As the mercenaries fighting for Ukraine have found out a real war against an advanced military power, such as Russia, is very different to fighting weak countries and goat-herders. For any individual, the decision to fight in a war tends to be an illogical one unless the chance of death or disablement are low, and the military offers much better life chances. The fighting of colonial and neo-colonial wars tends to fit this template very well, as the colonial power will most probably have significant advantages in military technology, training and overall strength. The colonization of Africa, with spear wielding warriors being mown down by European rifles, Maxim guns, cannons, and gunboats as Churchill experienced at The Battle of Omdurman (1898), was a good example. A force of 8,000 British troops and 17,000 colonial Sudanese and Egyptians defeated a Sudanese tribal force twice their size, losing 48 dead and 382 wounded to its opponent’s 12,000 killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner. Omdurman also highlights how the Europeans, especially the British, could fight colonial wars on the cheap by offering advantages to colonial subjects to fight for the Empire and even subjugate their fellow citizens.
The British Indian Army, 1,750,000 strong in WW1 (with 1 million serving overseas) and 2,500,000 in WW2 was paid for by the Indians themselves, providing a massive armed force for free to subjugate threats to the Empire around the world and to fight in the world wars. Recruitment was especially directed at non-Hindu and non-Muslim minorities, such as the Sikhs (100,000 troops in WW1 and 300,000 in WW2) and Gurkhas (predominantly Nepalese: 200,000 troops in WW1 and 250,000 in WW2). Irish soldiers were also heavily represented in the nineteenth century colonial apparatus, escaping the dire poverty of the Irish colony; 200,000 Irish fought for the British in WW1. Over 275,000 French colonial subjects served in WW1. There were also huge numbers from the British white settler colonies, 400,000 in WW1 and 1 million in WW2 from Australia, 100,000 and 140,000 from New Zealand, 650,000 and 1 million from Canada (out of a population of 8 million), and 250,000 and 300,000 from South Africa. Overall, about 3 million overseas soldiers and labourers fought for the British in WW1, predominantly funded by their own countries; more soldiers from the Empire died than were from Britain (over 1 million compared to 888,000).
WW1 was the first truly mass war, with both sides utilizing technologies (machine guns, barbed wire, heavy artillery) that could create tens of thousands of dead and wounded in a single day. Propaganda was widely used to cover up the scale of the slaughter, but as more and more families experienced grief it became evident to the civilian population. By 1916 there was a dwindling pool of British men that wanted to throw away their lives so needlessly, even with the widespread war propaganda (“Huns bayonetting babies”), the general shaming of such non-serving men and the actions of the White Feather Brigade. The latter somewhat backfired as white feathers were given to those in reserved occupations, those serving the military at home and soldiers on leave and honourably discharged, requiring the state to provide badges to identify such individuals; on one occasion a man travelling to a reception in his honour after being awarded the highest medal for bravery was presented with a white feather! An excellent short dramatization of this phenomenon.
Germany had entered the war with universal mass conscription. In January 1916 conscription was implemented in Britain and New Zealand, Canada in 1917. In the US, which was finally dragged into the war by President Wilson (after he had promised not to do so only months earlier to get re-elected) in April 1917 after years of pro-war propaganda, conscription was rapidly introduced after only 73,000 volunteered. A fascistic state with widespread censorship, overwhelming propaganda, an army of thugs and spies (the 250,000 members of the American Protective League directed by the FBI), extensive Slacker Raids, the tarring and feathering and even lynching of those against the war and union leaders, anti-German hysteria including even local bans of the German language, the jailing of anyone publicly objecting to the draft (including the ex-presidential candidate Eugene Debs), and long prison sentences for those that refused to serve, were required to drag an unwilling public into the war. Over 116,000 Americans troops lost their lives in WW1, a war the majority of Americans did not want to be part of. This history has been “memory holed” with respect to standard US histories and school textbooks, as Hochschild notes.
In WW2, the WW1-scale military losses were predominantly on the Eastern and Chinese fronts, where the war was an existential struggle against an opponent proven in their horrific treatment of civilians (e.g. The Rape of Nanking and the widespread German atrocities in the Soviet Union) or who had even explicitly stated their ethnic cleansing plans; as with Hitler and his claim of lebensraum at the expense of the Slavs. American troop deaths were 407,000 (0.3% of the population), British and Crown Colony 384,000, Canada 42,000, Australia 40,000 while the Soviet Union suffered 11 million troop deaths (and 27 million overall deaths, 16% of the population), Germany 5 million (and 8 million overall), China 3.75 million (and up to 20 million overall, 4% of the population), Japan 2.3 million of which the majority were in China (3 million in total, 4% of the population). Standard Western histories of WW2 provide an incredibly biased view, focusing on relative side-shows and massively downplaying the major theatres of the war (the Eastern Front and China).
With much less carnage experienced by their populations than in WW1, together with the UK experiencing an existential threat and the US entering on the pretence of a ‘surprise’ attack triggered by US policies (i.e. the US oil embargo against Japan), it was easier to get young men to risk throwing away their lives. Of course, aided by widespread propaganda which including especially dehumanizing anti-Japanese propaganda. In Germany, the fascist state had spent the 1930s indoctrinating the population with widespread propaganda and changes to educational curricula. The easy victories of the Ruhr, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, and France also greatly increased popular support for the war. In the Korean War only 37,000 American soldiers died, in a war that the UN (with the Taiwan-based Republic of China taking China’s seat and the Soviet Union not taking theirs) deemed to have been started by North Korea and cloaked as a UN intervention. Even then, the support of the US public rapidly waned as the conflict dragged on.
The next mass war that the US fought was Vietnam, where 60,000 died and another 150,000 were wounded requiring hospital care. In the post-WW2 period, the US had become much richer and incomes had become less concentrated, with generally full employment and an increasingly well off (white) population. Even with widespread propaganda and a draft in place, young men were increasingly unwilling to give up comfortable lives and risk possible death to support a nation they knew little about. The level of outright insubordination, including the notorious “fragging” of officers and refusal to obey commands, became significant. As the war went on, the media propaganda campaign increasingly failed as it started to report the reality of war to the home population; a reality that included the My Lai Massacre (just one of numerous such instances that did not get reported). The true reality of war will always reduce its support except in truly existential risks to the home front.
After Vietnam, the US has not utilized a draft and instead has a professional army of volunteers sourced predominantly from the poorer sections of society, and non-citizens hoping to gain residency. Recruitment is supported by widespread efforts to co-opt the media into generating a positive image of the US military, and tight linkages between both secondary and university-level educational institutions. Official casualties were to be kept to a minimum through the use of mercenary forces, technology and covert operations while the media was to be tightly controlled when within the theatre of war; “embedded” journalists. In the first Iraq War only 294 Americans and 47 British died, in the second Iraq War 4,500 Americans and 179 British. In Afghanistan 2,400 Americans over two decades, and 453 British; of course, none of these figures include mercenary deaths. This is war on the official casualty cheap. In addition, the US military repeatedly abused “stop loss” powers to obviate the need for a draft; forcing soldiers to fight for longer than they had contracted for. In addition, many reservists found themselves in the middle of a war when they had seen themselves as simply weekend soldiers,
The other way to greatly reduce US casualties has been to have foreign nations fight the wars for the US, a strategy very successfully used by the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they funded European nations to fight each and therefore stop the rise of a major threat to British power. Unfortunately, the US has not been so successful, with the South Vietnamese army collapsing within years, the Georgians being crushed within days, the Iraqis refusing to be US pawns, the Syrians fighting back the US/Saudi/UAE head-choppers, and the Afghan army vaporizing in a matter of weeks. There is one place where this strategy has been successful for the US (and Britain), and that is Ukraine; a strategy planned for many, many decades.
First of all, the US, Britain and Canada accepted in the worst of the worst Ukrainian Nazis and Banderists after WW2, and fully supported them afterwards as an anti-communist force both at home and abroad. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine, a battle began between the West and Russia for dominance in Ukraine; culminating in the Western-sponsored 2014 Maidan Coup. The Ukrainian right-wing nationalist diaspora had been heavily used to build up nationalist and anti-Russian ideology during this period, and with those forces now fully in power the state initiated extensive propaganda, including make-believe school textbooks that echoed the racism and fake nationalist history of those of the Nazis (Jews were replaced with Russians); backed up by extensive fascist-style groups to enforce support for the regime. Even after this, Zelensky was elected president because of his promises to make peace with Russia; a position he quickly understood to be personally suicidal if continued. The Ukrainian army was heavily funded, trained and rearmed by the US, Britain and other Western nations, ready to invade the Donbass.
With 150,000 Ukrainian troops massed on the border of Donbass, and the escalation of Ukrainian shelling that tends to happen prior to an attack, the Russians were drawn into a pre-emptive strike which could be sold as “Russian Aggression”. For a year and a half, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died fighting the West’s war to destroy Russia, but instead of collapsing, Russia has remained steadfast and even gained strength. With the loss of Bakhmut, the collapse of the summer offensive, and the springing up of mass military graves across Ukraine, the propagandist boasts of every-increasing numbers of Russian casualties and great victories has begun to fall apart. Even after the West has had to rearm and retrain the Ukrainian army twice over due to its vast manpower, equipment and munitions losses. There have already been widespread excesses carried out by Ukrainian recruitment officers, especially in ethnic-Russian and Hungarian areas, but now spreading across nationalist areas. With a Ukrainian-controlled population of perhaps 20 million at most, heavily skewed toward the old due to the collapse in birth rates after independence and the fleeing of so many of the young to other countries (including at least 600,000 prime age men), the only real option for the regime is an all-out national mobilization which removes current reserved occupation, age and sex exclusions.
Even eight months ago, there were many men not wanting to throw their lives away needlessly on the Russian meat grinder. Bribing officials, hiding, dressing as women when they go out, using apps that geolocate recruitment personnel, and skipping across the border are some of the many ways such people are keeping themselves away from the meat grinder. They only have to visit the many and growing mass war graves to realize that Ukrainian war propaganda is unhinged from reality.
A few months ago, Zelensky fired all regional military recruitment chiefs over widespread evidence of corruption:
With recent recruitment drives netting small percentages of their targets, Ukraine is now in the position of not being able to replace all of the soldiers that have died, been injured beyond recovery, and are missing or taken prisoner. But he is caught between the Scylla of a slowly collapsing army and the Charybdis of a nation realizing that it cannot win and a population increasingly not wanting to lose their lives in a war that is lost. If Zelensky greatly expands the draft (younger people, students, reserved occupations, women) and tries to brutally enforce it he may face his own Maidan; when a nation knows that it has lost the will to fight may disappear. This is not helped by the widespread corruption that redirects military supplies of all kinds toward the black market, enriching the elite that exhorts the citizens to go to their deaths in the meat grinder.
Seemingly sensing weakness, the Russian army has significantly stepped up its offensive activities across the front; helped by the firm winter ground. In addition, with the depths of winter approaching a repeat of last year’s attacks on the energy and communications infrastructure may be unleashed. If Western governments are unable to approve new large-scale funding for Ukraine, the result will be Ukrainian central bank money printing and escalating domestic inflation which will only exacerbate domestic unrest and reduce further the support for the war.
It is interesting how the Western media keep referring to a “winter stalemate” just as the Russians are making progress all along the combat line. With Ukraine very much living hand to mouth with military supplies already much diminished, any further reductions may precipitate a collapse process; with differing Ukrainian elite groups taking actions to save themselves in the face of defeat and/or domestic rebellion. we are already seeing increasing conflict within the Ukrainian power structures.
It seems that the West may not have access to its Ukrainian proxy military through all of 2024. Will NATO “step up” and directly intervene? Here we have the issue of industrial warfare against a peer, which now has hundreds of thousands of war hardened troops, that will result in massive levels of deaths. For the Russian people, it will still be an existential war but not so much for the Western young men who will be asked to risk throwing their lives away. This at a time when the US military is experiencing severe recruitment issues, with the US army missing its most recent annual recruitment target by 25% (15,000 soldiers), even after significantly reducing its recruitment standards. The US obesity crisis, together with young men underperforming educationally, the effects of COVID, and the extensive criminalization of young men, has greatly increased the amount of people that do not meet even the relaxed standards; only 23% of young US men and women meet them. In addition, the bad treatment of military veterans seems to have decreased the number of military families willing to recommend service; an underfunded Veterans Administration and all those Iraqi War stop-loss orders will have left a bad taste in the mouths of many veterans. The abject failures in Iraq and Afghanistan may have also reduced the allure of the military to young people. Less than one in ten young Americans show any propensity to want to join the US military, even with large cash bonuses and help in paying for education.
Or maybe Gen Z just aren’t that interested in dying, and the thought of facing a victorious war-hardened Russian military doesn’t help with that. Over 80% of US Gen Z’s consider that the US is “on the wrong track” so why would they want to fight and risk death for that country? At the same time, 40,000 Russian young men are volunteering for the Russian military each month! Will the Europeans step up to the plate? The UK military only has 76,000 troops, Germany 184,000, France 120,000, even Poland only has 292,000 and the last thing they want to do is fight the Russian army. The many pictures of destroyed German Leopards and British Challengers, with the few US Abrams kept out of harm’s way, have shown the supposed Western technological superiority to be a chimera
So, who’s the next proxy population that can be used to fight against Russia, Iran or China. In the Middle East there are the repeatedly suckered Kurds, but they are a small force. There is also the fully indoctrinated in Arab-hating Israeli population, but their weekend-warrior army seems more suited for murdering and subjugating civilians than a modern industrial scale war. Their numbers are also limited, and they are surrounded by populations many times their own size. The Saudis have made peace with the Iranians, and anyway they prefer to be the funder of wars not the victims. There is India which seems to be quite stupidly sidling up more to the West these days, especially against China, but it is a long-term strong friend of Russia. What about a Taiwan that is certainly being boosted up to take on China! A quick declaration of full independence will bring on a bloody Chinese invasion that can be used to galvanize nations against Chinese “aggression”. Unfortunately, the other Asian nations predominantly see the Taiwan issue as a domestic Chinese one and are not about to throw away the hugely beneficial economic linkages they have with the largest economy in the world (on a PPP basis).
As for the Taiwanese themselves, they seem to have little yearning for being the new US sacrificial lambs. The current warmongering in-power DPP are not doing well after eight years in office, with the KMT which prefers peaceful relations (and even possibly reunification) with China now neck and neck with the DPP. With support for the very much centrist TPP falling away and seeming to move to the KMT, the elections on January 13th are very much wide open. The most probable outcome is the DPP losing its majority and having to rule with the TPP, which would most probably force a reduction in tensions with China. If the KMT wins, the US will lose big as Taiwan re-establishes friendly relations with China. Whichever outcome, the possible use of the Taiwanese population as a proxy force against China will become much less possible.
Perhaps the Taiwanese DPP government should have focused on fixing the more prosaic problem of youth stuck with low pay on an expensive island, rather than stir up trouble with China, if it wants the support of young Taiwanese? Something the US and European governments should perhaps also focus on if they want the support of their youth.
What will the US do without a viable proxy force, and the young both at home and abroad refusing to fight to save its Empire? This problem may very well be put on the back burner in the election year of 2024, but it will raise its head once again in 2025; especially if the Ukrainians are soundly defeated by the Russians. Will we see a repeat of the WW1 US fascist state across both the US and the major European nations, will that even be possible given the level of internal strife that is escalating the most in the US but is also becoming an issue within other Western nations? Such a probability may be much greater under a Democrat administration beholden to the internationalist elites and infested with the neoconservative warmongers. As in 2016, Trump may represent the best chance of a relatively peaceful four years. Those TDS-demented liberals who see Trump as the greatest threat to US “democracy” need to look in the mirror and do some soul-searching about the nature and actions of the current and past Democrat administrations. As elections approach in Germany (2025) and France (2027) it will be interesting to see if the anti-war AfD (Germany) and the National Front (France) are allowed to stand in them.
Time is on the side of China, Russia and Iran and it is therefore not them that need to act, but the US and the West. Without a cause celebre the West may have little ability to gird their own populations or those of proxies into fighting a war to maintain the Western Empire. The rapid fall of “French” Africa from that nation’s clutches may be indicative of things to come.
The Western elites, especially the US ones, may come to rue their arrogance in bringing colonial levels of exploitation to their own populations and throwing away erstwhile allies such as Hussein’s Iraq. The unconditional support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza by Western governments is also driving a wedge between them and the very domestic youth they rely on to fight their wars, as well as turn so many countries away from the West.
What a great portrait of the global situation. Highly recommended by me, for whatever that's worth.
great overview roger.. thank you..