Towards an EU Garrison State?

Provoked by Russian advances in Ukraine, can the EU transform from a weak and flabby state of indulgence into a society capable of mass weapons production and powerful military projection?

https://kyivindependent.com/charles-michel-europe-must-prepare-for-war/

The West’s inability to deliver sufficient quantities of weapons has marred Ukraine’s war effort. So much so that a panicked European Council President Charles Michel is now calling for Europe to launch a war economy:

“If we do not get the EU's response right and do not give Ukraine enough support to stop Russia, we are next. We must therefore be defense-ready and shift to a 'war economy' mode,” he wrote.

“Russia is a serious military threat to our European continent and global security. If we do not get the EU’s response right and do not give Ukraine enough support to stop Russia, we are next,” he added.

“If we want peace, we must prepare for war.”

President Michel is not wrong. The West’s heavily financialized economies are failing to provision arms to their proxy fighters in Ukraine. In a financialized economy, excess capital is not invested in factories. If goods are to be produced, financial economies prefer not getting their dainty hands dirty, and offshore such hard and sweaty work to poor countries. Financialized economies prefer to invest in debt, and provide soft service jobs to their citizens—whether in plush offices or behind check-out tills in retail stores. After all, factories use energy, consume resources, and create pollution. Financialized economies kvetch constantly about curtailing their carbon footprint. And so when that dreaded rainy day of war arrives, there are no factories to produce the artillery shells Ukrainians so desperately need.

Michel decried a decades-long lack of funding and investment in European militaries and despite military manufacturing capacity increasing by 50% since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, much more was needed to be done.

Michel demonstrates the dark magic of percentages. A 50% increase of next to nothing is not impressive. He does seem to acknowledge though the lack of investment must be addressed. Is he really about to push for a command economy, with would entail huge state investments into arms manufacturing?

“While we beef up our defense capacity, we must ensure Ukraine gets what it needs on the battlefield,” he wrote, adding that “Ukrainian soldiers urgently need bullets, missiles and air defense systems to control the skies.

“We must use the European budget to buy military equipment for Ukraine and let’s make use of the windfall profits from Russia’s immobilized assets to purchase arms for Ukraine.”

Michel envisions two time-lines. Investment and development of a robust arms industry in Europe will take at least a decade. In the meantime, young Ukrainians, overwhelmed by superior Russian firepower, are dying at a rate that ravenous Ukrainian conscription squads cannot replace. Michel reverts back to what a financial economy does best: steal the wealth it can no longer create, to purchase the weapons it can no longer make.

Michel’s rhetorical flourish about “windfall profits” refers to interest payments or bonds reaching maturity from Russian Central Bank assets, held by the Belgian company Euroclear, that have been frozen by European authorities. Since neither Belgium or the EU is yet at war with Russia, there is no legal way to seize these assets. Only in the case of a Russian defeat, and with her agreement to use these assets as part of a reparations package, could Russia’s sovereign wealth be legally appropriated by the West. If the EU resorts to piracy, Euroclear is likely to face serious problems with the Global Majority:

EU officials expect Russia, through court action, to also try to seize Euroclear cash in securities depositories in Hong Kong, Dubai and elsewhere.

Their concern is that this could drain Euroclear capital and require a huge bailout of an institution that looks after about 37 trillion euros of global assets.

Be that as it may, Michel’s comments invite an interesting thought experiment. What would it mean for the West in general, and the EU in particular, to implement a war economy? Who would the winners and losers be in such an economy? What type of cultural and social changes would follow on from such a radical economic shift?

Wars of Attrition

Active-duty military officers, if they wish to survive, must embrace reality and constantly carve out concepts that enhance comprehension of the actual. With shells, bullets and enemies swirling everywhere, true soldiers have little time for ideological fantasies and would be the last people on earth to promote war just for the sake of war.

Once retired, a small faction of the most ambitious military professionals leverage their prestigious credentials to perform information warfare campaigns for overly credulous media audiences. Former generals fill the airwaves with total nonsense about how invincible their side is. They are acting not as analysts explaining reality but as preachers of an ideological construct. Their promulgation of the good news provokes faith among their flock. This is fine when reality stays in close proximity to their idealized version of the world. As events stray, an exponential increase in the intensity of propaganda is required to keep the sheep on the reservation.

Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin is certainly not from this faction. In mid-March he wrote a reality-embracing piece, The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine explaining the nature of Russian-style wars.

Attritional wars require their own ‘Art of War’ and are fought with a ‘force-centric’ approach, unlike wars of manoeuvre which are ‘terrain-focused’. They are rooted in massive industrial capacity to enable the replacement of losses, geographical depth to absorb a series of defeats, and technological conditions that prevent rapid ground movement. In attritional wars, military operations are shaped by a state’s ability to replace losses and generate new formations, not tactical and operational manoeuvres. The side that accepts the attritional nature of war and focuses on destroying enemy forces rather than gaining terrain is most likely to win.

The West is not prepared for this kind of war. To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short ‘winner takes all’ clash of professional armies. <…> Wars of attrition are treated as exceptions, something to be avoided at all costs and generally products of leaders’ ineptitude. Unfortunately, wars between near-peer powers are likely to be attritional, thanks to a large pool of resources available to replace initial losses. The attritional nature of combat, including the erosion of professionalism due to casualties, levels the battlefield no matter which army started with better trained forces. As conflict drags on, the war is won by economies, not armies. States that grasp this and fight such a war via an attritional strategy aimed at exhausting enemy resources while preserving their own are more likely to win.

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Wars of attrition are won by economies enabling mass mobilisation of militaries via their industrial sectors. Armies expand rapidly during such a conflict, requiring massive quantities of armoured vehicles, drones, electronic products, and other combat equipment. Because high-end weaponry is very complex to manufacture and consumes vast resources, a high-low mixture of forces and weapons is imperative in order to win.

The financialized West is only able to produce a modest amount of high-end weaponry. But much of it is untested on any battlefield. The F-35 fifth generation fighter jet program has long been beset with problems and the US Government Accountability Office indicates that only between 15-30% of these aircraft are “full mission capable:”

Things are not much better for Western arms production on the mid to low-end of the spectrum, as the lack of air defense missiles and artillery shells in Ukraine demonstrates.

It is easier and faster to produce large numbers of cheap weapons and munitions, especially if their subcomponents are interchangeable with civilian goods, ensuring mass quantity without the expansion of production lines. New recruits also absorb simpler weapons faster, allowing rapid generation of new formations or the reconstitution of existing ones.

Achieving mass is difficult for higher-end Western economies. To achieve hyper-efficiency, they shed excess capacity and struggle to rapidly expand, especially since lower-tier industries have been transferred abroad for economic reasons. During war, global supply chains are disrupted and subcomponents can no longer be secured. Added to this conundrum is the lack of a skilled workforce with experience in a particular industry. These skills are acquired over decades, and once an industry is shuttered it takes decades to rebuild.

This is the challenge the West faces in their growing military confrontation with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. It’s not at all clear how far Western leaders have thought this conflict through. While financialized economies can print wealth, they cannot print weapons. Western militaries are currently configured to fight colonial policing actions in faraway 3rd World hellholes. Light, complicated and yet very precise weapons suffice to dominate destitute sheepherders but are wholly inadequate to project power across a thousand kilometres of conventional battlefield.

The Garrison State

A generalist in a social science milieu that encouraged specialization, Harold Lasswell was one of the most incisive political theorists of the mid-twentieth century. Largely forgotten today, Lasswell explored communications (propaganda) theory, elite analysis, social developmental research and the intersection between psychological dysfunction and political power. One wonders what the social impact would be if Western students applied themselves in the arena of elite studies with as much energy as they now put in to gender studies. Strangely enough, along with Lasswell, the other masters of elite studies—Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, C. Wright Mills and James Burnham—have all fallen out of favour in the 21st century. It’s almost as if our current elites prefer avoiding the trauma of intense scholarly gaze.

In 1941, after studying the Sino-Japanese war, Lasswell attempted to infer the direction societies would take when faced with constant geopolitical insecurity. His highly influential article, The Garrison State articulated a “developmental concept” of how a society’s internal civilian-military power balance would tilt during periods of long-term international strife and tension.

As World War 2 broke out, and armed conflicts engulfed the globe, the continuum Lasswell proposed was at one extreme, a society controlled by businessmen, opposed on the other pole by a nation under military rule. From The Garrison State:

The purpose of this article is to consider the possibility that we are moving toward a world of "garrison states"—a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society. From this point of view the trend of our time is away from the dominance of the specialist on bargaining, who is the businessman, and toward the supremacy of the soldier. We may distinguish transitional forms, such as the party propaganda state, where the dominant figure is the propagandist, and the party bureaucratic state, in which the organization men of the party make the vital decisions. There are mixed forms in which predominance is shared by the monopolists of party and market power.

Today, we see the pole of rule-by-businesspeople in the attempts by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to co-opt the policies of nation-states. But what’s interesting about Charles Michel’s call for a “war economy,” is that any substantial moves in this direction would entail increased power for military experts, and consequently reduced power for the business class. Perhaps this explains the eerie silence on Ukraine from the WEF and the growing hostility among some factions of Western business oligarchs to the war, led by Elon Musk.

Lasswell’s alternative to a garrison state was a cooperative “world commonwealth.” With geopolitical tensions kept to a minimum, the creation of prosperity through technological advancement could be prioritized. This is not so far from the current globalist paradigm, as long as prosperity is understood as wealth concentrating into oligarchic centres of power.

Today, globalist dreams are shattered each time EU leaders threaten military interventions against Russia. Taking their words seriously would entail an EU evolution away from the current weak, state of indulgence in Europe, and towards a more muscular and authoritarian garrison state. Additionally, Europe’s no-limits Israeli diplomacy may soon grow into a requirement for Europeans to fight wars for the increasingly embattled yet physically miniscule Jewish State. But the current social structure and elite configuration in Europe are highly unsuitable to any such martial endeavours.

The distinctive frame of reference in a fighting society is fighting effectiveness. All social change is translated into battle potential. Now there can be no realistic calculation of fighting effectiveness without knowledge of the technical and psychological characteristics of modern production processes. The function of management in such a society is already known to us; it includes the exercise of skill in supervising technical operations, in administrative organization, in personnel management, in public relations. These skills are needed to translate the complicated operations of modern life into every relevant frame of reference—the frame of fighting effectiveness as well as of pecuniary profit.

This leads to the seeming paradox that, as modern states are militarized, specialists on violence are more preoccupied with the skills and attitudes judged characteristic of nonviolence.

In a garrison state, civilian supremacy falls and a cadre of “specialists on violence” take power. Today European elites, lacking any knowledge of violence or coercion, are sticking their noses into domains for which they lack any expertise. It’s important to note that actual experts on war and extreme human violence would be the last people on earth to militate promiscuously for unnecessary wars. What Europe lacks today are strong military leaders able to step in and shut down the dangerous talk fuelled by geopolitical agitators. Instead inexperienced European leaders produce butch images of themselves posed in martial activities.

The war party rhetoric is driven by a cabal of neoconservative agitators, who while blessed with decent levels of historical knowledge, are totally lacking in military experience and know-how. The failed adventures by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s several decades of defeat and decline, are the result of unrestrained neocon war agitation.

During WW2, US society evolved strongly in the direction of a garrison state. US economic prowess allowed it to not go quite as far on this continuum as Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. In the post-war years, business leaders slowly recaptured the reigns of power. A key moment in the American post-war move away from the garrison state featured a man with vast military experience. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general, argued against the US sliding even further along the garrison state spectrum:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be might, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

To be fair, the military-industrial complex is the synthesis of Lasswell’s garrison and business state. Free market capitalism is far from the best system with which to manufacture arms. Traditionally a command economy is preferred, where the state leads industrial investment and acts as the “consumer” of the military commodities produced. This is the direction the EU will have to move if they are serious about beefing up their defense capabilities. The fundamental problem for a market-based approach is the irregularity of demand—in other words, the unpredictable nature of when wars will break out. A powerful military-industrial complex must have enough civilian power to trigger wars on a regular basis in order to keep armament demand steady.

Since WW2, only in Korea did the US fight a near-peer conventional war. When Mao’s forces jumped the Yalu River they rudely pushed the surprised UN forces back to the current border. Since then the West has primarily engaged in colonial policing actions. With a professional army and limited Military Keynesianism policies, the US was able to conduct its various wars in the Middle East over the past 35 years, but only by incurring large levels of debt. Such conflicts fit within the capabilities of a financialized democratic society. The military-industrial complexes of the US and EU now specialize in providing the light, high-tech arms needed for these limited expeditionary adventures.

In Europe during the Cold War, the NATO allies never tried to match the Soviet Union’s conventional military power. Instead they relied on nuclear deterrents to make war unthinkable on the continent. After all, the USSR was very much on the garrison state end of the spectrum and the West refused to mirror this alignment. One can see the end of the Cold War as a strong shift by both Russia and China, in their various versions of market reforms, towards the business pole of the Lasswell’s spectrum. Russia mothballed but didn’t destroy their industrial weapon production capacities. They were aware this infrastructure may come in handy on an eventual geopolitical rainy day. While cranking up war production over the past two years, President Putin has recently commented that Russia must avoid her past mistakes of pushing too far along the militarization spectrum.

Today Europe finds itself at the very opposite of a garrison state: an indulgent state. Instead of martial values, care and comfort are promoted. Why not? Who really wants to live in a repressive and paranoid garrison state in constant preparation for the mayhem of war? In a case of no good options, is the WEF’s “own nothing and be happy” any worse than working double shifts to make shells and then getting sent off the die in a freezing, rat-ridden trench protecting Odessa?

Israeli military strategist calls for Europeans and Americans to die for Ukraine

But instead of rejecting neocon geopolitical agitation, the EU is echoing and even amplifying these narratives. Combined with decades of colonial phoney wars, the West lacks military experts on conventional warfare. Alex Vershinin, whose work is quoted above, is the rare voice of military wisdom in an otherwise chorus of fools. Instead the upper levels of Western militaries are flooded with specialists in information warfare and propaganda. They are convinced that mere words can conquer all, and that they can just jawbone their way to victory in Ukraine. In a garrison state, leaders must do much more:

It is probable that the ruling elite of the garrison state will acquire most of the skills that we have come to accept as part of modern civilian management. Particularly prominent will be skill in the manipulation of symbols in the interest of morale and public relations. Unemployment will be "psychologically" abolished. Internal violence will be directed principally against unskilled manual workers and counter-élite elements who have come under suspicion. Incomes will be somewhat equalized in the interest of maintaining morale under modern conditions of socialized danger. The practice will be to recruit the elite according to ability (in periods of crisis); authority will be dictatorial, governmentalized, centralized, integrated

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In the garrison state there must be work-and the duty to work for all. Since all work becomes public work, all who do not accept employment flout military discipline. For those who do not fit with- in the structure of the state there is but one alternative-to obey or die. Compulsion, therefore, is to be expected as a potent instrument for internal control of the garrison state.

Sparta is the iconic model of a garrison state. The ancient Greek state took boys from their homes at the age of seven and segregated them as a warrior class. Common labor was left to the helots, a class of semi-serfs who worked the land and produced the food and material goods upon which the warriors thrived. There were many helot rebellions and the Spartan state had to constantly pressure them to submit.

North Korea shows many qualities expected in a garrison state. In the West, Israel comes closest. The Israeli military is certainly not segregated by sex but her children are indoctrinated on the moral superiority of their Jewish State from an early age. Palestinians serve as a helot class, doing the work Israelis are just not willing to do, such as construction. And just as the helots in Sparta, the Palestinians have no political rights and go through frequent cycles of rebellion answered with punitive slaughter.

Despite Putin’s promises, the West’s geopolitical strategy of tension employed by neocons is driving Russia back into at least partial garrison state mode. US pressure in the Taiwan Straits is having a similar effect on China. Stoked by sanctions, Iran is displaying an impressive ability to build inexpensive but effective weaponry. In Declaring Global War 6, I describe the historical cycles that may show the world is entering a 30 year period of global conflict, with the winner set to lead the globe for the remainder of this century.

A transition towards a garrison state in Europe will benefit first and foremost rural and working class men, the very groups most deplored by Eurocrat elites. In the current indulgent state, female values of comfort and safety predominate. Just as during WW2 in the US, iconified by the Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign, as society tends towards the garrison state, women will be coerced towards adopting male values. The current promotion of female sporting events is already a step in this direction, in what is otherwise a Western culture that promotes the feminization of men.

According to Lasswell, the primary losers in a garrison state are the parasitical class that Marxists call the lumpen-proletariat:

The use of coercion can have an important effect upon many more people than it reaches directly; this is the propaganda component of any "propaganda of the deed." The spectacle of compulsory labor gangs in prisons or concentration camps is a negative means of conserving morale—negative since it arouses fear and guilt. Compulsory labor groups are suitable popular scapegoats in a military state. The duty to obey, to serve the state, to work—these are cardinal virtues in the garrison state. Unceasing emphasis upon duty is certain to arouse opposing tendencies within the personality structure of all who live under a garrison regime. Everyone must struggle to hold in check any tendencies, conscious or unconscious, to defy authority, to violate the code of work, to flout the incessant demand for sacrifice in the collective interest. From the earliest years youth will be trained to subdue—to disavow, to struggle against—any specific opposition to the ruling code of collective exactions.

Besides the helot example in ancient Sparta and the Palestinians in modern-day Israel, we currently see a garrison-prison state type process developing in El Salvador. Gangbangers are rounded up en masse and placed in high-security detention. For a proper garrison state, this is simply the first step, since these prisoners (and their guards) still serve as a parasitical drain on the nation’s resources. In a society whose goal is the constant preparation for war, these prisoners must engage in either forced labor or form disposable shock troops for frontal infantry charges on a battlefield. Muslim minorities in Europe, with their refusal to embrace Zionism, may eventually serve as such scapegoats in a garrison state Europe.

El Salvador’s incarceration state contains a large parasitical and unproductive sector. A garrison state transforms these prisoners into forced labor or cannon fodder.

In an ideal garrison state, superfluous consumption is squeezed out of the economy. The goal of all economic activity, beyond the bare maintenance of the life-energy needed for the population’s survival, is to produce weaponry for war. During WW2, basic necessities of life were rationed in both the US and UK.

For the EU to transition towards a war economy, they must corral hundreds of billions of Euros of investment capital. Then the requisite natural resources and energy must be acquired. European economies will increasingly shed service jobs and transition towards blue collar production. Large scale worker training programs will be needed to introduce former cubicle dwellers into the finer arts of using real existing tools. Chinese arms factories are now highly automated but will Europe be able to follow suit? As the world splits into two camps, technology and natural resource transfers from the Global Majority towards the Golden Minority will become increasingly restricted. The EU will by necessity be pushed towards autarky, but featuring a component of total dependence on the US.

During the West’s post WW2 colonial policing phase, fighting wars was optional. It was the West who held the initiative and was free to decide when and where a war would be launched. Now things are different. As Western arms stocks are depleted, it will be the Primal Horde who decide the time and place of any further attritional sessions of Western weaponry.

The West is captured in the horns of a dilemma. If it continues on the business elite route—towards some sort of de facto world commonwealth—any such geopolitical configuration will be dominated by the Global Majority, with China at its head. This is not the brand of globalism that Western globalists wish for.

A multipolar, Chinese-led world is contrary to the basic beliefs of neoconservative agitators, who insist on two states of exception: the US and Israel. The US must continue as global hegemon, the indispensable nation, which exists outside any common rules of conduct. Israel, the Chosen Nation, due to the angelic victim-purity of its people, must also exist on a plane higher than other nations. To stay in this exalted position, Israel must exploit US power as a sort of backpack of geopolitical privilege.

Now the EU is facing a choice. Breaking with the neocons and stopping the slide towards militarism would allow the EU in the medium term to get back to business and join forces with the multipolar majority. But with their leaders captured by the neocon agitators, the EU will be pushed towards authoritarianism in defense of “democracy.” As they gather pace in shifting towards the garrison state pole, instead of being a group of nations with armies, the new model EU will seek to become an army with a group of nations.

EU leaders must first lay the cultural groundwork of such a radical shift. Without the proper conditioning of their populations, any precipitous move towards the garrison state may be met with revolutionary furor. Working class and rural men, who have much to gain as strong men in a garrison state, and much to lose as weak men in a business state, will face a particularly difficult decision on supporting any such transition.