This strategy would fall apart when you encounter an adversary willing to sacrifice its own people. Nations that care about their own people need to keep a technological advantage on the battlefield.

I mean, all treaties are at risk of failure from bad actors, even implicit ones like mutually-assured-destruction, and in the later case it has been shown to be incredibly effective. But I don't feel like grinding the threat of powerful weapons against each other to be a particularly wise long term solution to security.

I think it's a pretty obvious ipso facto that the more, and more advanced weapons, that are placed into the global battlefield, the less actual security (in life and liberty) we can expect.

The problem isn't that there are adversaries that are willing to sacrifice their people, almost every war is one of attrition after all, it's that leaders that would be adversaries like this are inevitable in a governmental structure that is delegated a monopoly on violence.

Adversaries willing to sacrifice their own people are absolutely a problem for societies that care about their own people.

States don't care.

Believe it or not, USA government cares at least a little. USA did not institute the draft even when fighting on two fronts (Afghanistan and Iraq). USA made up for the lack in manpower with technology: Reaper drones, cluster munitions, night vision, precise artillery, overwhelming air power.

Don't you find it a bit frightening that this tech is daily giving a smaller and smaller subset of people in the world the unilateral ability to project their will onto the world? At least if they tried to draft in an unjust war, the people could withhold their physical support. This was pretty effective during the Vietnam area, but it's a bargaining chip we've lost.

As we saw with 702, we really have very little leverage left in what our gov does anymore, the threat of being voted out even carries little power, exactly because they're systematically removing humans from every loop they can for the purpose of working unilaterally even when--perhaps especially when--it's against the will of the people. The spooks themselves have literally said exactly as much in their fight against privacy.

To me, the latest 702 is more terrifying than any adversary. When we, who the government should be beholden to, cannot even know the text of the laws which apply to us, it really puts a fine point on how the those who run our government view themselves in relation to its citizenry.

"The liberties of people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -Patrick Henry

Well if the history in the past 3 years is relevant I would say that the power of elites to project their will onto the rest of the world is small. In both sides: Russia is still grinding through a war that may be their second Afghanistan; and on the western side it took US Congress half a year to approve some funds so someone else (Ukraine) would to fight China’s gas station.

From my PoV, much of the Ukraine war was the result of the powers in the US exercising their control over the world, and it sure didn't take long to dispatch two carrier battlegroups to the aid of Israel.

I find the threat of policing and misery used for recruitment a tad bit worse than drafting.

Not that it matters, the state still doesn't care. It can't, it's not that kind of being.