One Small Thing About the Big Thing
Factors of Victory // 金門調酒 // Kinmen Cocktails #15
Today, we would like to discuss Ray Dalio’s piece “The Big Thing: We Are In A World War That Isn’t Going To End Anytime Soon.” We think it is an excellently written piece, and certainly agree with most of it. Of course, we often disagree with Ray on his positions regarding China.
Putting all that aside, we want to point out that Ray is amiss on point number four of his article:
4. As history has shown, the most reliable indicator of which country is likely to win [a large conventional war] is not which is most powerful; it is which can endure the most pain the longest.
That certainly is a factor in the US-Iran war, with the president assuring the American public that the war will be over in a couple of weeks, gas prices will then decline, and we will go back to our normal prosperous times. There are many good indicators that point to whether a country has the capacity to endure the pain for an extended period of time, such as popularity polls (especially in democracies) and/or the power of government leaders to remain in control (especially in autocracies, where popular opinion doesn’t matter as much). In fighting wars, winning doesn’t occur until surrender. That is because it is impossible to eliminate all enemies. When China entered the Korean War against the United States at a time when China had very little power and the United States was a nuclear power, Mao supposedly said, “They can’t kill us all,” meaning that the enemy can’t win if there are people who keep fighting. The lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are clear. Winning happens when the winning country can get out with the losing country no longer remaining a threat. While the United States appears to be the most powerful country in the world, it is also the most overextended major power and the weakest at withstanding pain over a long period of time.
The strongest single predictor of victory in major interstate war since 1900 has precisely been which country is more powerful. Large-scale systemic conflict is more often won by the nations that possess superior manpower, military assets, economies, and logistics.
The victors in WWI, WWII, the India-Pakistan War, the Falklands War, and the Gulf War were certainly the more powerful states.
What are the outliers? Some analysts may point to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. While Russia at the time was given more respect as an established imperial power, the fact is that the Japanese outspent the Russians over the course of the war. Adding to this, due to the Russian Empire’s unique geography, Japan had more military assets in the theater of war than did Russia, and Japan handily won. It would be strange to say that the side with more money, resources, manpower, and military assets committed to the conflict was not the more powerful party.
Ray brings up the Korean War as an example. UN/US forces certainly were more powerful than China and North Korea. But Ray’s point is about winning, and Mao never won. In fact, he lost his son on the Korean front. Both Washington and Beijing decided to call it quits, which worked well enough for the Americans. The war was started by the North Koreans to take over the entire peninsula, at the time a peripheral interest in the ongoing Cold War.
There are then examples Ray points out, such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But these were never the type of large conventional interstate wars that Ray is talking about in his post. These were quite small-scale counterinsurgencies, which play by a whole different set of rules than large-scale systemic warfare.
We would even take Iraq out of the equation because the insurgency, in fact, did not win - the US and the new Iraqi government are the victors and defended those gains by defeating ISIS.
What of willingness to endure pain? During WWII, Japan and Nazi Germany displayed incredible pain endurance - they simply would not surrender until functionally incapable of resistance. It is hard to argue that the Imperial Japanese Army, defending the first (Okinawa) and second (Iwo Jima, the Marianas) island chains to the death, was not willing to endure pain to its bitter end. The same can be said of the kamikazes.
In January 1945, the Nazi war machine was collapsing on all fronts. Despite this catastrophic failure, the German people were motivated to designate their towns and cities as fortresses and initiate the Volkssturm, pouring teenagers and old men into the meat grinder to win the final battle. The Italians? Not so much.
Our Soviet allies fought bitterly; our Chinese allies not so much. And what do we make of Great Britain? Her European alliance defeated, she stood alone against the Nazi onslaught in 1940, after the fall of France, yet before Pearl Harbor. Her peoples suffered daily bombings, sinking of vessels, extreme rationing, malnutrition, and total war on the land, at sea, and in the air. Yet British freedom persevered and a “weak” democracy never blinked.
Willingness to endure pain is, of course, an important factor in war. But to claim that it is the most important reliable factor does not survive a cursory Google search.
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