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Discussion starter, but something I'm sincerely interested in and don't have strong opinions about: do modern Western states (e.g., the US, UK, Japan) have more or less state capacity than they did 20, 40, 60 years ago?
The concept of state capacity seemed to enter mainstream geopolitics wonkery about a decade or so ago, and I find it very useful. I'm sure most of you have heard of it, but in short it refers to the ability of the state to accomplish its policy goals through the use of military, industrial, infrastructural, economic, and informational resources. Each of these is important, but I'd flag that informational resources have a special role insofar as they directly feed into the efficiency by which other resources can be deployed for ends. For example, a piece of infrastructure like a new dam or a rail network may advance policy goals or it may be a waste of time and money, and informational resources will help the state predict which will be the case.
Two other key points to note. First, state capacity of course does not only refer to internal state capacity (i.e., resources proper to the state), but also the ability of the state to persuade or coerce domestic non-state actors such as corporations to co-operate with the state's goals. Most of the major players in WW2 - Britain, the United States, but also Germany and Japan - drew most of their state capacity from these more indirect mechanisms. Second, state capacity is hard to directly assess for the simple reason for it is a fact about potentiality rather than actuality: outside of wars or similar crises, there are good reasons both political and pragmatic for the state not to use the full force of its coercive power.
Recent or ongoing test cases for state capacity in the West include the COVID pandemic, ramping up of basic munitions production like 155mm artillery rounds (especially in Europe), and the new vogue for industrial policy in critical industries like ship-building in the US. My gut instinct is that right now, state capacity in the West is historically at a very low ebb, possibly lower than it has been for more than a century, and that this may be helpful for understanding the behaviour of governments. However, I don't have strong confidence in this assessment, and would love to hear what others think.
This has nothing to do with state capacity and everything to do with states not placing longterm orders for 155 shells. Expansions in capacity won't magically appear unless customers place orders. The industry has communicated that it stands ready to expand and that the states only have to say the word, the states aren't and not because they lack the financial capacity.
The problem isn't state capacity, it's political will.
During WW1 shell crisis in Britain, the government was able to ramp up production from 500,000 shells in first few months of the War (since August-December) to 16 million shells in 1915.
During shell crisis the reasons were similar - UK was missing some key chemicals like acetone, now Europe and to some extent US have shortages of guncotton and other basic materials. By the way during WW1 Dupont was able to produce 500 tons of guncotton a day. We are now two years into a conflict where Western powers know they are draining their munition reserves and they still cannot produce near the volume of munitions that countries were able to produce 100 years ago. In fact US and EU is reliant on guncotton production from China
You may say that it is problem of state orders, but that itself is a problem of state capacity or to better say incapacity. No decision can be straigthtforward and is mired in endless internal battles due to incompetence and other reasons.
That may hold true for America but not Europe. The issue isn't internal battles but internal indecision or naive hope. The governments have in general not been split and it has been 100% up to the current rulers which investments to make. They have chosen not to invest.
For America, I agree that polarisation seems fairly directly decrease effective state capacity because of how the government functions, but even then I think it's important to delineate between lack of action due to political deadlock and an actual material lack of capacity.
Why are we not sending more military aid to Ukraine? Is it because we can't or because we don't want to? Its because we don't/didn't want to.
There's a federal/state distinction, so the test would be to check states with one sided partisan control- they should have more state capacity. Both Texas and California have been in the news for doing things no one really expected them to get away with doing unilaterally, so it passes a vibe check.
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I'll note that 'want' also obscures factors of strategy and consideration of other factors.
If, for example, the US has sent categories of aid in advance of it's allies willingness to do the same, then there was a risk that the countries that felt their concerns were bypassed would refuse to send similar aid. The example that comes to mind is tanks- before the Germans objected to sending tanks on grounds that the US hadn't sent any, there was a more general German consensus that tanks were too escalatory. It wasn't until internal german political dynamics had changed that 'we won't send tanks before the US' replaced 'no one should send tanks because tanks are too escalatory, and if you do we won't.' Given the risk was that doing so would prompt the Germans to not do the same, and the German military aid value substantially outweighs the value of individual systems sent without German assent (in the case of Germany-derived tanks) or over German objections (US-derived tanks), and this creates a circumstance of actors wanting to send aid but not wanting to send aid because they want to send more aid overall but doing what they want gets in the way of what they want for what they want.
Which is a heck of a mess of wants, and complicates an over-simplified analysis.
When it comes to the pro-Ukraine coalition in general, I sincerely believe an underappreciated part of the Western war strategy is how the strategy has prioritized building and maintaining the coalition of donors, particularly Germany, over immediate deliveries of on-hand assets. This has been apparent since 2022, but rarely remarked upon, even though the difference of approaching something as a short-term versus long-term problem have considerably different implications. For example, how one views this year's Russian advances in the Donbass; the implications change considerably depending on whether you believe the war ends if the Russians take all the administrative boundaries of the Donbas (a short term paradigm), despite the Donbas not being particularly important to Ukraine's ability to continue fighting (a long-term paradigm).
But to bring this back to political capacity- this sort of perspective does challenge the state capacity in a different way, since the capacity of individual states is being subordinated to the capacity of a coalition as a whole, which makes this a coordination-issue rather than a matter of just beuracratic capacity.
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