What happens with war when the money runs out?

There was a canard about the American war in Vietnam that I could never verify; I was too young during that phase of the conflict, and it is always difficult to get to the truth of what actually happened during any war.

The story was told that for every combatant in the field there were 16 working at a base somewhere. By this logic there is a legion of workers in the background of Russia’s war on Ukraine, (almost all of them supplied by the US), and like the first Gulf War there are countries that have sent vast amounts of money to fund the Ukrainian side.

To take this a step further, the US has in reality entered the war, and there are countries that have outsourced war between the Russians and Ukrainians. The outsourcing of war is a singularly important matter that we can touch on later on below.

At least two things stand out from the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. In the former there seems to be a war exhaustion (in the trenches) or a war exasperation (in Europe and the US). In Palestine we may be approaching the point where the world will say: how much destruction, killing and dying is enough?

It cannot carry on forever. The rest of the world may underestimate the “how much killing and destruction is enough” part. There are two reasons for this statement.

First, there is a ready and quite convenient belief that Muslims are in a hurry to meet their maker, hence the culture of martyrdom. It is easily forgotten that Jews and Christians are also dying to meet their maker. Put differently, there is no limit to how many people should die because it fast-tracks the conveyor system to prostration before the big chair.

The second point probably contradicts the first, but that’s OK: as Walt Whitman said, “I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”...

Across the world, among the countries that in effect control the postwar liberal international order (Western Europe, North America and Japan), populations are ageing and there has been a decrease in obeisance to the church, school, family and political establishment.

One outcome of globalisation, the one I am especially positive about, is that people have become freer, and accept more and more that geography is not destiny — unless you travel with a passport issued by an African country. One outcome is that many young people are no longer willing to volunteer for military service and die for king and country.

There is a lot of data on ageing populations and what this means for military recruitment. The interested reader may want to start with Wenke Apt’s Germany’s New Security Demographics: Military Recruitment in the Era of Population Aging.

Apt makes strong arguments, asks good questions and provides solid answers, which leads one to an important question: if we can’t rely on “our own” people, where are the soldiers going to come from?

Before we move on, it is worth mentioning that there has been a general decline in religious obeisance, but we probably should not discount rising Christian evangelism in the US, and the religious basis of Israel’s war.

The US provides those 16 men at the base, and Israel the ones in the trenches. There are echoes of this in the far-eastern European conflict, though echoes bounce differently off different surfaces.

Ukrainian soldiers win small battles across the front, but they may not win the war with Russia. In a veritable plea to the mythical 16 men, earlier this week Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed concern about early promises of “open-ended” support, compared with declining US and European support.

In a video call last Wednesday Zelensky worried that the US and EU would themselves become weaker with weakening support for Ukraine: “The free world vitally needs to ... maintain support for those whose freedom is being attacked,” he said.

“Ukraine has strength. And I ask you to be as strong as you can be.”

One route out of the shortage of recruits, declining funds and national boots on the ground is to outsource war. This is not new.

Early in the era of globalisation, in 1996, Britain inserted “the logic of the market” into the ethos of state and government. For instance, the British army refused to intervene in the Great Lakes refugee crisis in Africa because it wanted to stay “within budget”.

For most of the 1990s the UK led the way in “outsourcing war”, hiring private companies to fight actual war in the trenches and perform nonmilitary tasks such as engineering back at base. The Labour

Party considered this necessary for “national security”.

While the 1990s saw a proliferation of private military forces

— Blackwater and Executive Outcomes roll off the tongue as easily plausible deniability — they have been around for centuries.

This market logic gives states a way out; concepts such as sovereignty, international law and even the Geneva Conventions matter very little to private corporations.

Unless, of course, a state sees itself as untouchable, beyond the reach of law, and considers itself a cause, not a state.