On another thread someone mentioned (paraphrasing) the Brits would be better off if their government liquidated itself, leaving the people free to defend themselves. For an island this sounds quite believable, but what about continental countries? A blitzkrieg against industrial centers would cut all kinds of military supplies to would-be guerillas, who would supply them? The US? In return for what - future military bases? Or was the USSR big enough for undeground industry to organize itself far from the big centers? I am really sceptical…
I wouldn’t fall into the trap of creating a binary choice of blitzkrieg vs. guerilla warfare.
Sounds a bit extreme about the Brits, particularly since the entire commonwealth did not lose that many civilians compared to the rest of the world (sans US) and it already had an extant navy with a trained and experienced non conscripted armed forces prepared to fight :
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/civilian_casualties_of_world_war.htm
Also, if I am working in an environment where I am - in my day to day routine - acting within the calculations and expectations of an armed forces, and than you defy expectation and disband them surprisingly when they are supposed to be used (in a sudden attack no less) I would not expect favorable results for the culture getting invaded
If I worked for a private company, and the security quit and said “fend for yourelves” as soon as a security breach hit - I would be a bit miffed, assuming I would survive that is.
If you can, you want to avoid having to fight as a guerrila. A guerrila is 100% incapable of protecting the populace, leaving it vulnerable to mass reprisals. A free society would realise this and get itself some tanks.
Well, armies absolutely failed in WW2, and where swept as never before in the history of Europe by the Wermacht. So, a better question would have been: armies do not work, could guerrilla? At the very worst, they’d have failed juts as bad.
Now, the obnoxious thing about guerilla warfare is that you’ll need years if not decades to accomplish you job if the enemy is determined. The idea is to drive him to bankruptcy, make occupation far more expensive than productive, and get on his nerves. With Europe under the Nazi heel, that could have taken time, but the Nazis showed that they where not overtly happy about occupying uneeded countries, and I think it would have worked in time, in most cases.
Also, historically that is precisely what happened. The brits showered resistance movements with money and those resistance movements managed to make life unbearable for Germans. Yugoslavia is an excellent example.
So yes, I really think that guerrilla would have been the way to go. The army could have been kept at a minimum of highly trained officers, ready to be dispersed into the general population when the war begun to raise and train “on the job” their guerilla squads.
Guerilla Warfare is always the best option for defense of individual liberty.
That’s well and good for individual liberty, but what is best for me?
No way anyone can convince me disbanding the navy, RAF, intel service, etc at the start of the war, and letting the Germans invade is a good idea. That honestly is one of the goofier notions I have heard.
There is a difference between disbanding once they have been set up, and setting them up. So yes, disbanding would have been foolish, but not setting them up in the first place would have been better.
Although, in a final thought, the UK was not some libertarian paradise, and I really think that only in a totally free country can disbanding the army be discussed. It’s the last thing to do.
Yes. There is a lot of hardware, expertise and institutional experience built into armed forces of any state. It would be foolish to just give that up. It would be similar to dismantling state industries for scrap, instead of simply privatising them.
A privately run industry works better (for the customer) than a state run industry. It would be the same for a private conventional military force.
Armed forces of states are regularly impressive, but because the state has other priorities than national defense they are not actually geared towards protecting citizens and therefore are in many ways deficient looking from that point of view. Their buerocratisation and extreme, rigid centralisation are useful for ensuring they are useful instruments of foreign policy for the regime, rather than a threat to it, but make their value for defense of citizens dubious. They are impressive in the sense that they enable a small cabal of people at the top of the state to conquer and occupy a country on the other side of the globe. But in providing defense for the people not so much.
Rellying on a force that is centralised and regimented for your defense is in fact very foolish. Such a force may be rendered totally worthless by just a few miscalculations, just a few blunders commited at the top. I won’t get into it but that is essentially the reason why Germany was able penetrate so deep into the Soviet Union in WWII and why the USSR therefore ended up with as horrendous death toll as it did. A few incredibly stupid, and incredibly far reaching decisions made by Stalin (one single person) in the years and months before the war that utterly retarded the Red Army (an army of millions) that 200 million people were technically rellying on for their defense.
A decentralised (dispersed ownership and control, but I’m sure the various formations would find a way to coordinate) and non-regimented (well, that is a given since it is all on a voluntary-contractual basis) conventional force is what we would end up with in my opinion.
Also I would say that minarchist logic is exactly backward. Defense is the most important thing that we are prevented from taking care ourselves through the markets. Therefore it is the first thing that should be privatised, not the last. A lot more people have died because states failed to protect them from foreign agression than have died, because the states can’t do a proper job at garbage collection.
Well, in that case (assuming ALL of Europe had no army and fought using guerrilla warfare) there would be less deaths from actual fighting, but millions would die from Nazi reprisals on people in areas with heavy attacks, millions of Jews would be caught with the Nazis not having to worry about fighting a conventional war, and the Nazis would not be truly defeated until a decade or two later (and even then would be just waiting for the chance to attack again).
Yeah, doesn’t strike me as a good ideal. Okay, it works philosophically and in the long term it achieves its immediate purpose, but assuming you think an AnCap society should work like that it would just be a decade or two of occupation, small scale warfare, and massacre against an occupying government, followed by a couple years lull of peace, followed by another decade of occupation, rinse and repeat. Even assuming the industry of the AnCap area was 1000% more efficient, the occupation, guerrilla attacks, destruction of property, etc would nullify it and make the statist areas more prosperous (look at Somalia; they have an incredibly good telecom sector, but its more conventional sectors can’t develop properly because both foreign and home grown statists constantly come through town to loot/conquer/etc)
In fact in WWII the places that saw fiercest guerrila warfare and widest guerrila movements were the places that suffered the highest death tolls and devastation. Belarus number one among them.
I’ll take a conventional force, thank you very much.
I mean it is pretty logical. Aren’t we economics affectionados? A guerrilla has no capital other than a rifle. Guerrila defense is not capital intensive. It is similar to a worker digging with a shovel. If you can afford it, you want a defense that is capital intensive. Similar to a worker digging with heavy machinery.
I really think that only in a totally free country can disbanding the army be discussed. It’s the last thing to do
While I haven’t given this much thought, this sounds much more correct than incorrect
There will be several mini-states and banana republics without militaries very surprised to hear this.
I think I am thinking more in terms that self defense effeciency would sort of “manifest” in obviousness or something due to market forces. It is nothing that exists now, or I can comprehend all that much at present
The idea usually proposed is that competing private defense agencies will provide defense to paying customers. This works fine for small-medium scale things (it would probably be sufficient in stopping gangsters from recreating the state), but in the large scale it begins to face many huge obstacles.
First, if there is still a state around of reasonable strength (say, like France or Germany or the UK), it will have the full power to crush PDAs individually because it isn’t limited by having to limit its losses. Imagine this: Germany goes Ancap, things work, PDAs are set up. France doesn’t, whips the nation into a patriotic fervour, and decides to conquer Germany one slice at a time. Now Germany is still a larger nation (otherwise the type of defense would likely be irrelevant), but it has no united defense. More likely than not, many of the PDAs and local defense militias are exclusive to one area, meaning the French could knock them out of commission without facing a united front. Being a state, France would also probably be able to call up more manpower and resources than all of the PDAs in Germany combined. In peacetime, Germany’s lack of soldiers wasting taxpayer money would be a huge boon to the economy, but in wartime it would be completely outgunned. Plus, France wouldn’t be as constrained by costs as the PDAs. It could simply purchase a fleet of strategic bombers and level towns where needed, whereas the PDAs, being private businesses needing to make a profit, would be unlikely to field much heavy equipment. Finally, the PDAs would ultimately need to cut their losses and give up when the cost of fighting France becomes too high, whereas France, having an aggressive state, would likely remain fighting until utterly vanquished.
The other problem is that, ignoring external threats, internal ones could crop up relatively easily too. We all know that monopolies cannot last in a free market without use of coercion, but companies can come pretty close to it before eventually losing their innovative edge. Now imagine a giant corporation, owned by a rather unscrupulous person, that is at its peak. The only way it is going in terms of profit margins as of the moment is down. Therefore, the fellow in charge decides that he likes the sound of being “king” and puts the corporation’s resources into fielding a giant standing army of mercenaries. The problem of the previous scenario crops up again (a large standing army will sweep aside a small, profitable defense organization every time), but on a smaller scale as the new king won’t have loot until he begins the conquest. He will probably be stopped eventually, but the destruction he would cause would be quite high and he would be left over with a nice little empire to control. A lot of people seem to assume that someone rich enough to afford it wouldn’t do it due to the loss of profit, but some people don’t care about profit. If everyone put profit ahead of everything else, there would be no Hitlers, Stalins, or Pol Pots.
Finally, a sufficiently large gang of ideological nuts could cause a huge threat to society at large if they banded together compared to if there was a central government in place. Imagine around ten thousand environmentalist extremists gathered together in one place and, with just small arms and homemade explosives, decided to wipe out the nearby cities and industrial areas on their own. No PDA would be able to truly stop them without taking losses sufficient to effectively put them out of business, so the invaders could very well destroy huge parts of infrastructure and go on a Mongol style campaign of rape and pillage. Even worse, a company could covertly fund them so as to let them wipe out a competitor and then move in and set up shop with the competition’s businesses burned to the ground.
People limit themselves to these PDAs entirely too much. In a free society would local volunteer fire departments disappear overnight, the job of taking out fires taken over by commercial fire departments entirely? Of course not. They would augment each other just like now socialist and volunteer fire departments augment each other. (Albeit for the sake of the truth it should be said volunteer fire departments today are only in small part voluntarily funded.)
Maybe in a free society, just like now in every town there is a volunteer fire depatment, in every mayor town there would be a volunteer combat training centre that would field a local part-time paramilitary unit. Similar to the national guard system but not centrally run. If the volunteer firemen can operate trucks, I don’t know why the paramilitaries could not operate artillery and armored vehicles.
Just like volunteer fire departments coordinate through the national volunteer firefighting association, the paramilitaries could coordinate through competing national paramilitary associations. So no case for taking them on piecemal.
If anything the professional armies fielded today are already ridiculously small. Which is why whenever there is an actual war that matters their numbers always swell many times over.
Frankly the Communists have probably gone the farthest to show how national defense would in effect look in a free society, albeit they used communistic methods to get there. Communist Yugoslavia was a country of 20 million people, but counted the size of its armed forces (if fully mobilised) as being over 1 million. Mayority of that in the so called Territorial Defense that was a provincially organised second tier reserve force of men too old (over 27) to be counted in the mobilisation pool of the regular army. A small country by population, but with huge deterrence capacity on paper nontheless. I don’t believe a free society would end up with a system where it had less deterrence capacity than that.
To strip it down to bare basics, the fact is that humans are enslavable. The vast majority of people are perfectly willing to give up a very large portion of their productive capacity for no good reason. This surplus productivity is channeled by the elites of warmongering and serfdom (the Prince/State) into oppressive and aggressive initiatives. The purpose of oppressive initiatives are to increase the productivity of the subject populace and reduce its expected standard-of-living, that is, to get people to work as hard as possible for as little as possible. The purpose of aggressive initiatives is to expand one’s turf at the expense of surrounding Princes/States.
A territorial, free people would just be a target for all Princes since their very existence would put the lie to all State propaganda and show that the masses enslave themselves for no good reason. Hence, all Princes are automatically aligned against the emergence of an identifiably free people and will do everything in their power to destroy them. I believe this explains a large part of why there is conflict in most of the conflict zones in the world today (particularly Afghanistan and Somalia). Also, this is why I’m suspicious of Free State Projects… it feels like a fly-paper trap to me. This is also why free people* are, to a large extent, “loners.” It is impossible to openly associate with other like-minded people without quickly becoming a perceived threat by the Establishment. Naturally, free people rely on the division of labor and specialization just like everybody else so they have to learn how to integrate into the Statist order (for example, by working a wage-labor job) without raising suspicion of their true attitudes regarding the Statist order. This is less obvious today than it was even just 60 years ago but it is as true today as it ever was. In the US, espousing ideas hostile to government and Statism was once an integral part of the culture but this era has long since passed and we are entering a global eclipse of liberalism.
Clayton -
*Since we are all born into a kind of slavery in the Statist order (unless you happen to be the son and heir of a de facto Prince or other de facto nobility), freedom is a state of mind… it is an internal state of moral non-recognition of the Establishment’s claims of legitimacy.
Maybe in a free society, just like now in every town there is a volunteer fire depatment, in every mayor town there would be a volunteer combat training centre that would field a local part-time paramilitary unit. Similar to the national guard system but not centrally run.
That’s the aproach I preached while leaving in Switzerland. In Swiss military approach, every man (there are exceptions) receives a regular military training, and many of them keep their military firearms at their homes. This means, that in case of necessity, half of population becomes a trained armed army in a matter of minutes. That’s a good start, but I see two issues. First, it is mandatory, and second, it is centrally run (by “it” I mean both training and distribution of arms and ammo). For some reason, most people I talked to rejected suggestions to change this on the spot, before I even tried to argue. Probably I used bad approach…