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Last week, in the context of the Ukraine war, we talked about conscription.
We also talked about the possibility of European countries like France or the UK sending "boots on the ground and planes in the air", to Ukraine to help secure a peace deal.
And finally, as usual, we talked about migration and demographics in Europe.
Here's an interesting tweet at the intersection of all three of these topics:
I have to agree. And I never thought about the issue that way. Since the Napoleonic era, European countries have relied on nationalism to mobilize huge armies. Even if the state was totalitarian, as in Russia, there was still national identity to motivate the troops.
A two tier society, as currently practiced in much of Europe, is fundamentally hostile to the young white men living inside it. Society may be able to tolerate injustice in taxes, housing, and criminal law, but will they tolerate their sons being sent to die on a godforsaken battlefield in the Ukraine, while migrants continue to loiter on street corners and shopping centers? I think this is a bridge too far, even for Europe.
The army of the UK has about 70,000 trained members and 30,000 reservists. Of these, it's questionable how many could be deployed. 30,000 maybe? This is a pretty small number in the context of the Ukraine war, less than 10% of the Ukrainian or Russian forces.
Honestly, I don't think it will ever come to conscription, for the simple reason that it can't. The state would lose all legitimacy. But, for British citizens, I think it's fair to ask. Under what circumstances would you risk your life for your country? Would you die to defend this UK like your great-grandfathers died to defend the UK of the early 20th century?
I think the ease with which huge numbers of human soldiers on both sides are being slaughtered in trenches in Ukraine by cheap drones means that conscription is less and less likely in future wars. Ukraine and Russia need it because we’re in a transition phase in terms of warfare, giving each drone a multimodal LLM for navigation hasn’t started yet, production lines are still being set up etc.
But when the big states can deploy swarms of literally billions of drones, what use is a meat body in a trench who will get killed 0.1 seconds after sticking his head above a parapet? That’s just pointless, and the cost of feeding him, housing him, transporting him to the front lines etc will take away from drone production.
As the below post says, you need to get Nybbler-pilled on this. Consent can be manufactured. With AI, gaming, ultra-addictive short form video, convincing zoomer Brits of all races to die in a war against Russia will be a breeze. 19 year old boys aren’t making reasoned judgments about the demographic future of England, for good or ill. As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.
Quadcopter drones aren’t actually killing that many people comparatively, it just seems like it because those are the only ones that have clear videos of the attack. When an artillery strike takes out a whole trench line killing two entire companies, there’s no video of that. Artillery is still the king of the battlefield, and artillery is still responsible for 80 percent of the casualties in the war, like it has been in every industrial war since 1914. In fact, the primary use of quadcopter drones in this war has been for artillery spotting, not as FPV kill drones.
Additionally, the only reason quadcopter drones are effective right now is that they are new and there haven’t been any good countermeasures developed. It would be pretty easy to design a motion tracking automated gun to take these out. And there are many many electronic warfare countermeasures to jam FPV drones (Human or AI controlled) that just haven’t been implemented in large scale yet. Like it or not, the main effect of all the new warfare technology has been to reduce us to WWI-style mass artillery barrages and trench warfare.
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