Well sure but then it relies on the US army. Costa Rica is allied with the US and foolish would be the country trying to declare war to Costa Rica because it'd very probably face the full wrath of Uncle Sam's army.

I'm not saying setting up an alliance with the country that has the biggest army in the world and then doing without an army is a bad thing...

What I'm saying though is that it'd probably be very different for a country without any alliance with the US to decide to have no army.

Technically it relies on the TIAR (interamerican treaty of reciprocal defense).

Edit: fixed acronym. Thanks

TIAR. ITAR is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

A standing army creates a ton of problems, but what happens if nobody has a standing army? Seems like someone has to play cop and eat the cost (both social and economic) of doing so.

Like many social problems, this is actually a coordination problem, and can be easily boiled down to a tragedy of the commons situation.

Everyone would prefer to not have an army, because most of the time you don't need them but they're still expensive to maintain and when you do need them they're even more expensive. But if nobody has an army then the bad actors can form an army and take over everybody else. So everybody needs to have an army unless and until you can get global coordination working to the point where everyone de-militarizes and the moment anyone starts militarizing everyone else does the same and joins together to absolutely crush that violator. You just gotta hope they weren't able to massively militarize in secret.

The seems unlikely to ever happen, so until then you have a couple countries that get to live in the sweet spot of not having their own army but still being covered by someone else's.

The fascinating thing is that the "well the bad guys could form an army" argument sounds logical, but really isn't. You can't secretly recruit and train several 100,000 people.

The closest we've ever come to seeing this happen in real time was probably with German rearmament in the 20s and 30s, and they were telegraphing for decades what they were doing.

It does however raise the other problem - if people are willing to stand by and ignore obviously bad actors skirting closer and closer to the line, you'll have at some point a fairly big problem, and it depends on how long you waited.

That is the bigger problem of global demilitarization - the fact that non-action in the face of a violation usually plays better to a domestic audience than actually doing something. (This is a pattern that has and will play out repeatedly. That's the actual question that needs answering)

Germany is actually a very illustrative example. They started remilitarization in earnest in 1933, Britain and France started around 1936, and those few years of head start let Germany trounce everyone around for the first few years of WWII despite their inferior industrial base.

That's ignoring the Free Corps, though. There was a lot of staffing up via paramilitaries. (Sort of like piling all your armies into Australia in Risk ;)

And I think it's worth calling out that Britain and France deliberately slowed down as a result of appeasement policies, not because they missed that Germany was rearming. That's what I meant in the GP post when I said "people willing to stand by and ignore obviously bad actors"

The Freikorps were not a useful force for conflict with peer states. The long-lead-time rearmament that Germany started early was gearing up industry and producing equipment. The Weimar efforts at deniable weapons development was nowhere near the open military work of Britain or France.

Alas with modern warfare you don't need 100k people in order to curb-stomp the unmilitarized competition.

I am certain the US for instance could easily make nukes with no other country knowing about it, and that's with all the people in the US who would scream that from the rooftops if they knew.

Or you could get even more creative: make a virus in a lab, develop a vaccine / cure, vaccinate your population, release the virus. We don't even know if COVID-19 came from a Wuhan lab and even if it did it seems incredibly unlikely it was developed as a weapon. Imagine the secrecy that would be involved by a country doing so deliberately.

Between nukes / bioweapons / chemical weapons / drones / etc, a country could definitely achieve a huge edge before any other country knew what was happening. It's not 1920 anymore.

You don't "easily make nukes". They require an incredibly large industrial infrastructure to support them.

And it's worth pointing out that bioweapons are not a problem that can be fixed with a standing army. (Again, not touching the fact that a BSL4 lab specializing in weaponized agents is not something that just escapes notice). And I'm terribly sorry, but the idea that you can vaccinate an entire population without anybody noticing is just flat out ridiculous.

> You don't "easily make nukes".

I didn't say anyone can, I said the US can. Even if the US "demilitarized", we could definitely still easily make nukes.

> And it's worth pointing out that bioweapons are not a problem that can be fixed with a standing army.

I never said standing army, I was clear about using demilitarized/militarized. You could use cyber security as another example – a country with a standing army is of course not going to help against a cyber offensive. However a country with cyber defenses...

> but the idea that you can vaccinate an entire population without anybody noticing is just flat out ridiculous.

The US vaccinates its population against the flu every year.

I think that, "what happens if nobody has a standing army?" is an interesting question. What I don't understand is why you think that "someone has to play cop"...?

If you go by historical data, when nobody has a standing army everybody has mercenaries (which leads to instability at scale).

Or someone gets the bright idea of putting together an army and conquering their neighbors (who don't have a standing army and are relying on Mercenaries who keep a good feel on which way the wind is blowing (and who will have the money to pay them in the future)).

The neighbors, not being stupid, notice this and build their own standing armies (or at least conscript militias). Which is why historically, the situation where there are no armies or militias is so rare: it's not a Nash equilibrium.

So long as you can raise an army at some future point in time should the need arise, this issue seems moot. It's inefficient to maintain a standing army when it is unnecessary.

>So long as you can raise an army at some future point in time should the need arise, this issue seems moot.

By the time you could cobble together an army any modern military would have already conquered you, especially if you have super strict civilian firearm laws like Costa Rica that make putting together defensive militias much, much harder.

> especially if you have super strict civilian firearm laws like Costa Rica that make putting together defensive militias much, much harder.

Not refuting the larger point, but this part sounds questionable. For a country, rifles are easy to provision: just buy enough and keep them in well-guarded armories in strategic locations. Trained soldiers are much harder to come by.

South Korea has relatively strict gun laws and very few people own one at home. But almost every male goes through two years of military service. In case of a foreign invasion, it won't take 24 hours to summon millions of civilians, just throw each one a rifle, and there's your army.

But no one else has a standing army in this scenario so there is no such modern military that can conquer you before you can remilitarize. The moment one country starts militarizing in a world without militaries, you know their intentions and can start remilitarizing to counter.

But let's say Costa Rica had a standing army - are they going to stop that modern military from conquering them? Probably not, so why waste money on a half assed defense?

Germany, between WWI & WWII, officially has no military to worry about. Was able to create a Europe-conquering army very quickly.

So would you describe the Maginot line as a good investment?

Obviously not. Germany noticed lines have ends, and just went around.

So you're saying that a nation without a large standing army can build a new force well suited to exploiting weaknesses of its adversaries who spend substantially on maintaining investments in defense which contain those exploitable weaknesses?

One might go so far as to say that not having a strong standing army for an extended period of time actually proved militarily advantageous for the Germans in 1940 when their new army outmaneuvered an obsolete one.

I was responding to “The moment one country starts militarizing in a world without militaries, you know their intentions and can start remilitarizing to counter.” Lack of a military is quite a weakness to exploit.

The Brits abd French actually drastically cut military spending between WWI and WWII

Also, they went around it using, in large part, Czech armor they took when they invaded Sudetenland.

No, in this scenario someone made an army and conquered you, and now they own you and your resources.

> but what happens if nobody has a standing army?

The moment someone has a standing army, we are, by definition, no longer in a situation where nobody has a standing army.

If someone can magically instantaneously create an army, then Costa Rica should just do that the moment they're threatened.

The issue is that while someone is building an army, the rest of the world might stand by and do nothing in hopes that the army won't be used, via appeasement and negotiation, particularly if the world's culture is strongly set against having armies. At least until the aggressor starts conquering. That's how it tends to play out historically, so countries and kingdoms go to the trouble and expense of having standing armies, or being able to call them up quickly enough. Because there's always potentially someone who gains power that wants more, and plenty of people willing to follow.

> particularly if the world's culture is strongly set against having armies.

If the world's culture is strongly set against having armies, and one country effectively threatens them by breaking that taboo, then I would at least expect the world to instantly cease all trade and transport links with the arming country.

That may not be enough on its own to force the taboo-breaking country to disarm, but I don't see any contradiction in a world culture which is against having armies while also ruthlessly dedicated to temporarily re-arming and exterminating the first country that breaks the taboo.

There are hard coordination and rule of law / presumption of innocence questions to solve there, but I don't think we can necessarily assume that this world culture will stand idly by while their enemy works to undo the very thing that defines the culture.