Who'd Have Thought (back in 1984)?

[Nowhere Man 1966]

Originally Posted by LoneCollector1987

After reading your comments regarding Germany - sorry, but I am laughing.

Long ago I wrote a satire exactly about that and as I dont know if this will derail this thread I will post the relevant part if you agree.

And to the war: (and yes, I am the pessimist)

In regard to war you need two things: manpower and willpower.
The West has neither.

(I apologize for the cold language)

Compare - for instance - 1800 to today.
Back then every country had a childfactor of 4 or more (4 children born per family. And you need 2,1 to keep the number of population)
And then the countries could go to war, lose a few tenthousand or more (Napoleon anybody with about 800.000 death in Russia alone on both sides combined) and still have a population growth.

Today any NATO country has a childfactor of 1,5 or worse. So, losing people is bad, because we have no replacement, no security margin. We are barebones.
Or does anybody think that - if we enter the war - we will have no casualties?

Willpower:
We dont have it.
Remember Syria? One red line after another. Not one politician willing to pull the trigger. Just imagine that after having crossed the line of using a chemical weapon Assad would have been given a wake up call by a nuclear weapon detonated close (BUT far enough away to cause NO damage!!) to the coast of Syria.

And look at the state our weaponsindustry is in. According to a news in todays msn (based upon a report in the NZZ) even if Germany would spend every year the required 2% it will take about 40-100 years to bring back the military power of 2000.
For tanks it will be till 2066 to reach the numbers we had in 2004

We made the mistake of destroying our equipment and downsizing our productioncapabilities. Russia did not.
We may say thanks to our politicians for that.

Sad but true. Russia did good things by keeping their older model weapons mothballed, the thinking is that if there was a war and they lose all the best modern equipment as well as weaken their enemy, they would still have plenty of T-34's, 55's and 62's to run roughshod over the enemy. Even so, they are facing their own manpower problem. if you lack manpower and equipment and you are threatened to by overrun or lose, the only equalizers are nukes and chemical weapons, especially the former. I'm a bit of a pessimist myself, if I could start it, I'd be president of the "Pittsburgh Pessimist Society. " Without going too deep in politics we exhibit poor leadership in the West with a few exceptions,

I might sound a bit cold myself, but I'm afraid Osama Bin Ladin was correct where he said that people respect, follow, admire, whatever, a "Strong horse" over a "weak (or dead) horse." Putin is a vile person, don't get me wrong, but he is more of a strong horse or at least stronger than what we have in the West, although I think he wheels might be starting to come off

I was thinking about this as I was going through my 1980's era textbook on psychology when I had that class in 1985/86 as a college freshman. I kept it because ity had a lot of good articles, especially on Charles Manson and Malcom X (aka Little). As good guys, we are bound by basic morals and ethics where we cannot use evil or bad methods to appeal and manipulate people and evens, even if we are a strong horse. Dictators, psychopaths, terrorists, etc., are not bound by that so they use anything and everything over and underhanded to manipulate and control people and events or at least try to. Manson, Putin and Bin Ladin are these types of people to one degree or another. Same with criminals like Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz and people who do Ponzi schemes and so forth.

I do understand the objections to my hope of getting all parties to the peace table. How to do it is the $64,000 question. Still we must try. We need somehow to deal with Putin and throw him a bone, just a bone, but not cave in to him. Like it or not, we have the deal, he is their PResident but he won't be in forever and we need to hope the next guy or gal will be a strong horse but with much better morals and ethics. I still believe we lost a lot of opportunity to get Russia more to our side in the 1990's but again who really knows, playing "what if" is a tough game.

You need three things to fight a war, manpower, willpower and weapons. We lack all three, but the most important is willpower, if you don't hav e that, the other two really do not matter much.

[Nowhere Man 1966]

Originally Posted by kato13

There is much wisdom in what you say.

One nit pick


Currently (2022) the the 4 most powerful forces in NATO are above 1.5
UK 1.6
France 1.7
US 1.7
Turkey 1.8

I believe the only others are Bulgaria 1.6 and Romania 1.8 but how much value would they provide.

Source https://data.worldbank.org/indicator...ame_desc=false




This is why I would like to see more. 2% is the minimum. If this is, as I have been told, really a clash of cultures which will effect the course of the continent, maybe up it to 3 or 4.

Personally I feel Russia's own demographics crash (1.4), while pulling (and the Ukrainians killing) so many soldiers from districts that generated above average population growth, makes this Russia's last hurrah (without self destructing). Even so if other NATO countries make conscious decisions not to do anything serious for their own defense, I can see more and more Americans not seeing the value in shouldering such a great percentage of costs of maintaining NATO's defensive strength.

Agreed. One interesting thing that during the Cold WAr, Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu had his own "Lebensborn" type program to encourage large families as well as basically forcing couples just to make children. I work in Medicaid dental insurance taking calls and I talked to ne of those babies who was born under that program in 1984. She was shocked on how an American would know this.

I think at some point the downward trend in population will reverse, how, when an d why, I can't say. My guess is that the "powers that may be" of countries will encourage large families to fill the demand for labor, military and so forth. West Germany had "Kindergeld," Child Money to encourage growth but it did not quit work. I think for that to work, you need a more desperate situation.

The ideal population is 2.1 kids per family, weak growth as well as the 0.1 being there to replace losses of early child death due to things like auto wrecks and cancers.

[Nowhere Man 1966]

Originally Posted by Adm.Lee

Hopefully, this is a link https://www.celesticon.com/Podcasts/...%20Striker.mp3

Frank Chadwick was speaking at a convention in 2011, about Striker (sci-fi minis game linked to Traveller) and the technological changes he did or didn't see coming between 1981 and 2011. I think that can speak to some tech changes we and GDW didn't predict from 1984 to now, either.

For myself, aged 16 in 1984, I think I vaguely thought that the USSR might collapse, but with no thought as to timeline. I was reading Russian, Polish, and Soviet history as much as I could, as well as military history, and wargaming what I could find.

I was 17/18 in 1984 and I thought the same thing about the USSR and the Warsaw Pact but our consensus was that it would last until 2020 or 2025, not much beyond that.

TEch, my guess then if I had to remember my 1984 self is that by now, we'd have PC's that would be much like a Pentium II or III with 32 or 64 megabytes and we'd still be using modems and/or things like Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, etc. Fidonet would still be king, the electronic BBS Pony Express.