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2005-09-27 Afghanistan/South Asia

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Posted by Steve 2005-09-27 09:30|| || Front Page|| [2 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 While a good side-by-side comparison of technologies, this neglects the most powerful weapons system of either side, short of nuclear weapons. Raw, endless manpower.

Between the two, their skewed demographics, mostly due to the abortion of female fetuses, has resulted in as many as 60 Million "extra" males, for which there are no jobs, and more importantly, no prospect of ever being married. There are just not enough women for them. On top of that, there are perhaps 300 Million males of "low value" to their respective nations, mostly unskilled rural farm laborers.

And this most definitely skews military strategy. Though both sides have say, 2 Million men at arms each in their standing armies, either can muster vast numbers of "cannon fodder".

So, if China invades India, the Indians can throw endless amounts of infantrymen at them to overwhelm their army, and vice versa.

And yet, neither side can very well support keeping all of these "hot bodies", either as a standing army, or on the offensive. So both sides have relatively weak offenses and terribly strong defenses.

This raises the issue of causus belli, that being, "Is demographic imbalance alone enough to propel two nations into war?" It may very well be. Whatever the official reason, when the two sides conflict, it may boil down to a horrific, two-sided game of attrition.

A game seen before in World War I, but at a smaller scale. Trench warfare. The slaughter of tens of millions of spare males on both sides without permanent gain or loss of territory.

At that point, except to accelerate the slaughter, technology becomes almost superfluous. Both sides would seek to protect their high value professional soldiers from harm, saving them for some coup d' grace that never seems to come.

Ironically, the end of the conflict is even more foreseeable. It will end because of plague.

The great, endless manpower invasion of Korea by China was ended not by technology, but because the Chinese were more than decimated by hemorrhagic smallpox.

Typically, in war, disease kills more than violence anyway. But once numbers of men this vast come into play, death could claim more than a million men a day. And that, more than any other cause, would finally end their conflict. Perhaps by ending the real reason for their conflict.

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-09-27 10:27|| 2005-09-27 10:27|| Front Page Top

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