Metal Reviews

It seems to me that a lot of conflict is originated from the West.

Over the last decade the vast majority of conflict has been initiated or expanded by the West. Even where conflict started locally ala Libya, the interference of Western forces has generally lead to a massive expansion of fighting.

Indeed the death toll increased 10 fold in Libya once NATO bombs started falling.

In places like Syria or Iran, the West has been antagonistic and has refused to properly support diplomatic initiatives.

And in the Asia-Pacific the US has been openly hostile to China and drumming up anti-Chinese rhetoric.

So does the West need to be convincingly defeated for greater peace?

I'm not talking about being worn down by a long term insurgency.

I think what is needed is the following scenario:

1. West gets involved militarily in some place ala Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

2. Over the course of a week or two, Western air and naval forces are swiftly annihilated with massive military casualties.

The result would result in destruction of Western confidence in it's own invulnerability.

Western politicians would then have to adopt greater emphasis on diplomacy rather than crusader style military interventions.

With growth of Chinese, Indian and Russian military and economic power, war would become even more unlikely as no one maintains an edge in the military field.

I also enjoy thinking about thousands of people dying.

I really have no idea what you are talking about here dead1, but I'll say placing Russia in the same category as truly emerging powers like India and China is silly.

Well as a member of the "west" I think this idea sucks.

But I am also in the military, so I might be a touch biased

Right, leave everything in the hands of people who worship a paedophile. Great idea.

Russia is an emerging power. Their conventional military, economy and political power were completely destroyed after the Soviet Union collapsed.

It's power is coming back - though it'll never be on par with China or USA.

India's a funny one too - it's excessively bureaucratic nature has prevented it from increasing as much as China.

My own take for the mid-21st century:

Super Powers:

- China
- USA

Middle Powers:
- India
- Russia
- Brazil
- France
- South Korea
- Japan

Actually the West already acts as the military arm of Sunni muslim powers ala Saudi Arabia.

The entire Western approach to middle eastern politics is based on the policies of Saudi Arabia and other oil rich Sunni gulf sultanates.

The Saudis right now are bombing Shiite villages in Yemen and are involved in extremely heavy handed suppression of its own Shiite minority.

Yet no talk of NATO intervention or of sanctions on Saudi Arabia.


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So the point - remove Western military confidence by defeating them in conventional combat.

All of a sudden you've removed the only guys practicising interventionist global warfare.

However the Chinese and Russians can't muscle in because you'd still have a massive US naval and air presence.

After all by massive defeat I'm not implying destruction of Western military capabilities, just the loss of willingness to use it in expeditionary warfare.

This defeat could be as simple as large aircraft losses to SAMs in a very short time period.

Yes, I'm quite aware of that: Russia is definitely better off now than it was then in terms of power. But Russia's current sources of power: natural gas and nuclear weapons, are illusory. Gazprom has put all of its cards in downstream investment in order to corner the European gas market, problem is, its neglect of upstream development has already caused production to plateau. Now being friendly to foreign investments would help a lot with that problem, but Russia tends to view energy as a zero-sum game. A natural gas power play seems increasingly dangerous given huge prospective shale gas reserves in places like the USA and Poland (not to mention offshore gas reserves being discovered in the North Sea), and even worse than that, Russia has failed to diversify its economy in case of something like a shale gas boom.

Nuclear weapons are nice to have in terms of power, sure, but Russia's weapons systems are largely out of date as compared to the USA, and some nuclear theorists have even questioned whether Russia's nuclear weapons systems are strong enough to sustain the idea of MAD.

Beyond these "strengths", you have a population still undergoing a demographic crisis, still at risk of Islamism spreading from the rebellious North Caucasus to Tatarstan, and still generally recovering from the 2008 economic meltdown, not to mention the recent instability Mr Putin's government has had to deal with.

The future in terms of power projection looks much, much brighter for China and India.

Totally agree for the most part.

Russians are investing in new ICBMs and SLBMs as well as new ballistic missile submarines. Interestingly enough the Americans have some considerable reliability issues with their mainstay ICBM, Minuteman III.

Both sides still have capable enough sub launched missiles.

As for Ballistic Missile defence, it's never 100% successful.


As for India and China, I think their power projection is constrained by following factors:

1. China - no decent sea access. They're basically in a lake ringed by potentially hostile countries (China, Japan, Phillippines, Taiwan, Vietnam etc).

Historically power projection requires excellent access to the sea - e.g. Ancient Greece, British Empire, Spanish Empire, Japan, the USA).

2. India - too many local issues including rebellions in Kashmir and Assam. China has issues in Western China with Islamism and independence movements.

3. India/China - hostile land borders. India borders with 2 enemies: Pakistan, China while China borders with 3 potential hostile states Russia, Vietnam and India) and and a fourth potential power keg in the form of North Korea.

4. China is too far behind in terms of military development e.g. blue seas navies and power projection air power.

5. India's military procurement and development is extremely innefficient and corruption prone. Even simple weapons procurement can easily take decades.

As such India's military is actually shrinking as it runs out of equipment e.g. fighter squadron numbers are at extremely low levels due to long term delays to MRCA and LCA programs.

6. Both are still heavily reliant on imports of high end military technology from Russia and West.

China is self sufficient in the development of 1960s vintage junk. Anything else needs to be imported from Russia and clandestine tech transfers from West.

India's military development also hasn't progressed much since 1960s.

7. Both countries are followers in terms of military doctrine unlike USA which is a leader. (Russia is also very much a laggard, it's military doctrine still being based on WWII Soviet principles modified in the 1950s as is Chinas).


It's why China is focusing on soft power projection i.e. diplomacy, aid and economics.

India is too self absorbed and concerned with Pakistan to pursue any real power projection. It's nuclear and naval projection forces exist to contain Pakistan.