwar order of 1945-1991 and the post Cold War order of after 1991. So much of contemporary madness only really got underway in the 1990s.

November 10, 2025

Canadian military expansion

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this week’s dispatch post from The Line, the editors discuss some of the implications of the significant expansion plans for the Canadian Armed Forces (with the caveat that little of these plans are funded and would be subject to major changes if the government fails to get its budget through Parliament):

Canadian Armed Forces photo.

The amount of defence spending we’re talking about here is something that we have not thought about at all in recent generations. It’s a good thing. But it’s going to create some real challenges that we need to start thinking about, and coming up with solutions for, right away.

The numbers look something like this: the government had already announced a $9-billion influx of money into national defence, as well as a little bit of creative accounting, all with the goal of getting our spending up to the NATO two-per-cent-of-GDP target immediately, instead of on the absurdly prolonged trajectory the last prime minister deemed appropriate. A big part of this — and a welcome part — was a pay raise for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, particularly those at the lower scale of the pay grids for enlisted personnel and officers. One of the major problems the military has had in recent years is retaining trained personnel, and a pay raise is a tried-and-true way of helping address that. It also has the effect of juicing our spending at a time when our allies were looking for a tangible commitment. It’s a win-win.

But then there’s the rest of the spending: over $80 billion over the next five years, with a goal of getting up to the new NATO target of five per cent in only nine years, by 2035.

The Line supports this. We support this wholeheartedly. It makes us want to do cartwheels in the streets — and we would, if not for justified concerns for our joints and lower backs. (And dignity, though that’s less an issue.) But we do need to flag how transformative that level of investment would be.

Here’s the simplest way to put this. Almost our entire debate over defence in recent decades has been around the two-per-cent target. Nominally, the Canadian Armed Forces have certain capabilities that were suited to our national willingness to spend around two per cent of GDP. In reality, because of chronic under-funding, a lot of the capabilities we claim to have on paper didn’t really exist in reality. Units were badly undermanned. Equipment either didn’t exist or was not in serviceable condition or was long-since obsolete. Shortfalls of money and trained personnel were cutting into training exercises and basic upkeep on weapons, gear, and facilities. This prolonged fiscal starvation, combined with a fairly high level of demand on the forces for missions abroad and at home, had the effect, year after year, of hollowing out the force.

Getting spending up towards two per cent will help turn that around. This is conditional — and it’s a big condition — on fixing the military’s procurement problems. We could budget a trillion for the military, but it’s not going to make a difference if we have the same broken processes that need 10 to 15 years to actually get from an identified operational need to a signed contract. But still, if only in the big-picture sense, getting to two per cent will actually flesh out the Canadian Armed Forces into the organization that already existed on paper.

That’s good. That would be a big step up. But the problem is, as your Line editors have been screaming into the void for years, even the fully fleshed-out and realized version of the Canadian Armed Forces that existed on paper is too small for the current global environment, and lacks many critical capabilities that will be necessary to effectively fight — or even simply survive — on the battlefield. We need to do things we cannot currently do, and we need to do a lot more of all the things we’re already doing. That’s going to mean a bigger naval fleet, a larger army and a larger air force. That’s just the reality — our current force structure, even if fully manned and ready, is not large enough to meet all our needs.

That’s where the other tens of billions of dollars come in. There’s simply no way around the fact that this amount of money, combined with geopolitical reality and political rhetoric, is pointing to an inescapable conclusion: the Canadian Armed Forces are going to get a lot bigger. A lot bigger. We are looking at a substantial increase in the size of the regular forces, and probably an even larger increase in the size of the reserves.

Indeed, you may have seen this article recently in the Ottawa Citizen, by defence reporter David Pugliese. In it, he discusses proposals being prepared at National Defence Headquarters to establish a new reserve force of approximately 400,000 troops. The Line can confirm the general thrust of Pugliese’s reporting. We have no idea what the politicians will eventually sign off on, and we won’t be surprised if they get weak-kneed when some of the details are laid out before them, but discussion of a massive expansion of the Canadian Armed Forces, on a scale we haven’t seen since the Second World War, is indeed happening in certain rather important rooms in Ottawa.

October 22, 2025

The Korean War Week 70: Casualties Rise For The Chinese – October 21, 1951

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Oct 2025

The UN forces launch Operation Polecharge, hoping to complete Operation Commando, but they have worries away from the field, since UN pilots have violated the neutral zone and killed two young Korean boys, causing an outcry. If that weren’t enough, a new Soviet atomic bomb test has the entire world on edge.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:56 Recap
01:12 Operation Polecharge
02:37 Chinese Tactics
05:15 9th Corps Attacks
07:10 Unit Integration
10:04 B-29s Shot Down
11:06 The Mutual Security Act
12:47 Neutral Zone Violation
14:11 Summary
14:29 Conclusion
15:56 Call to Action
(more…)

September 27, 2025

NATO – the alliance of paper tigers?

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Italy, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak suggests that despite President Trump calling the Russians “paper tigers”, the non-US members of the NATO alliance could more appropriately be described that way:

It’s been an open secret for decades that Canada’s NATO contributions are more rhetoric than reality, but it’s true of many of the European NATO allies, too.

… simply raising defence spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defence and yet can mobilise some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defence minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilised. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defence spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defence budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defence system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meagre 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defence needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

Update, 30 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 18, 2025

How One Treaty Split The World In Two – W2W 40

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 17 Aug 2025

After WWII, Britain and France face the decline of their empires and the looming Soviet threat. Desperate for security, they forge the Dunkirk and Brussels Pacts, but quickly realize they need American support. As old alliances shatter and Germany becomes the front line, the world divides into two camps with the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Secret deals, rearmament, and the fear of communist tanks rolling across Europe set the stage for decades of Cold War rivalry.
(more…)

July 9, 2025

NATO secretary general Mark Rutte – Trump’s biggest European fanboy?

Filed under: Europe, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t often encounter positive reactions to US President Donald Trump from the other side of the pond, but Paul Wells makes a case here for Mark Rutte, the current secretary general of the NATO alliance, being utterly sincere in his regard for his American “daddy”:

Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general.
Photo from Paul Wells’ substack

I haven’t seen much commentary about Mark Rutte’s weekend interview with the New York Times. It’s quite an interview. If the NATO secretary general is faking his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, he’s really committing to the bit.

I’m going to quote Rutte’s remarks in greater detail than you sometimes get, because what really stands out over the 36-minute podcast that resulted from the Times interview is Rutte’s doggedness. He doesn’t simply treat the US president as a containable problem, as European security experts sometimes do, but as nothing less than a full NATO partner and, indeed, as the hero of the alliance’s revitalization.

“President Trump deserves all the praise,” he tells interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a longtime NPR foreign correspondent before she joined the Times, “because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2% this year and the 5% in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this.”

Does he regret that Trump posted what the AP and a lot of others called a “fawning” text message in which Rutte wrote to Trump, “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win”? “Not at all, because what was in the text message is exactly as I see it.”

Is the integrity of NATO’s defense perimeter solid? “But it’s not that the Estonians are left to themselves. It would be the full force of NATO, including the full backup of the United States, which will come to the rescue. Putin knows this.”

Garcia-Navarro keeps pushing. Full backup of the United States, she says? You bet, Rutte says. In “everything I’ve discussed over the last six months with the new U.S. administration” there is “absolutely no shiver of a doubt that the U.S. is completely committed to NATO, is completely committed to Article 5,” the Alliance’s collective-defence principle.

Isn’t there a “fundamental disconnect” between the way Trump views the world and the commitments needed to make NATO work? Rutte answers: Nope! “President Trump put in place an excellent foreign-policy team, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth,” he offers.

But “what we are seeing,” Garcia-Navarro insists, perhaps in reference to this or this, “is the United States pulling back from Europe.”

“I really have to correct you,” Rutte insists in turn. “The United States is not pulling away from Europe.”

Where does Rutte stand on the credibility and prospects of Russia-Ukraine peace talks? “With the risk that I’m again praising President Trump: He is the one who broke the deadlock with Putin. When he became president in January, he started these discussions with Putin, and he was the only one who was able to do this. This had to happen.”

June 26, 2025

NATO members “commit” to a new 5% defence spending target

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many predicted, just as Canada finally gets around to at least pretending to meet the 2% defence spending target we agreed to over a decade ago, those goalposts get moved:

So today the leaders of Nato convene for a landmark summit:

NATO countries agree to increase defence spending to 5%

That headline isn’t strictly accurate. Member states have apparently agreed to commit to a target of 5% by 2035, to mark the start of the fourteenth anniversary of the Ukraine war. Which means that, as always with Nato, they’ll all look butch at the photo-op, and then they’ll do bugger all. Even the “commitment” to a “target” is too much for Spain, which has secured an opt-out.

But hang on a minute: Nato has been at war — or at proxy-war — with Russia for three-and-a-half years now. So it’s been on a war-footing, supposedly, for seven-eighths of the length of the First World War. How’s that war-footing going? Per Nato’s head honcho, Mark Rutte (the woeful former Dutch PM — ask our pal Eva Vlaardingerbroek), earlier this month:

    The Russian army is developing its war capabilities by multiple times more than that of NATO despite having an economy 25 times smaller, NATO’s secretary general has warned …

    “The Russians, as we speak are reconstituting themselves at a rapid pace and producing four times more ammunition in three months than the whole of NATO in a year,” said Rutte.

That’s a rather confusing way of putting it; what he means is: the Russians (who, as Mark Levin assures us, “scare nobody”) produce more ammunition in three weeks than the whole of Nato does in a year. Can even Nato be that worthless?

Taking the Secretary-General at his word, if you’re wondering why the Pentagon has to divert ammo marked for Israel to Ukraine and then divert it back from Ukraine to Israel … well, let’s do what everybody else does and dredge up the only historical analogy anybody knows — not the First World War, but the Second (see Levin’s “Iranian Nazi regime”): We’re asked to believe that Nato needs longer than the US was in the Second World War for to move to a war-production footing.

To be sure, supply chains are always difficult: Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz could have seriously impacted McDonald’s need to recall the hash browns it sent to Montenegro and divert them to Kiribati.

Trump gets something very basic: Flying the highest of high-tech weaponry seven thousand miles to drop down a ventilation shaft opening the size of a dishwasher is the kind of brilliant, dazzling one-off only the United States can do. But what next? Almost all geopolitical conflicts start with a bit of shock-&-awe (Pearl Harbor, even the assassination of the Archduke) and then dwindle down to old-school wars of attrition – as the United States should certainly know after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, and three years to lose to “a gas station masquerading as a country” (thank you, John McCain). In wars of attrition, old-fashioned unglamorous things become important, like the ability to manufacture bullets in a timely manner. The basic arithmetical calculations are not complex: Don’t get into a long war with an enemy whose stock of long-range ballistic missiles outnumbers your surface-to-air missiles.

So Trump had the narrowest window of opportunity, and used it.

On the other side, the last week-and-a-half mostly revealed the shallowness of the War Party. You’ll recall, for example, that Ted Cruz got into a spat with Tucker over the actual population of Iran. Last week, a UK podcast had a brief discussion on The US Army-Marine Corps Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which notes the following (foot of page xxvi):

    The troop demands are significant. The manual’s recommendation is a minimum of twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents.

That’s roughly what the British had in Malaya. Which they won, by the way. Twenty-two years ago, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I stopped on the shoulder of the main western highway from Jordan to Baghdad to fill up from an enterprising Iraqi who’d retrieved some supplies from a looted petrol station and was anxious to sell them to any passing Canadian tourists. As he was topping off, I asked him how agreeable he found the western soldiery. He grinned a big toothless grin and pointed to a chopper that had just come up over the horizon to hover above our heads. Then he said: “Americans only in the sky.”

We did not win that one, you’ll recall. Instead, we created an Iranian client-state.

That’s why Ted Cruz’s breezy indifference when Tucker asked him the population of Iran was so revealing. The senator told Tucker that it doesn’t matter whether the population of Iran is eighty million or a hundred million. Really?

Because, per the Pentagon’s own field manual, the latter figure would require finding an extra 400,000 troops. Oh, wait. If it’s a Nato mission, the other members could muster 127 guys between them, so it would only require 399,873 extra Americans.

Even if the public were minded to put one-and-a-half million pairs of boots on the ground, it couldn’t do it. “Americans only in the sky” equals what an Australian prime minister told me, after a flying visit to the troops in Afghanistan, was “the Crusader fort mentality”.

It doesn’t work. The political divide in America is between, crudely, Trumpians and neocons. The former are anti-war; the latter are pro-war … but a way of war that doesn’t work.

June 10, 2025

Mark Carney’s big defence spending announcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Monday Morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to make a major announcement on Canada’s military spending. After being one of the worst freeloaders in the western alliance, Canada was spending far less on the Canadian Armed Forces than the 2% of GDP we’d promised our NATO partners several years ago. Of course, at the same time that Canada seems to be finally getting serious about defence priorities, the rest of our allies are talking seriously about raising the agreed-upon target to 5%:

Chris Lambie in the National Post says it’s a C$9 billion bump in direct military spending in this (unbudgeted) year:

Canada’s plan to add more than $9 billion to defence spending this year was praised by military watchers Monday, but they cautioned that the country is shooting at a moving target.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the country would meet its commitment in this fiscal year of hitting the two per cent of gross domestic product mark that was agreed upon by NATO countries more than a decade back.

“It’s very encouraging that the prime minister has come out this early in his mandate and made such a strong commitment to defence,” said Vincent Rigby, a former top intelligence adviser to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who spent 14 years with Canada’s Department of National Defence.

“You’ve gone from the former prime minister talking about the two per cent as a crass mathematical calculation to the current prime minister saying, no, this is actually a serious commitment. We committed to it 10 years ago and even before that. And we have to do it because we owe it to our allies. But we also owe it to the Canadian people. He made it quite clear this is about protecting Canada, protecting our national interests and protecting our values.”

New spending could do a lot to improve crumbling military infrastructure, said Michel Maisonneuve, a retired Canadian Army lieutenant-general who has served as assistant deputy chief of defence staff, and chief of staff of NATO’s Allied Command.

“The housing on bases is horrible,” Maisonneuve said.

He’s keen on Carney’s plan to participate in the $234-billion ReArm Europe program.

“This will bolster our ability to produce stuff for ourselves” while also helping the Europeans to do the same, Maisonneuve said.

“All the tree huggers are going to hate that, but that’s where we are today in the world.”

Carney’s cash injection includes $2.6 billion to recruit and retain military personnel. The military is short about 13,000 people. It aims to boost the regular force to 71,500 and the reserves to 30,000 by the end of this decade.

“There is no way we can protect Canada and Canadians with the strength that we have now,” Maisonneuve said.

Later in the day, Matt Gurney made some preliminary comments on the social media site formerly known as Twitter (I imagine he’ll have more to say in an upcoming Line post):

I’ve had a chance to actually look at some of the details of what was announced today for Canada’s defence. Overall, I am very supportive of everything that’s been announced.

There are some caveats. Or at least notes.

1. The new spending is mostly aimed at flushing out existing capabilities, not adding new ones.

That’s fine! We need to do that, definitely. I just don’t know if the public understands how much money we could sink into the military without actually adding any new capabilities. All we would do is backfill capabilities that we currently claim to have that don’t really exist.

2. Billions of additional dollars are going toward very basic things. More money to retain existing personnel. Apparently more money to build out recruitment. Spending more money to bring equipment and facilities up to state of proper repair.

Same as above. All good! Needed. Smart.

3. Some of what’s being announced today is entirely a matter of how we’re budgeting stuff. Certain existing expenditures are being redesignated as defence expenditures.

That’s okay! Some of our allies count things toward their defence total that we don’t. Everybody cooks the books a little bit, and I have no objection to this.

4. Everything being announced today should have been done years ago.

The only note I really have to add here is how the longer [Mark Carney] is Prime Minister, the harder it gets to explain away some of the shocking inactivity of his immediate predecessor.

5. None of this is going to be enough.

Remember, all we’re doing here is building out existing capabilities so that they are actually real things, not just things that exist on paper. That’s good. But the actual work of recapitalizing, expanding and adapting the military for 21st-century conflict hasn’t really begun yet. Everything announced today is a necessary start to getting that done. But the hard work is still to come.

And so are the really eye-watering numbers.

Of course, there are definite downsides to just opening up the spending taps the way things currently are set up:

He’s not wrong.

May 25, 2025

When NATO “stopped being an effective military alliance” and instead “became a kind of social club”

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak says that Europe (however you might prefer to define it) needs a new Great Power:

All through European history, the intervals of peace, during which reconstruction and progress overcame the ravages of war, were secured by a temporary equilibrium between the Great Powers of the day.

It is obvious that there was no such equilibrium on 23 February 2022, when Russian columns started rolling towards Kyiv, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had just described Ukraine not merely as Russian, but as the homeland of the very first Russian state: Kievan Rus’.

[…]

But when the moment came, and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, there was no cohesive and determined power ready to respond quickly and effectively. Nato had done just that several times during the Cold War, by promptly reinforcing threatened allies with thousands of air-lifted troops from the so-called “Allied Command Europe Mobile Force”.

That, however, was the old, pre-enlargement Nato, which was still a veritable military alliance of countries capable of defending themselves, and help weaker allies in trouble, and whose chronically weak Mediterranean member states, with the most resplendent uniforms and least combat strength, had no Russian troops on their borders.

But once very deserving yet utterly indefensible countries such as Estonia were included in Nato — along with Poland, which mustered just 42,000 combat soldiers out of its population of 33 million a mere three months before Putin’s full-scale invasion began — it stopped being an effective military alliance.

Instead, it became a kind of social club. The Nato calendar is full of meetings at the “Supreme Allied Headquarters” in Mons in Belgium, where all manner of military and related issues are addressed often very professionally and quite freely — except that nobody is allowed to mention, however politely, even the most glaring military shortcomings of fellow allies, which undermine important war plans.

The highpoint of the Nato calendar is the splendid summits with all flags flying, in which the arrival of new countries is greatly celebrated, regardless of their ability to actually defend themselves. Both heads of state and heads of government are invited to those gatherings on the premise that there is strength in numbers, with no concerns about the inherent difficulty of reaching any agreements in such a vast crowd.

In the last summit, held in Washington DC in July 2024, Biden’s confusion of President Zelensky with Putin added a touch of humour to otherwise gloomy proceedings: nobody in attendance offered any suggestions on how to end the war in Ukraine.

What proves that Nato is no longer a genuine military alliance was that nothing was done in the last pre-war days before Putin’s invasion finally began. The satellite intelligence that revealed Russian forces on the move also showed that they were already in assault formations. But even then, five days remained to fly fighter-bomber squadrons to forward bases.

Yet even inaction would have been better than what actually happened. Instead of ordering the rapid deployment of tactical airpower to bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the Biden administration instead evacuated US diplomats from Kyiv, starting a panic that induced the evacuation of some 20 other diplomatic missions.

May 18, 2025

The FAL for British Troop Trials in 1954: X8E1 & X8E2

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Feb 2020

The NATO rifle trials of the early 1950s eventually chose the 7.62mm x 51mm cartridge, and the British and Belgians agreed on the FAL rifle to shoot it (and they thought the US would as well, but that’s another story). The British government formally accepted the FAL for troop trials, and in 1954 an order for 4,000 X8E1 rifles (with iron sights) and 1,000 X8E2 rifles (with SUIT 1x optical sights) was placed. These rifles were mechanically the same as what would be finalized as the L1A1 rifle, but they include a number of differing features. Both models had 3-position selector switches allowing automatic fire, and they also had manual forward assists on the bolt handles. The iron sights had top covers with integrated stripper clip guides, as there was concern that troops would have to manually reload their magazines, and stripper clips would speed this process up.
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April 23, 2025

This Way Toward Enemy – How The Bomb Didn’t Quite Go Boom

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 17 Feb 2023

I can do nothing about the way I say Nuclear. If that upsets you please don’t bother commenting

A brief history of the many ways that nuclear weapons nearly killed us all
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April 3, 2025

English Electric Lightning – the F-22 of 1958

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 14 Jul 2023

In which we explore one of the more bonkers aircraft of the Cold War and all the reasons it made no sense whatsoever whilst being awesome in practically every way.
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March 25, 2025

How Maps Decide Battles – NATO Symbology Special

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Mar 2025

Learn to speak the language of modern war! Today, Indy goes over some of the history and uses of NATO Joint Military Symbology and how it inspires and helps us in our own cartography department. Join us for this crash course — the perfect accompaniment to the regular series.
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