Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to What happened a few years ago in the Balkans shows otherwise.

Re: What happened in the Balkans...
Fox — (archived)

What didn't happen in the Balkans actually leans toward supporting my point - and I will attempt to explain. (In the meantime, recall that you and I agree on the topic of US basing in Europe - we just have different reasons.)

The brutality of the Milosevic regime in "the former Yugoslavia" was not an attack to be defended against. It was a crime against humanity and against international law, and needed to be stopped and the perpetrator(s) arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced accordingly.

A standing army is not a police force. A standing army designed, equipped, and ordered to defend against massive conventional attack is not capable of rapid response, of detaching a smaller force from the main body to intervene and stop the commission of a crime or to arrest the person(s) responsible.

What didn't happen in the Balkans, but should have, was the result of inertia: political inertia and strategic inertia. Europe's politicians and Europe's military were still in Cold War mode, in defensive posture. It takes a long time, even in a single country run by a dictator, to reorganize and equip an armed force for offense. Now multiply that by the number of countries in NATO then, and add a large factor for Germany's understandable reluctance to send its soldiers anywhere outside Germany... especially into a Europe that hasn't yet forgotten the last time German boots stood on their soil. Europe wasn't weak, but their forces and their thinking were obsolete.

All the noise in this thread about how much the US spends, and the rest of NATO (including Canada, who were still members last I looked) does not spend, to defend Europe completely misses the point that military defense is not what is needed now. Continuing to react to new problems with old habits of thought merely perpetuates the problem.

Look at it this way: not a single armed serviceman or -woman, let alone the tens of thousands stationed withn US borders, nor any of the armaments at their command, was able to deter or defend against the attacks of 9/11/01.

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