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Notes -
Manufacturers of prosthesis, rejoice!
Anti-personnel mines are making a big comeback in Europe, with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty. Poland has now decided to deploy millions of mines on its eastern border. Ukraine is of course in breach of that treaty, but as a non-signatory I do not see that Russia would get to whine about it.
On the one hand, I will concede that the Ottawa Treaty was always lacking support from the superpowers, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention. Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
I do not think that the US argument is without merit, and if they had pushed for a treaty exemption for mines whose design had been approved by international experts so that they explode within 48 hours, that would perhaps not critically weaken Ottawa. The problem is that the military incentives do not lie that way. Obviously there are situations where it will be advantageous for a mine to remain dangerous years after they are placed. And anyone producing short-lived mines can easily switch to producing cheaper long-lived ones by just getting rid of the timer. I wish I could say that I believed that Trump would say "unfortunately, the US unilaterally committed to never use persistent landmines under Clinton, so we will not do that", but realistically he will just say that this was Bad Radical Leftist Democrat policy and ignore it. So "no anti-personnel land mines" seems like the obvious Schelling point for an international agreement. (Anti-vehicle mines are a lesser concern, either they are planted on roads, where they are easily discovered (one way or another), or they are planted offroad, where the chances of civilians triggering them are much slimmer. Lots of kids play in the woods, few kids drive jeeps through the prairie.)
Personally, I would prefer for Poland to start a nuclear weapons program to them relying on landmines.
Some countries need landmines, and so will have them, one way or the other. Same thing with nuclear weapons (within technological capability).
International treaties are toilet paper. They can be ignored, unsigned or simply violated at will, because the only thing that enforces an international treaty is military force. Every bit of paper ever dedicated to a treaty draft in all of world history carries less force than I do going to Aldi for butter.
This doesn't seem right.
I get the sense that there are certain weapons and tactics that end up as a race to the bottom. Governments and their soldiers would rather not compete on those things. Even if they have an advantage on one race to the bottom, they don't have it in all areas.
The soldiers themselves are often interested in compliance. American POWs were treated well in Nazi Germany, even while they were sending their own population to gulags and gas chambers.
All weapons and tactics are a race to the bottom, war is a race to the bottom.
NBA players are often interested in the enforcement of foul rules. They are also interested in skirting those rules when possible to gain advantage in the game. Half the weaponry the US fields is built to skirt the Geneva Conventions in some way too technical or expensive for other people to duplicate.
But war has no actual rules, the other guys don't have to follow shit, that's why they're fighting you.
Yeah I just think you are misunderstanding some fundamental incentive structures man.
Race to the bottom gets to the bottom when there is only a singular driving incentive. And modern war often seems that way, but its not.
An example of something that is ruthless is biological evolution. Any tactic works. Any genes that can replicate and gain energy are acceptable. You get parasites, viruses, mind controlling fungi, etc.
Human war (especially in the modern era) is not really like that. Politicians at the top would like it to be that way for the sake of their own success. But they have to operate through lots of intermediaries. And those intermediaries are playing iterated prisoner's dilemmas with other nations, troops, and their descendants.
Or, to return to the Clausewitzian classic- war is the extension of politics by other means.
There may well be a theoretical 'pure' war, that ultimate bottom to race to... but that theoretical is stupid, because getting to it requires various disregards of political and even physical considerations and limitations. Even North Korea, the most hyper-militarized country on earth, spends soldier time supporting the harvest, and engineering, and enough other things that after a point you realize the military is also a jobs program for the state.
This, in turn, leads to how politics works in a context of anarchy with no higher power or inherent limiting principle. Unsurprisingly, it leads to cooperation and agreements that often self-limit. These are often unstable agreements, but the reasons that people agree to self-limit, and often uphold such self-limitations, are legion and not exactly new or novel.
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