US - Greenland Crisis Thread

[Sheilbh]

The issue is Euro armies have probably gone too far into the slider of quality vs quantity, basically. For things like securing the Baltics there's a kinetic power to having a lot of boots on the ground that isn't easily replicated with advanced weapon systems, highly advanced fighter/bombers, missile systems etc.

The U.S. also has moved that way versus where we were in the Cold War, obviously, but we still have 1.3m active duty, and 800k ready reserve. Some of the European armies are shockingly small in terms of manpower versus where they were in the late 1980s.

It's not that they need to go back to the Cold War level of manpower, mass conscription, etc, but they definitely need more guys under arms, no other way about it. They aren't going to weapon system spend their way into reliable self defense.

They should also learn that a lot of concrete and construction can slow a front down. Poland is building out huge walls of anti-tank barriers that have proven effective at preventing large scale offensives in the Ukraine war, I don't really know enough about what the border regions of the Baltics are like, but if they aren't doing what Poland is they need to be, and yesterday.

Edit to add: If Wikipedia is correct, the UK--one of the generally worse ran post-Cold War European countries, has 135,000 active duty and essentially a non-functional reserve system. That means the Brits have fewer guys ready to fight than Israel did before the Gaza War broke out.

Obviously Israel has more serious security concerns, but it's a tiny country in terms of both population and GDP, it's really not tremendously defensible how far back countries like Britain have neutered their defense capabilities.

I think it's worse than that in some respects.

In 1990 when we were clearly winning the Cold War the UK was still spending about 4% of GDP on defence. The current commitment is to get to 3.5% by 2035. The British Army of the Rhine in 1990 as part of our boots on the ground serious commitment to European defence was about 50,000 strong. The British Army currently has about 70,000 personnel and it's massively over-focused on various forms of "elite" forces/special forces type regiments (state conflict was over, it's all about non-state actors, that's our USP in the Atlantic alliace/how we demonstrate value to the Americans etc).

Having said that Britain wasn't primarily a land power even in the Cold War - but we were engaged in naval security. So just last month the First Sea Lord gave a speech and then an interview with the FT where he observed a 30% increase in Russian incursions into our waters in the last year. He added that for the first time since the end of the Second World War the UK is close to losing its advantage over Russia in the Atlantic.

I think that should still shape our approach - it's why I think minilateralism could be the best way with Europe working together. I think divvying up responsibility (especially as we now have all of Europe and not just the Western half) for defence would make sense (and be the best way of spending resources).

I think you're right - I think there's also a degree to which in the popular but also, I think catastrophically, the elite interpretation of the Cold War there's a lack of understanding of how it ended (in the UK I think there's something similar with WW2 and the Troubles). At any point after the war the idea that the USSR would dissolve peacefully, Germany would re-unite peacefully and the NATO and NATO would roll up into what was then Soviet territory would seem almost impossible. And perhaps because that outcome was so ulikely after it happened it became understood as inevitable - with limits to the understanding of how it was produced and the contingecies involved. I think that is a large part of what's led to Europe's problems that the miraculous - and miraculously positive - became inevitable. I'd also add you have that end of history reality in one part of the Europe ("bliss was it in that dawn to be alive") and in the other, with Russia, I think you can look at Tsarist Russia, USSR and now and see huge continuities of behaviour and attitudes.

I think it's why it's most extreme with the UK and Germany because I think we were the countries where there was most buy in into that narrative (very understandably from a - West - German perpsective). On a purely British perspective I think there has not been anywhere near the reckoning that we need over the fact that we lost in Iraq and had to be bailed out (having gone in very overconfident and billy big bollocks about teaching the Yanks about counter-insurgency etc).

I would add I'm not even sure it's a quality v quantity thing in that framing. In terms of deployable forces a lot of Europe is in a really bad way - France and the UK are currently the only two big European countries capable of deploying significant force. This is one of the reasons that the focus from the US hasn't just been defence spending but also spending on equipment (and I think training). I think that's going to take a while (I think thiswas an issue with some German equipment provided to Ukraine that it was basically degraded beyond the point of use).

[Legbiter]

Denmark should follow the French suggestion in hardening Greenland harbors and stationing dispersed troops to guard against any Trumpian sudden impulse. Also, be ready to knock out the 4 generators powering Pituffik/Thule.

[Jacob]

Denmark should follow the French suggestion in hardening Greenland harbors and stationing dispersed troops to guard against any Trumpian sudden impulse. Also, be ready to knock out the 4 generators powering Pituffik/Thule.

Agreed