Greetings Friends,
I guess this would theoretically be another email to write but I don't really anyone to write to so I'll just send it to the void of the internet instead; maybe someone will plagiarize it and do something useful with this information or something. So It is kind of stupid to call the present global situation a cold war when there is a hot war (the hottest war since Korea or Vietnam pretty much) going on but that's the closest terminology that we have. A lot of people have suggested that the primary result is the regionalization of globalization; i.e. the entire world will not participate in one global economic system instead they will choose to participate in one of two or three economic global systems; in the short term this will likely cause a recession and exarcerbate the inflation caused by speculative investments (cryptocurrency mostly) and the war itself; in the long term I don't really think it must be bad or even is likely to be bad on a basic level. Having two giant competing economic systems will probably create much faster innovative technologies and so forth overall (a la the Space Race).......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Unfortunately I think a big focus of those technologies will be militarily based. Since the war in Ukraine has devolved into an attrition based artillery duel and Russia fires 10-20 times as many shells as Ukraine there should theoretically be a requirement by each government on Russia's border to both bolster their artillery technology itself and the reserve of simple ammunition and related resources just in anticipation of future wars. This is very similar to the pre WWI arms race and also the alliance systems created at the time; it does not guarantee a larger major war but it does imply a high likelihood of that happening. I think the only way to stop such a war is place nuclear weapons in all of those countries essentially (which winds up being around 60% of Europe having "Defensive" Nuclear Weapons in them, possibly more than the Cold War but I'm not entirely sure on that front)....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The other primary focus of military technology that we've learned from the war is that Tanks are no longer offensively viable and drones are the king of the battlefield; this is the same exact thing that happened in Nagorno-Karabakh so we need a new Clausewitz of Drones to emerge to dictate the theoretical strategy in that regard. One thing I've pushed since the early 2000s is that active defense can probably win conflicts in 10-1 or 20-1 odds situations; this apparently has become a more mainstream train of thought (I don't exactly know why but it probably has something to do with Fallujah like battles and so forth); but if the notion of defense being considerably stronger than offense becomes the popular train of thought by military analysts it virtually necessitates a massive arms race of defensive technology both Artillery based and Drone Based; Aircraft is too expensive to develop, use, and maintain (and also hasn't really played a huge role in Ukraine so far) so only superpowers can do so; ergo you fall back on cheaper options. .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
It appears that the urban city is the best fortification in the present world and only countries that are willing to completely flatten them with ungodly amounts of artillery shells can really negate that (still at great expense); so will urbanization itself become a means of fortification in the future? Interesting concept; if you read Ralph D. Sawyer's Ancient Chinese Warfare he talks about this same thing happening thousands of years ago which why China has like 300 cities with over a million people in them now and also gigantic ancient city walls a la the Theodosian Walls in Constantinople..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
It should be noted that all of this implies that offensive wars are very difficult to succeed with unless the opponent is vastly inferior on every technological front; globalization itself has sort of flattened the technological curve worldwide so those sorts of advantages simply won't exist in the future on land (Air and Sea Based Wars can still be dictated by the superior technological force, of course said wars will almost certainly be between two extremely powerful countries in the vicinity of the Philippines); so this would be another suggestion of a Cold War, not a MAD based Cold War because Nuclear Weapons are just not on the table for most nations (Russia may have used Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine had they been pushed back, since that didn't happen it would strictly be a taboo breaking maneuver which doesn't seem that profitable in the long run).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Aside for whatever reason the paragraph breaks aren't working for this post so I just put periods instead.
