A Return to Weltpolitik?

The question of Germany's possession of, and attitude toward, world power status has been ceaselessly jawed about for a century and a half now. The issue, however, has not always been equally topical. It seems to have become more so this past decade, in the wake of an embrace of economic neoliberalism at home that had the conventionally-minded in the business press and economic analysis nodding approvingly; its championing of the same in Europe's fiscal crisis in which it has been seen as a leader (in part, because of the slighting of the international character of the bailout that the U.S. alone furnished); and in a context of intensifying conflict in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East (and neocon doubts about America's commitment to its old role), the increasing militarization of German policy. (Thousands of German troops are now deployed in about a dozen other countries from Mali to Afghanistan, while German defense ministers propose new missions to the Middle East, with more of the same on the way as the country ramps up its defense spending and openly discuss policy changes from a renewal of conscription to the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal.)

At its most extravagant some of the talk has a whiff of Kaiser Wilhelm about it ("taskmaster of Europe,", "newest superpower," "indispensable nation," "too rich, too big, too powerful, to shrink from its responsibilities"). And considering it all I find myself comparing Germany's position with respect to hard power then and now. Looking at Angus Maddison's historical data, and Paul Bairoch's oft-cited historical data on manufacturing shares, it seems that in 1913 Germany had a little under 4 percent of the world's population, and about 15 percent of its manufacturing output--making it number one in Europe and second only to the United States in the latter area.*

Moreover, there were significant potentials for further expansion, under the right conditions. A Pan-German movement that it was imagined could peacefully bring the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Low Countries and Scandinavia into some sort of union with Germany, had it accomplished its maximum goals, would have given the new entity about 7 percent of the world's population, and at least 22 percent of its industry, while assuring the continued dynamism of German manufacturing through its access to raw materials and markets, leaving it more populous than America, and even more narrowly competitive with it industrially. Expansion beyond those possibilities, militarily at the expense of France and Russia, for example, held out still greater potentials.

Even realizing such possibilities only partially would have considerably extended Germany's preponderance in Europe, which was still the center of the world in a good many respects--with the continent accounting for nearly three-fifths of the planet's industrial output, while the empires seated there exerted formal control over most of Africa and Asia as well. In short, there was some foundation for the great power aspirations, even if, as Bloch, Wells and others rightly observed at the time, pursuit of them was virtually certain to result in catastrophe (as indeed it did). To a lesser extent this was still the case in the 1930s when a German government made its second bid for global power (which ended even more catastrophically, not least for a Germany that was divided and occupied for a half century after).

By contrast today Germany accounts for little more than 1 percent of the world's population, and 7 percent of its manufacturing--punching above its weight by an even greater margin than it did a century ago, but all the same, in a rather lower weight class. An expanded Pan-German entity is a fantasy confined only to the most extreme nationalists. And however powerful Germany could become in Europe from its limited base within the structures of the European Union or informally, Europe is far from being the power base it once was, in a world full of other power centers, while the trend toward broader multipolarity seems nearly certain to continue.

Of course, if some of the talk echoes that of an era long past, even the most aggressive German commentators today do not proclaim anything like the agenda of formal imperialism inside and outside Europe that the country's Establishment did circa 1913. Still, all things considered, the rhetoric can seem disconnected from reality.

* Germany's lead over Britain can appear slight (14.8 to 13.6 percent according to Paul Bairoch's figures), but there was a significant qualitative disparity. Britain's manufacturing base was, if large, comparatively backward, being disproportionately invested in old lines like textiles and of deteriorating competitiveness in regard to productivity and quality of output in areas like steel; and heavily dependent on defense orders and colonial markets for its sales.

Has the American Right Changed its Mind About Europe?

Recently I had occasion to revisit the theme of the passing of the "European dream"--the hope, or rather, the illusion that in a world where the United States had come to be identified with neoliberalism and neoconservatism the countries of Europe, individually and also collectively through the European Union (EU), would provide an alternative model more appealing to progressives--no leftist paradise, it is true, but still, socially more egalitarian, ecologically more sustainable, in foreign policy less militaristic, certainly to a degree that would matter and, from this standpoint, leave the world better off.

Such views derived some support from the inability of successive European governments to do more than chip away at protections for workers that looked extravgant to Anglosphere eyes; from Germany's successfully pioneering methods for pioneering the expansion of renewable energy, and the EU's emissions trading schemes; from the French and German opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the expectation was shared by people in and outside Europe--the term "European dream" I use here the title of a book by Jeremy Rifkin making exactly this case, while the sociologist Emmanuel Todd made the same case, not least in his book on the anticipated decline of the "American empire," in which drama the last act would be Europe's own ascendance as Britain with its financial weight and Russia with its military might and natural resources joined in the building of an even greater community extending from "sea to shining sea."

Of course, all this quickly waned after 2008 as European elites, long fantasizing about remaking the continent in the image of post-Thatcher Britain or post-Reagan America, not only grappled with an economic crisis of colossal proportions, but saw an extraordinary opportunity to cram neoliberalism down the throats of a public that had more strongly resisted the policy than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They did not hesitate to be brutal with the working classes of the continent, especially in its smaller and poorer nations--with not only their claims to social and economic rights, but their more classically liberal civil and political ones trampled. I am no admirer of Silvio Berlusconi, but the EU's squeezing him out of office was hardly democratic, and even as one prone to think of talk of Fourth Reichs and the like as melodramatic, it was impossible not to get the feeling watching Berlin impose its diktat on a horrifically brutalized Greece--and a French President who had kind words for Vichy unleashed the state security apparatus in a brutal assault on protesters against his predictably centrist "fake left, go right course."

At the same time Germany, while in respects paving the way for a world getting its energy from renewable sources, has seen its policy substantially remain in the grip of coal barons, whose filthy, polluting production has meant that even as the solar panels and the wind turbines spread, the country's greenhouse gas emissions remained high--in spite of that emissions trading scheme, which did not amount to very much. And the European states that balked at invading Iraq in 2003 did not hesitate to back regime change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine; or display great viciousness in a militarized response to the refugee crisis to which those "regime change" attempts contributed so much.

As one considers all this it is worth remembering that the more progressive, greener, pacifistic version of Europe was the object of enormous contempt on the part of right-wing American commentators. Remember Eurosclerosis? Remember Donald Rumsfeld's witless, illiterate rhetoric about "Old Europe and New Europe?" Remember the inanity that was the renaming of french fries and french toast Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast? One hears less of such things than before, and that does not seem accidental. It would be an exaggeration to say that the American right has come to love Europe. But, as Europe has changed in accordance with their ideals, they have at least come to be more accepting of it.

The German Economic Miracle (?)

I remember the hype back in the 1980s and 1990s regarding the reported ascent of the German and Japanese economies--how it seemed they were edging the U.S. out of the number one spot. I remember, too, how that talk faded during the '90s amid fuss over globalization and the New Economy, and how supposedly the Eurosclerotic Germans with their unaffordable welfare states, and the rigid Japanese, were missing that train as such dynamic firms as Enron were, in Thomas Friedman's words, "discovering the equivalent of cyber-oil."

Of course, that hype faded in its turn (even as it remained the conventional wisdom), but the appraisal of at least the German economy became less harsh as it turned out to be, after all, a global champion in manufacturing exports (doubling the share of these in its GDP in 1990-2009, and outdoing the four times' larger U.S. to become number one in the world), and weathered the Great Recession better than just about anyone else, and laid down the law in the European economic space it dominated. (It was also far from trivial to the essentially neoliberal commentariat that its government increasingly embraced their preferred theories, not least in the Hartz IV labor reforms, cheered by the economically orthodox, not so cheered by, you know, actual working people in Germany or anywhere else.)

Naturally one hears, from time to time, reference to not just the country's successes of the present, but those of its past, touching in particular on its recovery from the Second World War, which they are quick to chalk up in a vaguely racialist way to German propensity for hard and attentive work, and to the home-grown variant on neoliberal, supply-side economics, "ordoliberalism."

Of course, as is always the case, the reality is more complex than this morality tale so beloved of those observers who like to talk about "culture," and the virtues of hard work and right-wing economic prescriptions--as I was reminded when researching Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity (principally about Britain's economic history, of course, but its premise was that what the country's rivals did mattered, making Germany's ascent part of Britain's own story).

The reality is that before the war Germany had been the world's number two industrial power for decades, substantially due to the opportunities afforded by its unique geographic position in nineteenth century Europe (and the ways in which it improved on them through conquest, especially in the Franco-Prussian War, not least its scoring the continent's richest industrial territory as spoils).

Moreover, catastrophic as World War II was for the world, and for the tens of millions of Germans killed, maimed and rendered homeless or even stateless, and virtually all the rest whose lives were stunted or scarred by the experience, German industry did relatively well for itself. In the 1930s and 1940s German industry gorged itself on military spending and the spoils of war to such a degree that even after the losses of wartime destruction and post-war occupation and confiscations the German industrial base was still ahead of where it was pre-war. In itself that would seem to have been enough to lay the foundations for German industry's leap into the "Fordist" era, while it did well, too, out of the post-war, which is to say, the early Cold War in which it was all too clear that a strong Germany was far more useful to the Western alliance than a weak one. The result was astonishing debt relief; the Marshall Aid that compensated for confiscations by the Allies and enabled its trading partners to afford its products; and the very light defense burden it bore compared with America, Britain, or even France; along with the massive stimulus of America's military Keynesianism in the Korean War period and after. (Far from insignificant, too, was German capital's finding the country awash in cheap labor with all those millions of ethnic Germans expelled from the East refugees in the West, and millions more guest workers come north from the shores of the Mediterranean. Oh, and an undervalued currency, too.)

All that made the miracle possible, a miracle that it must be remembered was only one miracle among others in that period. (There was an even more spectacular Japanese miracle, after all, and great leaps on the part of the Italians and French and even Soviets in these decades, while the U.S. economy, the biggest and richest of all, went on exploding.) And like all the rest the German miracle was running its course by the 1970s, Germany like all the others slowing down as post-war boom turned to post-post-war bust. Still, starting out in a different place Germany's advance put it well ahead of the rest of the European pack (and save for the U.S. and Japan, the world pack) at a moment when the terms of the race changed profoundly. (The market got crowded, the rate of profit fell, the rate of growth slowed, and the neoliberal turn delivered an age of anemic growth indeed.) That left rather little room for anyone to make up the distance, perhaps especially within the framework of the European Union whose consumption of German goods has been so crucial to its success.

We Need To Talk About Geoengineering

Already the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has not only elevated temperatures and increased the frequency of extreme weather events to a disruptive, damaging degree. They have produced a variety of second-order effects which are, in turn, contributing to further warming, and the damage generally. The melting of the polar ice caps means open water where there was ice cover that had previously reflected solar radiation, and the release of methane previously trapped in permafrost, as well as directly raising sea levels. The increased droughts are killing forests that had been great carbon sinks, while the burning trees and rotting wood that result contribute yet more such emissions. And of course, there is the acidification of the carbon dioxide-saturated oceans. The most ambitious decarbonization of our energy and transport system, our industry and food production, is likely to still see positive emissions for decades to come, exacerbating the pattern.

The result is that anything remotely resembling a livable situation requires going beyond zero emissions. The two most obvious courses are negative emissions--the extraction of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere--and the management of solar radiation. Where negative emissions are concerned the most obvious courses are reforestation and afforestation, which can extend to wetlands and undersea kelp "forest" (the latter, offering the nice bonus of directly reversing one of the more worrisome consequences of warming, the acidification of the oceans), and management of the soil. Such natural means can also be supplemented by direct air capture technology, which currently operates on a small scale. Many of these options have the added benefit of generating useful products, with kelp notable as a potential source of animal feed capable of reducing the methane emissions of cattle-raising, and biofuels; while carbon recovered from the atmosphere can be converted into "buckytubes" with potentially wide applications, from computer chip architectures to large-scale construction and engineering.

Solar radiation management can be carried on through some of the same techniques, with greenery cooling the immediate area, while other methods entail the reflection of a higher proportion of solar radiation into space. One promising approach is the dispersal of silica across ice to increase its reflection of the sun's rays. More broadly, the conservation and expansion of ice cover is useful in this regard, with the thickening of ice packs through water-spraying one plausible option. Another is the construction of "cooling tunnels" in areas subject to melting, such as Greenland, and the building of sills which prevent warm water from getting underneath them. Additionally melting glaciers and ice shelves can be kept from running off into the sea with the use of walls. (And of course, anything that preserves the ice ameliorates the risk of rising sea levels.)

All this, of course, does not exhaust the full range of options. Others, many more radical (like the fertilization of the ocean with iron, or the use of aerosols to reduce the entry of solar radiation into the atmosphere) also exist. They all seem considerably riskier, but I do not rule them out, especially if the prognosis continues to worsen at the rate it has this past, exceedingly depressing decade. Still, the more modest options discussed above seem to me to offer an ample basis for a comprehensive geoengineering plan, without which any plan to redress climate change cannot be considered anywhere close to complete in the circumstances in which we now found ourselves.

Is Bernie Sanders a Socialist?

Socialism calls for the economy to be managed collectively, for the sake of the well-being of all of society's members; rather than its driving force being the decision-making of private actors pursuing private profit (what its proponents, not always coherently, call "the market").

By contrast, social democracy accepts the private, capitalist economy as its baseline, but simply takes the position that in real life markets require rules to permit them to function, and that optimal economic outcomes may come from channeling market forces; that there may be areas where markets simply do less well than alternative modes of organization, for example, in cases of natural monopoly; and that optimal social outcomes tend to require remedial action to protect the public against the harsher consequences of the market.

Thus one has regulations to protect the worker, the consumer, the natural environment; one has subsidy of various kinds; one has public services, going beyond the traditional minimum of armed forces, law enforcement, a postal service, infrastructure, to the realms of education and health and perhaps public ownership of enterprises like utilities or transport systems; one has a social safety net. Accordingly one also sees a fairly large state, supported by relatively high taxes. Still, the economy remains largely and usually private and proft-driven.

There is a world of difference between socialism as described here, and social democracy as described here. The really hardline anti-Communist may claim not to understand that difference, or make slippery slope arguments about any impurity of a capitalist society putting it on the train straight to Stalintown or somesuch. Yet, the fact remains that, whatever one makes of such arguments, they are two different social models, in their principles and their workings.

By and large what we in the United States are hearing described as "socialism" is just social democracy. Thus does it even go with Sanders' call for the expansion of the publicly owned electric grid on the basis of enlarged investment in renewable power in his vision of a Green New Deal. The end result would be that the American government would be the principal provider of electricity to the consumer. Yet, those who know something of the history of social democracy will remember that other states went rather further in this direction before--even post-war Britain, which far from building up a government-owned electric grid, did not hesitate to nationalize the existing one, along with the coal, gas and oil sectors (which remained government-owned until the privatizations of the Thatcher era).

Simply put, Sanders' plan in this area, and others, looks much more radical than it is because of how modest the social democratic element in the U.S. was even at its peak (the extent of regulation, the social safety net, public ownership never coming close to what was seen even in safely capitalist Europe), and because of how far to the right the Democratic Party has marched since the 1970s, especially under the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, a march that the party's neoliberal elite (whose stance is epitomized by Nancy "Paygo" Pelosi) are utterly intent on continuing. The result has been to pit that elite against the party's more left-leaning base, a conflict which cost the party dearly in 2016. Should the elite get their way again, it seems likely the party will pay the price yet again in 2020.

Just Out: Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century

Back in 2004 I published "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" in the journal International Security. (The journal is paywalled, but you can access a copy on my blog, here.)

The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.

This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.

As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)

Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.

My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

Tweet

Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal: A First Take, Part I

As you are likely already aware, Bernie Sanders has released his document regarding a Green New Deal. In contrast with the resolution sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey earlier this year, which merely outlined the standards a plan of action ought to meet, but a detailed outline of the plan itself, presenting a comprehensive set of proposals.

As I write the plan has been available to the public for mere hours, and it is long and intricate, some 14,000 words. I do not claim to be anywhere near done close-reading and thinking about it, but it does seem possible to say some things regarding the plan in light of my earlier thoughts about such a Green New Deal.

I previously asserted here that any plan worthy of serious consideration must abide by four principles, namely scale, global thinking, pragmatism, and equity. This plan appears to abide by all four of them. The authors realize that serious action means nothing less than the production of 100 percent electricity from renewable energy by 2030, the fuller decarbonization of the energy and transport sector, and an overhaul of agriculture, which will not come cheaply, but will require that World War II-level effort of which so many speak but which few seem to actually understand. The plan acknowledges that the U.S. must do its part to solve the problem of climate change, but cannot do it alone, acknowledging the need to enlist the cooperation of the other major governments, and the revision of trade agreements, while aiding less developed nations in making the transition. Its authors do not hesitate to speak of the necessary means for carrying out such action, however squeamish orthodox opinion may be about them--going beyond pious talk of "supporting research" or somehow inducing business to do the job to public construction and ownership of the needed power capacity (via the Power Marketing Associations). And it is certainly attentive to equity, not only between rich countries and poor as acknowledged above, but in regard to working people who risk dislocation in the energy transition because of the sectors in which they happen to work; and the responsibility of the fossil fuel sector for the "externalities" it has generated.

All of that has naturally got my attention.

Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal: A First Take, Part II

As noted in my previous post, I was impressed by the extent to which Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal acknowledged those important principles of scale, global thinking, pragmatism, and equity. What does it really consist of, however?

The centerpiece of the plan is a shift to renewable power as the basis of the energy and transport systems of the country (and it is on this aspect of the plan that I will focus here). The plan specifically envisions a massive, rapid expansion of electricity production capacity, combined with a "smart grid"; the electrification of homes and businesses currently using oil and gas for such purposes as heating; and transport fleets, the latter with the help of grants for trade-ins for individuals, school districts, transit agencies, and trucking, and the funding of a user-friendly charging infrastructure. (The plan also includes a substantial investment in electrically powered public transit and high-speed rail; the weatherizing of buildings, which will entail the construction and modification of a great deal of housing stock.)

As renewable energy production increasingly meets the country's energy needs, the plan also curbs fossil fuels production and consumption, with the latter sector paying significantly toward the progress of the former. The elimination of Federal fossil fuel subsidies (including the massive military expenditures devoted to protecting oil supplies and transport routes, far vaster than the official subsidies) and divestment from overseas fossil fuel project financing, the penalties for violations of environmental laws that the crippled regulators from the Reagan era forward failed to collect, taxes on polluters, and suits against the oil industry (like those against the tobacco companies) will provide much of the funding for the transition--which will, over time, substantially pay for itself. The most obvious reason is that the Power Marketing Associations will build and operate much of the renewable energy-based power generation capacity, and collect the revenue--making this an investment by the government, rather than mere expenditure. However, there will also be the economic boost from rising income tax revenue (and falling social safety net payouts) due to the colossal stimulus of the plan, which it is intended will create 20 million jobs.

Alongside all this, the environmental destructiveness of the fossil fuel production that will continue as the shift is carried through will be minimized, with the plan explicitly calling for bans on offshore drilling, fracking, mountaintop removal coal-mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels, and on new fossil fuel infrastructure permits on Federal land. It also calls for the repair and clean-up of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, both that in use and that which has been abandoned, to minimize its negative effects. Beyond these objects the plan will also see government enlargement of recycling efforts, not least to minimize the resource consumption required by the construction of renewable energy-production systems.

In considering all this the plan is notable for its comparative technological conservatism--its emphasis on the use of existing, proven technologies. However, it also acknowledges the areas where further research and development will be required, or helpful, specifying programs in the areas of energy storage; the decarbonization of shipping and aviation; and the production of alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics. Notable, too, is the extent to which it addresses other problems related to this transition, and to coping with climate change, including more general redress of an infrastructure which must be made more efficient and resilient, from the supply of potable water to the supply of broadband Internet (here, too, public ownership will be part of the plan), the strengthening of firefighting capabilities, the expansion of Brownfield and Superfund cleanup, and the protection of public lands.

Considering all this I must admit that I was impressed by not just the scale of the program, as previously acknowledged here, but also its comprehensiveness, its audacity, or its rigor, not a single thing so far striking me as obviously infeasible or even implausible given what I know of the issue, whether in regard to its aims or the means for realizing them. No plan previously presented by a national figure even begins to compare with it in any of these respects--and whatever I make of the details as they continue to appear, and we all continue to study them, I think I will still think what I do now, that finally we are starting to see some real acknowledgment of just what this job will take.

The First Review is In! (The Military Techno-Thriller: A History)

My book The Military Techno-Thriller: A History hit the market earlier this month.

Fuldapocalypse Fiction has just reviewed it, and I am pleased to say its assessment of the book has been favorable.

Its review praised the book's history of the field as a "multi-century tour de force" of "not only the books themselves but also the cultural context behind them," even as it manages to be "both long enough to be . . . and short enough to be easily readable, making it the best of both worlds." Altogether Fuldapocalypse rated it

an excellent book that examines an overlooked genre through a variety of interesting perspectives in a highly readable way. I cannot recommend The Military Techno-Thriller: A History enough for fans of the genre.

That's very high praise from any source--and the more meaningful because so much of his characterization of the book ("long enough to be comprehensive . . . and short enough to be easily readable, making it the best of both worlds") is exactly what I aimed for.

It's the more meaningful, too, for having come from this blog specifically. As a longtime reader (and fan) of Fuldapocalypse Fiction, and the affiliated Coiler's Creative Corner--both of which I regard as must-reads for those interested in military techno-thrillers, action-adventure ficion, and related thriller genres across the media spectrum from print to gaming--I have consistently found the author a deeply informed, incisive and tough (but fair) critic of work in the field.

The Regime Change Fantasists

Those who flatter themselves that they are statesmen, looking at a regime they hate and want to overthrow, always imagine that it is just so much rotting wood which a swift kick would bring down, with the population subsequently welcoming them as liberators, making it easy and cheap for them to do as they please. They never imagine that the regime they so dislike may nonetheless command its people's loyalty, rallying them round the flag in a time of national crisis (even as they count on exactly that in their own country); that given a choice between an indigenous government, even one they would like very much to change, and the foreigners dropping bombs on them or marching into their streets with ideas of their own about how they will live, they will commonly choose the former rather than the latter (even as, again, they count on exactly that same inclination in their own country).

This is called "extreme stupidity." History is littered with its disastrous results. And its prevalence (such that the neoconservatives whose stock in trade this is are back) is a reminder, if any were needed, that politics is not a meritocracy, that those in charge are never the "best and brightest" as their fawning courtiers tell them and the world, but careerist mediocrities who picked their parents well, and played the filthy game of getting ahead slightly better (or at least, with a little more luck on their side) than the other careerist mediocrities who made up the competition.

The Cheap and Easy Option Never Is

I have recently written here regarding the discussion of some hypothetical scenarios regarding U.S. military action against Iran. As appeared to be the case at first glance, and still more at second glance, Iran's size and population, its fragmented geography, its high level of urbanization and the distribution of its urban centers, and the lack of convenient entry points, as well as its relative demographic cohesion, make any attempt at invasion or occupation of the whole country a task difficult in the best of circumstances, and implausible on account of the sheer scale of the force required for it. (Instead of the hundred thousand troops who occupied Iraq, or the two or three hundred thousand who might be available in the event of a full mobilization of the reserves and National Guard, two or three million would be required--figures implausible outside a world war-like draft.)

That reality leaves the air and sea options. It would be relatively easy for the U.S. to neutralize Iran's air force and navy, while its ballistic missile forces appear to be of quite limited practical offensive capacity. At the same time its less conventional anti-ship capabilities, and its anti-air capabilities, if possibly more formidable than those of other recent U.S. opponents (especially if there proves to be some truth to the larger claims made for its indigenous systems), seem unlikely to make a prolonged U.S. air campaign and blockade against the country infeasible (even if they may take a toll heavier than the very light ones of past air campaigns). The U.S. could quite easily cut off Iran's trade, and inflict heavy damage on its armed forces and its economy.

Still, all these years later, there remains no substitute for ground forces in achieving regime changes through military means--while the prospect for blowback is considerable, and not solely through the most obvious sympathizers Iran has. A prolonged campaign of this kind will test the tolerance of the international community broadly, and not least, the patience of neighboring Russia, whose non-intervention cannot be counted on. The result is that the seemingly "easy" air-sea option is not so easy after all. It just about never is.

Funding the Sixth-Generation Fighter?

Some years ago I took up the subject of the sixth-generation fighter aircraft.

I discussed what features are thought likely to distinguish such an aircraft. (Think artificially intelligent, hypersonic, armed with directed-energy weapons.) I also considered whether these as yet hypothetical planes might or might not actually appear within the predicted time frame--the late 2020s or 2030s.

I offered three reasons to be skeptical of this.

1. The turn from great power conflict to small wars, making quite different demands.
2. The rate of technical progress may be too slow to allow for the kind of aircraft imagined in that time frame (perhaps in itself, perhaps relative to other, more dynamic fields).
3. Economic stagnation may leave air forces unable to afford such aircraft.

It would be difficult to deny that great power conflict has resurged since I first wrote that piece (in 2010).

There is also more bullishness about technical development now than then. How many of the really relevant technologies will emerge remains open to question. Even where artificial intelligence is concerned expectations now seem more moderate as compared with a couple of years ago--while as the research into hypersonic weaponry shows, anything like a truly viable, multirole, production aircraft capable of hypersonic flight remains quite some way. I would not bet on such aircraft being anywhere near ready for service in the 2020s. Still, it seems to me precipitous to wholly rule out at least the technical possibility of such aircraft for a full generation.

However, the third reason, the matter of cost, seems at least as significant as ever.

Consider what came of the fifth generation of fighter. The Europeans decided not to bother, making do with the "generation 4.5" Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale. The Japanese, Russians, Chinese only belatedly pursued programs. And even the U.S. Air Force, initially intent on 750 F-22s, cut back its order by three-quarters, making do with a mere 187 operational jets.

One can attribute much of this to the end of the Cold War, admittedly. The Russians and Chinese did not have the resources--the former because of economic collapse, the latter because if fast-growing, they were still relatively cash-strapped, and (wisely) prioritizing economic development. This let the U.S. and its allies take it easy there, the more so as they had other priorities in an age of sluggish growth and intensifying economic competition, and in which, at any rate, small wars seemed the principal concern.

Still, as noted earlier, if the Russians and Chinese only belatedly fielded their own systems, they did so all the same, and in an international scene that had grown much more aggressive in comparison with the 1990s. However, after developing the Sukhoi-57 the Russian government decided to hold off on actual production. This may seem understandable given Russia's attempting here to fund superpower capacities (cutting-edge aircraft production) on rather less than superpower resources (even in PPP terms, its GDP is about 20 percent that of the U.S., the European Union or China). Still, in the face of what American policymakers regarded as a more aggressive scene, the Pentagon has opted to buy brand new F-15s (upgraded, but still F-15s, and not even stealthy "Silent Eagles" either) to fill out its ranks. There has been much argument over the rationale, with many downplaying the question of cost savings--perhaps, too much so, in light of the uncertainty involved in the eventual cost of the more advanced F-35, and for that matter, the fate of the program more generally. (Production has only scarcely begun, a mere four hundred of those thousands of intended units rolled off the line to date, while criticism of the high cost and questionable performance of the aircraft continue.)

In short, even the fifth generation of jets has proven prohibitively costly. It seems a certainty that, if they do prove technically feasible, a sixth generation of fighters will be much more costly than these--the billion dollar fighter upon us if the trend holds--without necessarily offering value for the money (other systems might prove a more efficient way of doing whatever job is at hand), or the resources being there even if they do. (Our economies have been a stagnant for a decade now, and could easily remain so, while one does not have to incline to the more apocalyptic visions of climate change to see that worse may be in store here.)

Indeed, thinking of the talk of sixth generation fighters I am reminded of other high-tech roads not traveled, like the '50s-era visions of ultra-fast, ultra-high-flying, ultra-long-range shooting superjets (YF-12, F-108) that should ring very familiar to anyone who has actually considered the things a sixth generation fighter is supposed to do (be a hypersonic, near-space jet with longer-ranged missiles and even "frigging laser beams"). Instead fighter design traveled a more conventional, less spectacular, but arguably more practical course. So does it seem likely to do again.

A Return to the Draft? Crunching the Numbers

I recently considered the discussion of what would be required in the way of military manpower for a U.S. occupation of Iran, which suggested a force of 2-3 million personnel--and in order to generate that, U.S. forces at manning levels not seen since World War II (10 million, 12 million).

Given that even a full mobilization of the Reserves and National Guard would generate just a fraction of that, the conclusion of many analysts of the subject has been that a draft would be required.

Still, there are many ways of handling conscription--not least, in regard to the proportion of the population subject to it.

It may seem that, given population growth since the 1940s--more than doubling the size of the U.S. population--it should not be quite so difficult to come up with the numbers discussed here.

However, due to the lengthening life expectancy and lower birth rates characteristic of a modern, urbanized society, it is also an older population on average.

In 1940 the median age in the U.S. was 29.

Today it is 38.

In 1940 the 15-24 age group made up about 18 percent of the population.

In 2018 it was down to under 12 percent--a far from insignificant drop.1

This naturally shows in the size of the 18-24 cohort that would be eligible for the draft, some 31 million as of 2010, with the figure unlikely to have grown very much (and, it is not impossible, has shrunk a little).

At first glance 30 million or so potential draftees may seem like quite an ample pool for the kind of expansion discussed here--a mere fraction of it sufficing to fill out the ranks to the desired degree. However, it is never the case that the entirety of any group is actually up to the rigors of military service. According to recent reports a significant majority of those in this cohort (71 percent) do not meet the armed forces' current health, physical fitness, educational and other standards.

Twenty-nine percent of that figure comes to somewhere around 10 million.

The result is that, if seriously aimed at generating a World War II level force, a draft directed at this age bracket would have to take virtually every acceptable male and female into the armed forces, questions of deferments for education or other special circumstances wholly dispensed with; reduce its standards at the price of its efficiency, perhaps significantly; or cast its net more widely, drafting from among older Americans as well.

That such possibilities would even have to be talked about makes clear just how drastic such a course would be, such that even the most overheated neocon imagination cannot picture its being remotely acceptable to what even conservative commentators acknowledge is a war-weary American public.

An Occupation of Iran? A Second Look at the Numbers--and Much Else

In the discussion of the various estimates some observers have made of just what a territorial occupation of Iran would involve, I have seen some object that attempting to base one on an analogy between Iran and 2003 Iraq, for example, is a crude method--implying that these may overestimate the troop requirements.

The objection can run that Iran is not evenly peopled. Much of the nation is uninhabitable--a quarter of it nearly uninhabited salt flat and desert in the center. The twenty-one provinces to the west of this desert-dominated center, comprising less than half the country by area, contain about five-sixths of the population; while Tehran province, and four of its adjoining provinces (Qom, Mazandaran, Alborz, Markazi), a little under six percent of the territory, contain almost thirty percent of the population.

This may seem to make the task easier by suggesting less territory actually has to be covered. However, Iran--a country, again, comparable to Western Europe in size--is vast enough that even occupying a portion of it would be a daunting task. The densely peopled Tehran-centered area discussed above is by itself still markedly greater in extent and population than the U.S. occupation zone in post-war Germany.1 And the bigger western region discussed here is, in territorial extent, about three times bigger than the whole of West Germany then. (It is also twice the size of the portion of Iraq not consisting of uninhabited desert.2)

The result is that this area alone would still be enough to plausibly require millions of soldiers.3 And the fact remains that the rest of the country could not be ignored given the significant populations further east, not least the nation's second-largest city, Mashhad, near the border with Turkmenistan. The physical fragmentation of this vast territory by the large uninhabitable space in the middle, and its multiple mountain chains (in which Iran resembles Italy more than Germany, yet another complicating factor), is likely to pose particular challenges for a force coming in from the outside with heavy mechanized units, and attempting to use troops efficiently through a rapid-reaction plan rather than a wide scattering of garrisons. (It also does not help that the densest and strategically most significant population cluster, the aforementioned one centering on Tehran, is deep within the country's interior, hundreds of miles inland from the Iraqi border, or the Persian Gulf.)

Still, for all the challenges posed by the country's large and mountainous territory, perhaps the most significant of all is the intensive urbanization at which this population distribution hints--already noted, but perhaps worth underlining here. Over half of the Iranian population lives in the country's nearly one hundred cities of 100,000 people or more; a quarter in just the eight cities home to a million or more. The capital Tehran has a population of 9 million, and 15 million in the metro area--nearly a fifth of the nation. No army has ever attempted a military occupation of an urban area this size. (Baghdad at the time of the invasion, for example, had a population just half the size of Tehran's--and on top of this Iran has two additional 2003 Baghdad equivalents, the Mashhad and Isfahan areas with 3-4 million each.)

All of this reinforces rather than debunks the argument that a force a multiple of what it would have taken to control Iraq, or which it did take to control America's portion of post-war Germany or Japan, would be required for an occupation of larger, more urbanized Iran--even before one thinks of the political complexities of the situation nationally and regionally, about which it might be appropriate to say another word.

Perhaps the most obvious matter is that Iran is considerably less subject to the kinds of ethno-religious divisions that Iraq was. This may seem an advantage given their contribution to the considerable bloodshed that followed regime change in that country. However, it made some aspects of that regime change easier. Certainly there is nothing comparable to the semi-detachment of Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion, and the U.S. alliance with Kurdish forces there; or the conflict between Shiites in the south and the Sunni center, which did not translate to such easy cooperation as in the case of the Kurds, but which meant a less united opposition to the post-Saddam regime. Indeed, where in Iraq an ethno-religious minority (Sunni Arabs) was in control, in Iran the majority ethnic group (Persians, over half the country) is politically dominant, while the country is relatively homogeneous in religion (ninety percent Shiite).

There is, too, the situation outside the country's borders. As I noted previously, local opposition in the wake of a successful invasion could find support among populations in neighboring states like Iraq--which might provide refuge and much else. (As the situation stands now Iran is affiliated with militias in many a neighboring country. Can it be imagined that they would totally stay out of such a fight?) Potentially more significant, however, there is the question of Russia, too little acknowledged in discussions of such a scenario. Given Iran's sharing the shores of the Caspian Sea, and borders with Russian-aligned Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, it is very easy to imagine such a conflict becoming--like the wars in Georgia, the Donbass, and Syria--a proxy war between Russia and the U.S.. All of this would not only make any post-occupation conflict more difficult, but contribute to the continued worsening of U.S.-Russian relations, and the danger of their military confrontation escalating.

Still, what may be more significant than all this is, of course, the point that David Edelstein has made in regard to territorial occupations. Critics of occupations like that of Iraq in 2003 are not wrong to point to the lack of local knowledge, planning and inadequate resourcing of the occupying force that so quickly turned the situation disastrous (unreadable as anything but the extreme wishful thinking and extreme incompetence of the neocons and their fellow travelers) but (as Machiavelli pointed out in The Prince a half millennium before Edelstein took up the subject) the task of changing regimes is about as difficult as a political job gets. It is worse when the one changing the regime is an outsider who blew up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people to get there, and has to do unpleasant things to stay where people did not want them to begin with.

Unsurprisingly, as Edelstein showed empirically in his two-century survey of territorial occupations in his 2004 article on the subject in International Security (same issue this appeared in, by the way) occupations--measured by the standard of whether they not merely keep violence to an acceptable minimum during their stay, but whether they achieve their political goals in more enduring fashion--usually fail, even when not being overseen by the likes of a Donald Rumsfeld and company. Indeed, just about the only thing that can make them work out (and this, Machiavelli did not anticipate) is if occupier and occupied are drawn together by a mutual fear of a third party greater than any hostility they have to each other.

This is pretty much unimaginable where Iran today is concerned. And no one who presumes to discuss the issue should forget it.

1. The U.S. had 1.6 million troops in Germany on V-E Day, over 300,000 in its zone a year later, while some four hundred thousand Western troops covered West Germany as a whole. Apportioning that to the areas discussed here, some half million would be needed for the densely peopled five-province west-central area alone, 1.2 million troops for the western part of the country.
2. Properly manning the occupation of Iraq in 2003 would, according to one estimate made at the time, have required 800,000 troops. Doubling that translates to 1.6 million troops for western Iran.
3. See notes 1 and 2.

Space Age Super-Fighters

In the half century or so after the Wright Brothers' first flight the performance of aircraft with regard to speed and altitude advanced exponentially. At the start of World War I, a scarce decade after that first flight, planes could fly as fast as seventy-five miles an hour and reach altitudes of twenty thousand feet. By the end of the war four years later those figures had doubled, and they doubled again during the interwar period, while World War II accelerated the advance once more. The conflict saw prop fighters doing four hundred, close to five hundred, miles an hour, and the first jets flying into action even faster than that. In another decade, the top speed of those jets was mere cruising speed for the fighters becoming standard in air force inventories, which could do Mach 2 or better on afterburner--while even passenger travel looked set to go supersonic (with Britain and France collaborating on the Concorde).

It seemed natural that planes would continue to become faster and higher-flying--the more so for the even more dramatic progress in the field of rocketry. The World War II-era V-2s led to rockets that could reach escape speed (twenty-five thousand miles per hour) to leave the atmosphere entirely in the same time frame, putting into orbit unmanned satellites, cosmonauts, and beyond that, who knew? Meanwhile, those rockets' smaller cousins revolutionized the field of air defense--surface-to-air missiles meaning in the view of many that planes would have to become faster and higher-flying to escape them. Scarcely after their production run had begun the B-52 Stratofortress no longer appeared stratospheric enough in the eyes of U.S. Air Force planners, the coming years apparently demanding planes that could fly at Mach 3 at 70,000 feet or higher--and in turn, interceptor aircraft that could match that performance, for when Soviet bombers became equally capable. Thus the B-70 Valkyrie, and the F-12 and F-108 fighters.

Of course, none of these projects amounted to all that much, and nothing comparable was ever set up in their place. Instead of the B-70, canceled after the expenditure of over ten billion dollars in today's terms (which works out to about five billion per prototype), what the Air Force got was the modestly supersonic B-1, and the subsonic B-2, the emphasis placed on sneaking under radar, and then hiding from it in plain sight with the help of stealthy shaping and material, rather than somehow trying to get beyond its reach.

The F-108 never even made it to the prototype stage, while the spectacularly expensive F-12 (for the cost of one of which the Air Force could purchase a half dozen Phantoms) was also cancelled. Only the latter had much of a legacy, in the form of a small fleet of spy planes based on its airframe, the SR-71 (32 jets total), while the fighters of the third, fourth, fifth generations were pretty much the same as those of the '50s-era second generation with regard to speed and altitude.

This was even the case with those planes' intended missile, the AIM-47. It did pave the way for the AIM-54 Phoenix, but that, too, appears underwhelming in hindsight. Because the TFX fighter program supposed to use it also came to naught, the Air Force never even fielded them, while just a single Navy plane carried them, the F-14 Tomcat. That fighter almost never used these missiles in combat, and perhaps never successfully (the few launched over Iraq apparently missing their targets), before their retirement as the more modest Sidewinder and Sparrow (and the much later AMRAAM) proved the real instruments of U.S. air superiority.

The same went on the Soviet side. Their aspirations toward a B-70 equivalent of their own, in the T-4 program, likewise amounted to little. More did come of their fighter programs, in the form of the near Mach-3 MiG-25 and MiG-31 interceptors--but these were arguably a detour from the main line of fighter development, as attested by the small numbers produced compared with other, contemporaneous models. (The Soviet Union built over 10,000 MiG-21s, and some 6,000 MiG-23s and MiG-27s--but only a little over 1,000 MiG-25s. Later the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation would build over 1,600 MiG-29s, and counting all variants, a similar number of Sukhoi-27s, but just 500 MiG-31s.)

Considering the visions of versatile, near-space-flying hypersonic combat aircraft (a different technical problem from the hypersonic missiles getting so much press now), and the other wild-seeming possibilities so prominent in talk about sixth generation fighters, I wonder if a half century later those speculating about these matters are not equally far off the mark--and never even suspecting it because they are more ignorant of the history than they realize.

Has the Real Cost of Fighter Planes Risen Over Time?

The question I just asked may seem rhetorical, since, for all the sniveling of that species of political hack that calls itself "economist," virtually all those living today have never known any but an inflationary era. And even compared with the general upward trend of prices (in contrast with, for example, the stagnation of wages for a half century now), the rising cost of major weapons systems like fighter aircraft is, like the rising cost of higher education or health care, beyond notorious--not least to those expert in such matters.

Still, broad impressions are one thing, specific information another, much rarer thing, and it is the latter that concerns me here--actually checking what we all "know," or think we know.

That requires me, of course, to come by actual cost estimates, on the basis of which one might properly make such judgments.

Just like everything else, this is easier said than done.

Much easier.

Given the tendency to multiple versions of a single aircraft type, which can be expected to have different features (are we talking the A or the J here?); the changes in the cost of even the exact same version during its life cycle (as we go from early projections to actual realities, where costs are amortized and production processes get more efficient but orders also get cut back, along with everything else that can affect industrial life); and the multiplicity of ways to go about the accounting (are we speaking of the production cost of single aircraft, or the overall program cost?); one easily finds multiple price estimates for the same plane.

Moreover, those presenting these estimates do not always give the source of the figure they are citing, let alone when and how it was arrived at, and I have found few attempts at either a comprehensive listing of estimates for single aircraft, or a sophisticated averaging out of costs for a type.

This is all headache enough when one is talking about current aircraft, as we see with the F-35--which, this past December, we were told would cost both $89 million, or $300 million, per unit. It is worse when we are looking for data on older aircraft which have gone through more years and more models in production. (Only four F-35 variants have been produced to date; but according to the Wikipedia page dedicated to just listing them, no fewer than fifty-one F-4 variants have actually been produced.) There is the problem of adjusting old figures for inflation--adjusting what may well be a "rough" estimate with another rough estimate.

And of course, as the whole point of this particular exercise is a comparison among aircraft, the difficulty of establishing whether two similar-looking planes are really comparable. (Whether a fighter is meant to take off from and land on carriers, for instance, can really complicate the issue, given the special engineering they require.)

Still, one can hardly avoid the exercise; and even a rough estimate may yield insight if a trend is pronounced enough.

For the sake of keeping things as simple as possible I stuck with U.S. Air Force jet fighters that went into wide enough production to be considered the standard type of their period, and a listing which afforded rare attention to differences among models of the same plane.

Turning to figures from Richard Knaack's Encyclopedia of USAF Aircraft and Missile Systems, however, one does see quite a number of figures for, among other things, fighter jets from the 1940s to the 1970s, nicely covering the first three generations of the system at least. Given his cost estimates for early production types, the first Air Force production jet, the P-80, ran a little over $1.5 million per unit in 2019 dollars; the more advanced but still first generation F-86A, around $1.9 million.

The Air Force did produce a more advanced F-86 with a radar and afterburning engine, the D model, but such features arguably make it already a second generation aircraft. This ran $4 million a unit.

As this indicates generational boundaries can be tricky, with a comparison of the F-104 and F-4 fighters clarifying the issue. The two are thought second and third-generation respectively, but both are Mach-2 capable, radar-equipped, missile-armed fighters that flew just a couple of years apart (the first F-104 flight 1956, the first F-4 flight 1958). The most obvious difference between one and the other, in fact, is the F-4's being a bigger, heavier, twin-engined plane bearing a heavier armament--so that a case can be made for thinking of the two as generationally comparable "light" and "heavy" fighters (like the F-16 and F-15 were in their original versions). As it happens, the prices of the systems reflected this proximity--the F-104G running $12 million, the early third-generation F-4 $16 million in its C version and $20 million in its E version.

I had to turn to other sources for later aircraft. However, the fourth-generation F-15 (the prices of classes A through D varying surprisingly little) is commonly estimated to cost something in the range of $45 million per aircraft. The F-22 is similarly estimated to run $200-$300 million in today's terms--roughly what the F-35, despite its lower performance, delayed appearance and far larger planned production run (a possible 4,000 units), may also cost.

The result is that a single F-22 cost a hundred or more times what a first generation jet did; ten or more times what a second/third generation jet did; four or more times what a fourth generation jet did.

In short, a generational jump went along with at least a doubling of prices--and sometimes much more than a doubling. Using the 1945 price of the P-80 and the 1998 price of the F-22 as benchmarks, it seems that the inflation-adjusted price of the latest fighter aircraft rose 10 percent a year. This is a doubling time of every seven years or so.

Looking back the most rapid period of price increase would seem to have been the two decades or so after the first jets appeared, when their evolution was most dynamic--going from subsonic planes with optically aimed guns to supersonic aircraft firing pulse Doppler radar-guided missiles beyond visual range. However, as the price gap between even the most advanced F-4 derivative and the F-22 or F-35 demonstrates, major leaps remained in store, so much so that along with the diminished intensity of procurement the end of the Cold War brought, the F-22 remained the most advanced jet in the world, while never even really replacing the fourth generation, the F-15s and F-16s not only still the U.S. Air Force's mainstay a near half century after their own first flights (1972 and 1974, respectively), but expected to continue in frontline service for decades more.

Moreover, while it may seem that the trend ran its course by the turn of the century, the widespread interest in a sixth generation fighter suggests that we will eventually be seeing cost estimates. If past experience is anything to go by, I would consider a half billion dollar plane each surprisingly cheap, an individual price tag of a billion or more (maybe much more) strongly probable.

All too predictably, however, none of those chattering about these aircraft seem to be talking about that bill . . .

A 100 Percent Renewable Energy-Based Electric Grid?

A recent estimate for the cost of a 100 percent renewable elecric grid by 2030 is $4.5 trillion according to a Wood Mackenzie analysis recently cited in Greentech Media.

Some will react with sticker shock.

But I suspect that is because they do not put the figure into its proper context. Large a sum as $4.5 trillion is, it is equal to about 2 percent of GDP or so over a decade, even assuming the stagnation seen this past decade continues--hardly a devastating price tag for such an essential piece of infrastructure. (Given the strong probability of technological improvement amid such an effort, and the economic stimulus it may generate, it might come to rather less.) And in any event, much or all of this money would have been spent anyway. (Infrastructure costs, and America's grid, rebuilding which is going to be a multi-trillion dollar job regardless of the specific technologies used, has been long neglected.)

In fact, it may be just half what we will spend on fossil fuel subsidies over the same time frame, if current practice continues (this being as much as $1 trillion a year). It is considerably less than the estimates of what the current round of wars (readable as at least to some extent an oil subsidy) has cost us (some $6 trillion to date).

The project (a modest thing next to all the World War II talk to which some tend when discussing the issue) is unavoidable--and as these other uses to which even greater sums have been and still are being put show (along with a good deal of other analysis), the money is there--making the course the obvious one of getting seriously to work on it, the sooner the better.

Assessing Iran's Air Defense Capability

Recently I discussed the possibility some have raised of what it would take to occupy Iran--or for that matter, fight a ground war with it. The requisite numbers, along with the country's geographical position (any approach to Iran would be far different from an invasion of Iraq from the south) makes a major ground clash appear comparatively implausible.

What does seem more plausible--as highlighted by Iran's downing of a Global Hawk drone last week--is a conflict fought in the air, which has raised the question of the capabilities of Iran's air defenses.

According to most counts, Iran has a couple of hundred fighters, five hundred or so surface-to-air missile launchers, and seventeen hundred anti-aircraft guns. It might be noted that the Iranian systems today are in the main older aircraft--F-4s, F-5s, and MiG-21 variants comprising over half the fleet, with the most advanced of them just some thirty or so export versions of early model MiG-29s (while the country may dispose of another forty or so early model F-14s). And while Iran's purchases of S-300 SAMs from Russia get all the press, the great bulk of its SAM force consists of older and mostly much less capable Hawks, SA-2s and Crotales. The guns are similarly old models (Soviet-made 23 mm, 37 mm, 57 mm and 85 mm cannon).

By contrast in 1991 Iraq had three hundred fighter planes, seven hundred SAM launchers and four thousand guns--more systems, covering a country just a third Iran's size, and of roughly the same types, many already obsolescent or obsolete then, but not so much as they would be a whole three decades later in comparison with America's state-of-the-art. (There were no F-22s or F-35s, no B-1s or B-2s, to say the least of the matter.)

The result was that, if far from a cutting edge force, Iraq's air defense system still utilized a far larger collection of systems, by the standard of the time more technically advanced and deployed rather more densely than is the case with Iran. Moreover, questions unavoidably hang over the serviceability of the still very substantial American and British-made component of these forces (in spite of claims that Iran has been able to keep them operational on the basis of third-party purchases and its indigenous manufacturing resources)--while the fact that, for all the difficulties they pose, Iran keeps them in service bespeaks its limited ability to get large numbers of more modern, more convenient replacements.

Of course, attentiveness to the guns and missile launchers only takes one so far. There is the question of the radar coverage of the country, the command and control systems, the training of crews, the serviceability of all that equipment and its robustness in the face of electronic or cyber-attack--more abstruse matters lending themselves less well to sound bites and tidy quantification and neat tables for side by side comparisons. By and large armed forces tend to skimp on such essentials in favors of the flashy systems, the more so in as they are cash-strapped or developing--and certainly Iran's forces appear to have been in poor condition in these respects just a decade ago.

In short, Iran's capabilities on this score appear less than formidable.

Still, this assessment does not include the possible supplementary role of indigenous Iranian systems. Often not mentioned at all in comprehensive assessments (consult, for example, a recent edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' Military Balance), they got more attention after the report that the missile that downed an American Global Hawk this June was one of its domestically produced models. I have not found much in the way of comprehensive overviews of the types and numbers of these weapons--with the principal exception the Wikipedia page devoted to Iran's Air Defense Force.

When I checked the page in question (on June 27 of this year) it reported that Iran has deployed over a thousand such long-range surface-to-air missile launchers (100 km range or more), citing over four hundred Sayyad-1s; more than a hundred and fifty Sayyad-2 and Sayyad-3 systems; over four hundred locally upgraded S-200s (in contrast with the handful of examples it was supposed to have); and over a dozen Bavar-373 missile batteries which Iran claims have successfully shot down ballistic missiles in tests. Supplementing them in this listing are some five hundred medium-range SAM launchers, of the Raad (150+), Mersad (300+) and Kamin-2 (?) types, and a roughly equal number of short-range types (some two hundred-plus Ya Zahara-3 and Herz-9 missile launchers).

Amounting to some two thousand more launchers in all, this multiplies the number of launchers fivefold, and the number of long-range launchers perhaps twenty-five-fold (such that a few more or less S-300s seem nearly trivial).

Meanwhile, many credit Iran with having made significant progress in improving the deeper functioning of its air defense system in the past several years. At least one assessment from the Washington Institute claims "significant" progress there since 2011, stressing, besides the number of weapons, a comprehensive system of sectoral command centers subordinate to a national center enjoying a "comprehensive threat picture" enabling it to exercise effective control over the whole. Additionally the oft-noted variety of Iranian radar systems, while a "maintenance nightmare" means "any opponent must find a solution for facing multiple radars at once," complicating the defense suppression efforts so key to avoiding U.S. combat losses in past wars, and includes some reputedly high-quality Russian and Chinese systems (such as over-the-horizon radars which may have significant capability against currently cutting edge stealth aircraft).

All of this would potentially be game-changing, making Iranian air defenses much, much tougher than the more restricted listings suggest. However, the Wikipedia article does not provide sources for its grandiose claims--and for that matter, neither does the Washington Institute piece, which is, to be frank, fairly superficial. (It offers some discussion of the structure of Iran's air defense establishment and makes reference to recent exercises--but offers no real clue as to how well all this would work, let alone concrete support for such claims on the basis of those exercises. And the Institute is, of course, a right-wing think tank selling a hawkish line on "the Iranian threat," making vagueness the more suspect.)

Moreover, there is ample reason for skepticism. Many writers seem incapable of telling the difference between a launcher and a battery. (Iran imported 32 S-300 launchers; one item I saw from a relatively reputable think tank claimed it was 32 batteries, a very different thing, with an S-300 battery having up to eight launchers.) This seems all the more problematic given that Western analysts have, with some plausibility, long argued for Iranian claims on behalf of their advanced indigenous weaponry consistently proving shabby hoaxes on close examination. Even assuming that Iran has deployed large numbers of such SAMs, their quality is, as a practical matter, unknown for lack of prior combat use. (A single downing of an unmanned, non-stealth aircraft in unclear circumstances does not necessarily reveal very much about even the system in question, let alone the broader gamut of them.) And of course, the assessment of command and control capabilities and the like is a subtler matter still.

The upshot of this is that there seems wide room for argument. The most well-grounded claims give the impression that Iran would not be much better able than other states the U.S. has faced in recent decades (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya) to counter American air power--with the result that even a large-scale, prolonged campaign may see few or even no losses of manned U.S. combat aircraft to enemy action, especially if it concentrates on strategic and fixed targets rather than forces in the field (where low-altitude operations would entail increased vulnerability to ground fire). However, if one takes seriously the claims made for Iran's deployment of massive numbers of advanced, medium- and long-range SAMs; and considerable upgrading of the system tying them together into a coherent defense of its aerospace; Iran's systems may pose a challenge such as the U.S. has not seen since at least the Vietnam era. Even that, however, appears slight next to the bigger danger of a wider conflict--which, even as the news buzzes with headlines about war with Iran at the very same time that it buzzes about Russian troops in Syria, Russo-American competition over Turkey, and cyber-war against Russia's electrical grid, astonishingly few seem to acknowledge as part of the picture.

An Occupation of Iran? Crunching the Numbers

Amid the Trump administration's tearing up of the 2015 deal the U.S. made with Iran regarding its nuclear program, the escalation of tensions in the region, the dispatch of substantial U.S. forces to its region, and the recent downing of a U.S. drone which, it is reported, led to the order of a retaliatory air strike rescinded mere minutes before it went through, there has been more than the usual consideration of full-blown war between the two countries--with one possible U.S. objective being the regime change in Iran long coveted by the neoconservatives, who have been in the ascendant again in Washington.

All of this, of course, evoked the memory of the attempt to do so in Iraq in 2003, which saw a highly successful conventional campaign--and disastrous aftermath. Rather than the brisk, easy transition from the Baathist regime to a more congenial successor, what resulted was a complex of wars that, in their metastasizing into the war with the ISIS organization, spilled across Iraqi borders in catastrophic fashion (and in Syria led the U.S. to perhaps its most dangerous confrontation with Russia in over a half century). And that memory has, in turn, raised the question of what would be required for an occupation of Iran were the administration to carry its action that far.

One approach to the problem has been to extrapolate from the requirements of the occupation of Iraq to those that similar action against Iran might require. One estimate espoused by then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was that hundreds of thousands--perhaps 800,000 troops--would be needed for occupation duty. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that a force a fraction that size (100,000) would be sufficient. As events quickly and predictably showed, they were not, and one could (conservatively but not unreasonably) take that 800,000 figure as a baseline.

Iran has over three times' Iraq's population (82 million to the 25 million or so Iraq had then), and almost four times' its territory (636,000 square miles to Iraq's 169,000), one could plausibly picture three to four times' the number of troops being necessary. On this basis scholar of Middle Eastern history Juan Cole tripled the 800,000 figure for 2.4 million in his own analysis, but one could just as easily speak of 2-3 million.

The need for up to 3 million troops to occupy Iran may, even in light of the Iraqi precedent, seem unduly pessimistic. After all, 3 million troops was what the U.S. had in Europe on V-E Day, and just over half those (1.6 million) in Germany, and even that figure dropped rapidly afterward.

And surely occupying Iran is a smaller job than occupying Germany?

The reality, however, is that Iran is a quarter more populous than Germany was in 1945, over four times as big as Germany was in area. Indeed, it is an eighth larger than Germany, the Benelux countries, Austria, France and Italy combined (a collective 560,000 square miles or so).

It should also not be forgotten that that occupation was a joint effort with the other Allies, not least Britain, France and the Soviet Union, with smaller areas assigned other nations like Belgium, Norway and Poland, the commitment discussed here a mere fraction of what was required. Where American occupation of Germany specifically is concerned, it should be remembered that the U.S. zone in western Germany amounted to a rough quarter of Germany, some 33,000 square miles and 16 million people--a twentieth of the territory and a fifth of the population of Iran today--and at the time this demanded some three hundred thousand troops a year after the end of the war.

Worth considering, too, is the occupation of post-war Japan the U.S. carried out more single-handedly, with nearly a half million troops at the outset when the Ryukus are included.

Iran is more than four times as large as Japan (636,000 to 145,000 square miles); and its population substantially larger than Japan's was at the time (81 million to 70 million or so).

The reader should also note that Iran is substantially more urbanized than Western Europe or Japan was at the time (nearly three-quarters of its people living in cities, compared with a third or so of Japan's in that period)--a fact which makes territorial occupation more rather than less manpower-intensive. One may point out, too, that in contrast with the situation in a Europe firmly under Allied control in 1945, or insular Japan, Iran has very long, very mountainous borders with populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan which might view the highly likely emergence of violent opposition to a U.S. occupation with sympathy. This would enlarge the problem of controlling the country, and perhaps, lead U.S. operations to extend beyond it in the event of trouble (just as the attempt to occupy Afghanistan drew the U.S. into involvement in Pakistan).

Also significant is the fact that armies have changed, especially high-tech mechanized armies like those of the U.S., whose proportion of "tail" to "tooth" has risen enormously. In the World War II period some 65 percent of troops were combat personnel, but the figure was down to a quarter by the early twentieth century. One could argue for an even sharper drop in the "foxhole strength" a large unit could muster--troops who would be available to, for instance, patrol on the street rather than keep the gear running, or the flow of supplies continuing to come in. This raises the necessary ratio of troops-to-occupied yet again.

Given these precedents with regard to territory, population, urbanization and borders, and the tasking of any given quantity of military manpower in the current high-tech, high-tail era, a total figure comparable to the U.S. force in Western Europe, or a multiple of the force inserted into Japan, does not seem at all outside the bounds of the plausible.

Of course, this is far beyond the capacity of American forces as presently constituted. Consider the active-duty U.S. armed forces. These come to some 1.3 million personnel. However, half of that is Air Force and Navy--and the other half Army and Marines. Moreover, of the 660,000 or so Army and Marines (480,000 Army, 180,000 Marines) not all are ground troops trained, armed and organized into usable formations.

The two services have some 13 divisions between them--on average, 15,000 troops each. This comes to about 200,000 troops that could actually be put on the ground--a third of the 660,000 figure, and the rest a vast organization for recruitment, training, administration and support in logistical and other ways required to keep those 200,000 in the field, especially in a faraway country. Additionally, it would be out of the question for the entire force to be deployed to one contingency, at once. The U.S. has military commitments all over the world; and in any event, units are rotated in and out of operational duty. (They need rest; they need retraining and reconstitution.) This is the case even in world wars. As a result, rather less than the whole would be available for a given task.

Of course, there are reserves. The Army and Marine Reserves together have some 240,000 personnel (200,000 Army, 40,000 Marines), while the Army National Guard can supply 340,000 more. However, one again has to think in terms of actual, usable ground units. The Army Reserve has 8 divisions, the Marine Reserve one, the Army National Guard 8 more divisions than that--a maximum of 17 divisions in all, and plausibly some 250,000 personnel, whose actual use would be subject to the same constraints as the active-duty troops.

Recent U.S. experience is telling. Even with the biggest mobilization of reservists since the Korean War swelling their ranks (150,000 National Guard and Reservists, providing up to a quarter of the force rotating through Iraq), keeping 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan--equaling just a quarter of nominal Army and Marine strength at the time--was a considerable strain.

The result is that even a complete mobilization of the Reserve and National Guard (a time-consuming process that will raise the political difficulty of action) gives the U.S. under a half million deployable combat troops, and to go by the Iraq precedent, just 300,000-400,000 available for all operational contingencies.

It is somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the 2-3 million personnel figure.

Now think about what it would take to close that gap. It would not be a simple addition of 2-3 million more troops, but 2-3 million in deployable combat units. Assuming the ratios of nominal service strength and combat strength remain the same, this will mean an enlargement of the Army (the more logical locus of the expansion, given the Marines' more specialized nature as an amphibious assault/rapid reaction force) to 6 million, 8 million, or even more. It is scarcely conceivable that such a body of ground troops could be supported abroad without a commensurate expansion of the Air Force and Navy, and especially their airlift and sealift capacities, meaning millions more personnel in those forces. In the end one might imagine something like that all-services' wartime peak, 12 million under arms in all.

The U.S. population is about two-and-a-half times larger today than it was during in World War II (330 million to 130 million then). Still, raising such a force would mean a fairly comprehensive draft, as some of the more astute observers have pointed out.

Daunting as all this sounds, it still overlooks a key issue here, which is that one ordinarily has to defeat a country's armed forces before they can occupy their territory. Given recent U.S. experience--above all, with Iraq--this may seem a simple matter. Still, Iraq proved an exceptionally "convenient" opponent. It had a long border with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, permitting the U.S. and allied forces wide leeway in their approach to the country, the more so given the open desert of the south. The Iraqi armed forces had already been badly mauled in the 1991 Gulf War, and substantially denied a chance to recover by international sanctions (with its air force and air defenses further degraded by low-grade air war). When war broke out, Iraq waged a defensive conventional campaign of a kind that left its forces as vulnerable as they could conceivably be to American strengths. And of course, the 2003 conflict saw Iraq totally on its own, with Russia, China and other actors limiting themselves to political opposition.

By contrast Iran's borders afford no such convenient entry points or staging areas. With four decades to adapt since the loss of American and British sponsorship, and three decades to recover from their last major war, Iran's armed forces are in a far less battered condition--and for all their undeniable limitations with regard to equipment and other matters, far more numerous (with the regular military, Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitaries plausibly raising 2 million or more). Iran may be less passive than Iraq in regard to a build-up nearby, using its far less likely to fight back along the rigidly conventional terms so implausible given the undeniable disparity in military power (with the prospect of unconventional Iranian naval tactics being used to sink American warships oft-noted). And of course the country will be nowhere near so isolated--with the possibility of Russian intervention impossible to leave out of any such calculations. Indeed, a U.S. attack on Iran may be less tolerable to Moscow than regime change in Syria because of the country's bordering ex-Soviet states Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Armenia, as well as its size and energy reserves; while the logistics of Russian intervention would be easier. (Russian aircraft need only fly over the Caspian, while enjoying quite direct access to Iranian airspace through bordering states.) While a Chinese response seems far less likely to take the form of direct military intervention, the country's objections to such action are likely to count for much more in 2019 than they did in 2003.

In short, any conflict against Iran, not simply including a full-blown national occupation, but any military action whatsoever, is quite a different thing from the question of action against Iraq in 2003--which itself proved a far, far different thing from what Donald Rumsfeld and company promised.