ONGOING DEMILITARIZATION OF THE WEST

 I sense that more than a few of the almost aware look at all the money and weapons we are pouring into Ukraine as somehow contributing to the defense of the West. It's an interesting view of what has been going on now since 1990; the endless draining away of Western military capabilities around the world. Every tank or fighting vehicle or missile sent to Ukraine was taken from the military stores of the countries doing the giving and there is NO PRODUCTION LINE replacing any of it. Hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and millions of rounds of small arms ammunition are gone and there is no replacement for any of it because at the top, in essence, nobody really believes that Russia will attack them. All those thousands of Javelin missiles that are gone? There is no replacement tooling up to replace them quickly. We got an insight into how long helicopters and fighters will last on a modern battlefield. There is no plan to make quantity a bigger part of military procurement and some countries deem themselves well armed if they have 18 4th or 5th generation jets. This is a real look under the procurement hood weapons replacement.

The UK could not begin to pull off another rescue of the Falklands if any devious Latin American country decided to take up residence there. It is of course not simply due to the lack of means but more to the lack of national Will. There is no-will-to-power anywhere in the West now beyond political power. 

What we do see is that irredentism is once again a force that stalks the world and leaves ruin in its wake. Russia claims to have acted in Ukraine in retaliation/response to the crimes being committed by Ukraine's government and Army against people of Russian descent living in the Ukraine. The history of what brought them there is one that should be examined very closely by the policy makers, but isn't. The same irredentism populated the Baltic Republics with large Russian ethnic minorities as a deliberate act by Stalin and the USSR. 

Irredentism, a word so foreign to us these days that every time I type it I get spellchecked by my writing program, is not new. It was what Adolph claimed when he claimed the Sudatenland for Germany and demanded that the world give way to German's sway over ethnic Germans held captive in other countries. It was a lesson the East learned very damned well and you saw every single eastern European country save E. Germany kick out every single German they could find. There are no large ethnic residue populations of Germans anywhere east of Germany's frontier. They were all driven out at the end of WWII.

It's interesting to speculate what the world will look like a in a hundred years time. Will the Europeans vanish altogether or will their current refugee populations prove to be as fleeting as the African populations in Arabia after centuries of bringing African slaves to the Middle East. And no, you will look perhaps but you won't find.