[extropy-chat] urban sprawl as defense

Tue Aug 31 20:45:53 UTC 2004

--- "J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew at ceruleansystems.com>
wrote:

> France, for all intents and purposes, has been
> reduced to a bit player 
> on the world scene.  

>The French military has
> negligible ability to 
> project force outside their borders.  They have
> about as much right to 
> be in the security council as a country like India. 
> The problem is 
> that removing them would leave the UK as the only
> permanent member from 
> Europe.

> The UK is the only European country 
> with substantial military projection capability, but
> because they align 
> so closely with the US the mainland Europeans would
> not be happy with 
> them as the only European voice in the security
> council.

     Although I might have started this particular
thread about kicking France off of the security
council for being pansies, I have since seen some
objective data that has caused me to withdraw my
objections to France. Here is the results of my
research utilizing 
http://www.nationmaster.com
&
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

     Assuming that Permanent Security Council members
should be the 5 most militarily powerful nations, I
used 2 criteria in my analysis. My first criterion was
military personnel. A country needs soldiers in order
to fight a war, if only to push the big red button. So
the top 25 nations in terms of military manpower:

Rank	Nation	Military Personnel
1	China	2,810,000
2	Russia	1,520,000
3	United States	1,366,000
4	India	1,303,000
5	Korea, South	683,000
6	Pakistan	612,000
7	Turkey	610,000
8	Iran	513,000
9	Vietnam	484,000
10	Egypt	448,000
11	Ethiopia	352,000
12	Burma	344,000
13	Syria	316,000
14	Ukraine	304,000
15	Thailand	301,000
16	Indonesia	297,000
17	France	294,000
18	Brazil	288,000
19	Italy	251,000
20	Japan	237,000
21	Germany	221,000
22	Poland	217,000
23	United Kingdom	212,000
24	Romania	207,000
25	Saudi Arabia	202,000

The second criteria I used was military expenditures
in absolute dollars. After all the most well trained
combatant is of no use unless his hardware is up to
par. So the top 25 countries ranked by military
expenditure are as follows:

Rank    Nation     Military Expenditures(billions $US)

1	United States	$276.70 
2	China	$55.91 
3	France	$46.50 
4	Japan	$39.52 
5	Germany	$38.80 
6	United Kingdom	$31.70 
7	Italy	$20.20 
8	Saudi Arabia	$18.30 
9	Brazil	$13.41 
10	Korea, South	$13.09 
11	India	$11.52 
12	Australia	$11.39 
13	Iran	$9.70 
14	Israel	$8.97 
15	Spain	$8.60 
16	Turkey	$8.10 
17	Canada	$7.86 
18	Taiwan	$7.57 
19	Netherlands	$6.50 
20	Greece	$6.12 
21	Korea, North	$5.22 
22	Singapore	$4.47 
23	Sweden	$4.40 
24	Argentina	$4.30 
25	Egypt	$4.04 

Then I calculated a statistic by simply multiplying
these two figures together that I will call aggregate
military power.

Rank  Nation Aggregate Military Power (manpowerXmoney)
 1    United States	377972200
 2    China	157107100
 3    Russia	72777600
 4    India	15010560
 5    France	13671000
 6    Japan	9366240
 7    Korea, South	8943406.9
 8    Germany	8574800
 9    United Kingdom	6720400
 10   Italy	5070200
 11   Turkey	4941000
 12   Brazil	3861504
 13   Saudi Arabia	3696600
 14   Egypt	1809920

    So assuming that the Security Council should
consist of the nations with the greatest ability to
extend military power thoughout the globe, France is
still a very powerful nation that definitely deserves
its place on the Council. 
     According to my analysis it ranks as the 5th most
militarily powerful country in the world. The
surprising thing is that with the exception of
swapping India for the UK, the UN Security Council IS
comprised of the most militarily powerful countries in
the world. Based upon my now objective evaluation of
France (I still enjoy making fun of the cheese-eating
surrender monkeys), any weakness attributed to them is
merely perceived or otherwise intangible. (perhaps
psychological or related to covert intelligence, etc.)
As they clearly have the military personnel and budget
to play with the big boys.
     Also now I think that India should replace the UK
on the Security Council (although since the US and UK
are such close allies, this might hurt the United
State's interests somewhat since the UK seems to be
happy to play the role of synchophant and support us
no matter what crazy scheme for world domination we
want to engage in. Then again the purpose of UN is to
ensure that a global war (like WWII) is not fought
again and not neccessarily that the United State's
interests are always supported. Plus there is the old
chestnut of "keeping friends close but enemies
closer".
      So was what happened in Iraq a UN failure? No,
not unless you consider the fact that the UN did not
deploy peacekeeping troops to defend Iraq against the
US a failure. What happened was Bush & Cheney were too
eager to invade Iraq to wait until they had a tenable
"causus belli". (After all they could only work their
no-bid Halliburton Scam during the 4 years they had in
office so they needed to do the hard sell.) Thus, when
the UN failed to help Dubya in his self-proclaimed
"crusade", the NeoCon spin doctors told everybody that
the United Nations was weak, obsolete, and
ineffectual. When really, it was just doing it's job
of preventing an unneccesary conflict aimed at
inflating the value of General Dynamics and
Halliburton stocks while settling a personal beef that
the Bushes had with Hussein. In other words, Chirac
was just less gullible than Blair and the American
Public.
     So the People of the United States were tricked
into wasting our military resources (an euphemism for
soldier's lives and money) to reconquer an already
defeated enemy (those pesky Iraquis... why haven't we
sown their fields with salt yet? oh yeah, it's a
desert.) in order to save ourselves from imaginary
weapons of mass distruction. Anybody want to
pre-emptively invade Mars to protect ourselves from
Marvin and his Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space
Modulator?   

=====
The Avantguardian 

"He stands like some sort of pagan god or deposed tyrant. Staring out over the city he's sworn to . . .to stare out over and it's evident just by looking at him that he's got some pretty heavy things on his mind."

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