I don’t actually know who writes the Aurelien2022 substack.“ The bold face sentences are mine, for emphasis.
Here Aurelien exposes how difficult it would be for most nation’s today to wage war.
There are examples enough right now showing how difficult it is to mobilize an army large enough to wage war, even if there are significant numbers of citizens with combat experience.
“….in the end, detail is the ultimate arbiter of whether things work properly, or even at all. Detail means thinking through the possibilities in a structured way, and at every point asking, “can we do this?” and “what’s the relationship with that?” Western society has often had an ambiguous relationship with detail, and our ability to focus on detail, or even to accept that it’s important, has declined rapidly in the last couple of generations. (If you like, substitute the word “precision” for “detail.”) This point first became obvious in the 1970s, with the arrival in the West of Japanese cars and consumer electronics. What struck people was not that they were cheap (they weren’t particularly, though precision manufacturing and attention to detail did a lot to keep prices down) but that they were designed and manufactured with a degree of precision and attention to detail that most western manufacturers could only fantasise about. Therefore they worked properly, and they lasted forever. And if you knew Japanese culture with its obsessive attention to detail this was hardly surprising. This attention was not just technical, it applied in the way that organisations and structures interacted with daily life. After all, in a busy Tokyo underground station, why not indicate where people should stand so that they will be facing the opening doors of the trains? You don’t need a PhD to work that out.
Some western cultures did approach things in a similar way. (Even today, you might walk around a city in Germany or Austria or Sweden, for example, and think that’s a clever idea! ) But the increasing financialisation of our society and the privatisation of public functions has resulted in much less attention these days to Doing Things Properly. As long as the bottom line is respected, and the task is more-or-less accomplished, that is all that matters. The difference is essentially cultural: either the top people in an organisation think that Doing Things Properly is important, or they don’t. Once they start to prefer Doing Things Profitably as an objective, decline set in . More importantly, though, this results in a loss of actual capability at all levels, to plan and carry out real tasks with precision. The people who prosper are those who know how to hit often arbitrary targets, or at least seem to, irrespective of whether this gets the job done.
This is a major contribution to the de-skilling of western governments, organisations and private companies, and we see it everywhere. How recently did you try to use a website that crashed and lost your data, or that refused even to perform the functions it claimed to carry out? How recently did you find it impossible to raise a human being, or to ask the question you wanted to ask from among twenty redundant ones? How often did government organisations fail to respond correctly to what you needed? How often did you have to send back articles to Amazon because they didn’t work? How often have parcels not been delivered because they were confided to a sub-contractor of a sub-contractor who uses casual unskilled labour?
You know the kind of thing. But it applies pervasively: doors falling off Boeing aircraft and spaceships, the Gaza pier, the inability of the UK to build even a small high-speed train network, delays in building nuclear power plants, cost overruns on military equipment projects, the organisational and technical shambles that was the Covid response in so many western countries … the list is almost endless, and I’m sure you can think of many more.
But today we no longer have nations; just temporary conjunctions of people and places, not citizens but residents. And the prevailing ideology is busy dismantling the national identities that do exist so that we start hating each other. Who’s going to fight, or even give up a year of their life, for that?
So in many ways those who will shout loudest for conscription are those who have done the most to make it impossible. (And I’ve hardly begun to go into the details of the various options.) Even if a coherent narrative could somehow be constructed to support conscription, western nations no longer have the command of detail and precision which alone would make it feasible. There are some problems you can’t Powerpoint your way out of.
