I’ve been following the decline of the British military for at least a few years now, but somehow it skipped me that we’re down to just 70,000 personnel now. Britain looks increasingly brittle as an imperialist force.
They’re certainly not a sole, independent imperialist force (though no less imperialist for it) anymore. That 70,000 can be thought of as American auxiliaries for their various wars of terror- a few thousand Brits, a few thousand coming from France, Canada, Germany, and all sorts of various NATO countries or US protectorates, and you have a party- moreso because they aren’t there, generally, for wars of traditional occupation and imperial administration as well- their MO is waging a war of terror, destroying vital infrastructure for utilities, killing civilians, bombing government workers and defending forces, and funding and instigating terrorists in the meantime.
For such methods- wars of not even colonial, but neo-colonial exploitation- it works well enough; their goal isn’t genuinely to stabilize places they destroy, after all- just blow shit up and terrorize the population, that’s good enough. In many ways they’re little better than a glorified, juiced-up al-Qaeda the way they work. Against any peer state- one with actual advanced native defense industries, which can actually fend for itself against airstrikes (not letting the west have the monopoly over airspace they’re used to), one which can’t be starved out and has depth they’ll actually have to work against- it all falls apart. Hell, even before Ukraine this was known in some considerable extent- the US can and constantly does terrorize other nations, but once they moved past the rampaging, ransacking phase- they have consistently fallen flat on their face since Vietnam, if not possibly Korea- in recent years the world has seen that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc…
All they have is terror- though they are capable of causing a lot of that, for sure- through airstrikes, piracy, terrorism, or the threat of MAD.
I’ve been following the decline of the British military for at least a few years now, but somehow it skipped me that we’re down to just 70,000 personnel now. Britain looks increasingly brittle as an imperialist force.
They’re certainly not a sole, independent imperialist force (though no less imperialist for it) anymore. That 70,000 can be thought of as American auxiliaries for their various wars of terror- a few thousand Brits, a few thousand coming from France, Canada, Germany, and all sorts of various NATO countries or US protectorates, and you have a party- moreso because they aren’t there, generally, for wars of traditional occupation and imperial administration as well- their MO is waging a war of terror, destroying vital infrastructure for utilities, killing civilians, bombing government workers and defending forces, and funding and instigating terrorists in the meantime.
For such methods- wars of not even colonial, but neo-colonial exploitation- it works well enough; their goal isn’t genuinely to stabilize places they destroy, after all- just blow shit up and terrorize the population, that’s good enough. In many ways they’re little better than a glorified, juiced-up al-Qaeda the way they work. Against any peer state- one with actual advanced native defense industries, which can actually fend for itself against airstrikes (not letting the west have the monopoly over airspace they’re used to), one which can’t be starved out and has depth they’ll actually have to work against- it all falls apart. Hell, even before Ukraine this was known in some considerable extent- the US can and constantly does terrorize other nations, but once they moved past the rampaging, ransacking phase- they have consistently fallen flat on their face since Vietnam, if not possibly Korea- in recent years the world has seen that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc…
All they have is terror- though they are capable of causing a lot of that, for sure- through airstrikes, piracy, terrorism, or the threat of MAD.