I discovered Jeff Medcalf’s blog, Caerdroia, not long ago and immediately put it into my favorites list. His politics are farther right than mine and he appears to be somewhat more bellicose than I am but I find his analyses clever and interesting. The blog name, by the way, is from a Dr. Who episode.
In a recent post, Coalitions, Jeff analyzes the prospects for future coalitions:
The prospect of future “coalitions of the willing” in any meaningful sense are almost nil. The only powers in the world that can deploy significant forces anywhere in the world and support them indefinitely are the United States and the United Kingdom. Russia has enough troops and logistics assets, but no cash to sustain them in combat. China has a large body of troops, but insufficient logistics assets to support them outside except in SE Asia. France’s capabilities are pretty much limited to the French Foreign Legion and maybe a couple of battallions if stretched, and then they have serious logistics issues. Germany has insufficient forces and insufficient logistics. Japan has constitutional restrictions that prevent sending force abroad. No one else has significant military forces in the first place.
Read the whole thing.
There are a number of ways in which coalitions can function other than the way that recent military coalitions have as in the Gulf War and recently in Iraq and the case of Poland can illustrate this. From The Weekly Standard:
Who even knew Poland had special forces? For a while, not many. The Polish government waited three years before publicly disclosing GROM’s existence. Standing for Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno Mobilnego (Operational Mobile Response Group), the name actually stems from a special-forces commander, Gromoslaw Czempinski, who, during the first Gulf War, led a Polish unit into Western Iraq to rescue a group of CIA operatives. One of the other men on that secret mission was Slawomir Petelicki–the father of GROM.
“GROM was my idea,” General Petelicki says in his husky, accented voice. “I presented it to the new democratic government” in 1991 “and because I liked to give honor to the commander of my unit, I named it after Gromoslaw.” (Grom also means thunder in Polish.) Petelicki, now retired from the military, spoke from Warsaw where he is now an independent consultant for, among others, Ernst & Young. It’s quite a change of pace for a man once described in Jane’s Intelligence Review as “his country’s James Bond and Rambo wrapped neatly into one daunting package.” (Petelicki also serves as chairman of the Special Forces Foundation. “I try to help former commandos and discourage them from going into organized crime–where there are many lucrative offers for work.”)
Poland while a substantial country can’t hope to apply the kinds of resources that a United States, Russia, China, or India can apply to its military. But by concentrating on particular areas of expertise, “niches” as Jeff calls them, in Poland’s case special forces, Poland can be a valuable member of a coalition.
It’s been known since the time of Adam Smith that specialization was the key to efficiency and there’s no reason that this can’t apply to military coalitions as well as to businesses. One country could specialize in special forces, another in artillery, another in logistical support. The key to this is coordination, command and control. I think that this is a trend that should be encouraged. This kind of specialization within an alliance framework like NATO could result in substantial efficiencies for all of the parties involved. And interdependence provides its own kind of security.
I think I’ll try to enlist the help of folks more knowledgeable than I on the military to report on this more in the next few weeks.
