Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.
One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.
Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."
The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.
TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).
Some facts we do know though:
1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office
2. The US moved missiles first
3. The military was following orders from the top
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg
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EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi...
For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday...
The latter book literally gave me nightmares.
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html
"A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...
My strong impression has been that the Japanese military in the 1930s was a catastrophically-extreme illustration of Dunning-Kruger syndrome when it came to understanding international affairs and in particular understanding the psychology and industrial capacity of the United States.
(Admiral Yamamoto was a noteworthy exception: Having spent considerable time in the U.S, he strongly favored friendly relations with the U.S. and opposed going to war. When he was overruled by the militarists in the Army, he planned Pearl Harbor and Midway as a roll of the dice for what he judged to be Japan's only hope of success, namely by striking hard blows and trying for a quick negotiated peace. It didn't work out that way.)
It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.
Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.
If you have the public’s support for the war, then a war isn’t going to hurt your election chances.
For example, it seems that the civilian elite of Germany and Austria-Hungary was ambivalent about war in early 1918, especially in A-H, and willing to entertain possible ceasefire with subsequent negotiations; but serious peace negotiations were not possible anymore, because the de facto power shifted to general Ludendorff and other high officers, who were determined to go on.
Former Czechoslovak president Ludvík Svoboda, a general who fought in the WWII and went through some of the bloodiest battles involving Czechoslovak forces [0], was known to be very wary of militaristic ideas later.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_194...
I model this differently - people are very conservative about narrative change. I feel it works more generally.
Examples:
If we've had peace for 30 years, then war seems impossible.
If we've had government fiat currency for a centuries or more, then of course cryptocurrencies are a joke.
If we've been on the gold standard for long enough, then of course that's how money should work.
I think the pendulum can swing too far the other way, though. People imagine a blank slate, but we don’t live in a blank slate, so you’re essentially imagining a fantasy world. Or, you just end up recreating the old world in the new one but worse.
In particular, he argues that the way you avoid things like World War II is in part precisely by making sure the military does not make decisions of war and peace.
For context on that, Bismarck's abdication in 1890 left a leadership vacuum that was was gradually filled-in by military elites, who were more interested in the mechanics of warfare than the nuance of politics. Where Bismarck used military force as political tool, in his absence every problem began to look like something that only the military could solve.
Although, it's worth taking this opportunity to repeat: the same military elites responsible for the tragedy of WWI and the Dolchstoss myth were responsible for appointing Hitler into power and legitimizing his militant tactics. Hindenburg and Ludendorff created Hitler, from inside and outside the establishment, respectively.
The significance of that, while it shouldn’t be dismissed either, often exaggerated; while, yes, that absolutely did happen, you see in the entirety of Europe, no matter the role of military vs. civilian authority, the myth of offense dominance, aggressive mobilization plans and hair-trigger activation, etc.
Basically everyone, civilian and military, had drawn the wrong conclusions about the direction of the evolution of warfare, and it affected every major powers diplomatic strategy, military posture, etc., because everyone saw the other side getting ahead of them as an existential threat.
Think of a corporations that make all decisions at top level vs corporations that at the top level mostly worry about creating correct environment for the individual contributors and low level managers to be able to make right decisions, individually.
US military won the IIWW war because it created that right environment.
Mobilizing people (people who are not interested in achieving goal are almost useless), keeping spirit (for example US military will always do what's necessary to save individual solders vs Japanese that treated soldiers mostly as expendable), ensuring that people are promoted on merit and not birth, ensuring people are trained and are given right tools.
All those things are so that soldiers can make the right decisions, on the spot.
It is naive to think that a general can say whatever he wants and make it happen. It will only happen if all those people want to make it happen and are prepared to make it happen.
The US did win the Pacific war, despite that its torpedoes were wholly almost wholly non-functional until 1944. It won at monstrous cost in wasted Marine Corps lives, apparently because blockade work was not dramatic for home audiences.
But it had beaten back most if the invasion before US materiel showed up in substantial quantity, and its industrial output (also) grew dramatically throughout the war.
Whether it could have secured enough food to sustain that output, without US SPAM, is unclear; the Soviets openly acknowledged the importance of the SPAM. The hundreds of thousands of trucks, millions of tires, millions of tons of steel, and corresponding amount of refined petrolem the US delivered probably mattered too, when it finally got there. Soviet pilots liked the P-39s, sort of proto-A10s.
The Soviet materiel placement in 1941, immediately before Germany invaded, was consistent with immediate plans to invade Germany.
Here in Poland this is very well known fact and nobody is going to forget this, for a very long time.
Soviets attacked Poland on September 17th, 1939 in accordance with plans they made with Nazis before the war. They made plans which part of Poland belonged to Soviets and which to Nazis and then were all too happy to occupy until Nazis turned on them.
US had declared Axis powers to be the enemy and then the enemy was defeated. Nobody questions that US was key to winning WWII. It seems impossible that soviets would hold if Nazi Germany was able to send all their resources to eastern front. Even with the help on the western front, soviets held JUST BARELY. And at key moment US troops landed in Italy forcing Hitler to divert his forces that were necessary to win battle of Kursk.
I don't see how you can question that US won the war, it is a fact documented by representatives of states involved in the war signing their capitulation to US.
In a sense it is true, but not in the sense we are talking about.
On that question, it is dead clear that the Soviets were, and by a huge margin.
Did US and British troops contribute? Yes. Did P-51s and P-38s help clear the skies of effective German air power? Sure. Would the outcome have been notably different without them? Probably not.
The biggest single setback for Germany, driving deep into original German territory, happened while the US and Britain were pinned down in Belgium and Southern France by a tiny fraction of German assets. Without, the war might have gone on for up to another year, and the Soviets would have ended up owning all of Europe and, probably, Africa. We must be satisfied that that did not happen.
> It only joined the war after Europeans had already killed more than 23 million Germans, and destroyed most of its military.
German military casualties were only 5.3 million by the high estimate. Total German casualties were only 7.4 million by the high estimate - for the whole war. So... I don't know where you get your ideas, but they are objectively very wrong.
That said, the US was far from ready to advance on the German heartland until after the time they were pottering about in Africa. It was a way to look busy.
Staying out long after the split, while Germany and Russia gored one another, was clearly the wiser course. Entering before the Soviets could subdue Germany and overrun western Europe was necessary. But any claim that the US had any sort of primary role in defeating Germany remains nonsense.
Individual soldiers don’t plan wars, obviously they don’t have a high enough level view to do that adequately. So much of war planning is logistics and not tactics or strategy. The idea is to get the troops there, make sure they have enough weapons and ammo, give them their objectives, then let field commanders do their jobs.
soldiers devotion to duty is ingrained in their head from day zero because they MUST be better than their enemies to win the fight, and the people in comfy chairs MUST devote themselves to the study and strategy of war, not tactics, to enable proper deployment of said soldiers. The danger is when innovation on the battlefield outpaces innovation in strategy, and leads to situations like the American Civil War and World War 1...real life meatgrinder horror.
Not just that. Neighbor dies of COVID, people are careful for a few days. Then they forget what the virus can do
Perhaps this is really what peace means. It is the security of being able to live and plan a life or a business without ever once worrying about "but what happens if there is a war?". The collective impact of that on psychological security and the free movement of goods, people, ideas across the world is huge.
> The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is.
People who started WWII were WWI veterans - that is who Nazi leadership were. Starting from Hitler, through Goebbels, down the rank. Not being veteran was seen as weakness. For that matter, Stalin was veteran too.
A lot of veterans would disagree about your "on average" thought. Sure, there are belligerent vets out there, but most have a better idea about the not-so-good stuff that happens in a war.
What's 'scary' are the stakes involved.
People in 'comfortable offices' are right now deciding who gets vaccines, and who will not until later.
People are dying in the US due to lack of access to healthcare due to other people making decisions in 'comfortable offices'.
We entrust those in positions of power with such legitimate authority.
And finally: "I think this option is more favourable to us than peace" - is an inappropriate analogy because it's generally never the case. If the US were to have entered WW1 and 2 earlier, a lot of lives would have been saved. While those were easier decisions in hindsight, they're all nuanced, for example, the US+Coalition decision to liberate Kuwait after Saddam's incursion.
Let me tell you, this is the main way to drive nationalistic divide, because the other half of the people in the country recognize for what it is -- evil manipulation of people's emotions for political gain (through conflict, much like Trump was doing in US).
The latter is what militant regimes do and did.
Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars. It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.
And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.
Weimar Republic's economic problems were mostly related to hyperinflation caused by their unsustainable debt, not sure how you're factoring trade deficits into that.
I agree nationalism is just an excuse like any other, but it's a remarkably good one: it's a cancerous mind virus that makes solving problems impossible, everyone is too busy calling everyone else unpatriotic or something.
It caused central banking failures all throughout Central Europe. Germany's banking system collapsed in the early 30s. In the wake of the Depression, European nations had very protectionist trade policies. With weakened international trade as a result of such policies, countries like Germany that did not have global empires had to resort to military force to acquire raw materials.
WWII was inevitable and that summary of the Weimar Republic's problems is overly-simplistic to the point of being misleading.
It's not enough just to look at trade imbalance from the lens of balance sheets. It's about what resources markets are (un)able to provide. You can look at the Opium wars similarly, which we think based on the name are about Opium but really were largely about the Silver trade from West to East and China's refusal to circulate that Silver back into the market.
Defecits are fine as long as everyone thinks they have reasonably fair access to the same resources. Notice the soft trade war that started mostly as a result of global manufacturing shifting to China and China's theft of IP...
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering
The sexist language is historically correct. Sorry ladies, history wasn't kind to you in general.
Nationalism is about building a strong us/them split, about having people internalize clear categories of Our Nation and The Others. This directly facilitates war.
One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based. If there hasn't been a war in 30 years, then they assume there will not be a war next year no matter how the background is changing.
The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is. There is a huge background risk that the age of abundance ends and then things get dicey.