Before getting started, JAXA’s Space Solar Power System reminds me more of SimCity 2000’s Microwave Power Station’s than some War To End All Wars But Won’t. After all, the ensuing widespread fire is infinitely more compelling than watching cannon fodder being mowed down like it’s another day at the office.
This isn’t strictly about Gundam 00 in much the same way that the series isn’t about Celestial Being. Just like how the narrator and token characters are only mouthpieces for the writers, beating us over the head with the Serious Stick from a flimsy pulpit of credibility built upon extrapolating trends at most 50 years into the future and calling it 300. Just like how power blocs exploit it for political and technological gain. Just like how the members hijack it to deal with their own issues.
And just like how I’m commandeering it for fun and profit.
Referring to the other day, my own conspiracy theory about ripping the UN logo is that there is no room for such an organization in a world ruled by three superpowers. So they took to the stars, and returned with a military not effectively owned by one country.
Early on, there was no disputing that they brought the beat down in style, and while there have been short and medium term gains, at no point should anyone believe that they are witnessing anything approximating an empire rising, let alone the Second Coming.
Violence might have been the answer a couple hundred years ago. Or even about 63 years ago, but let’s go with a couple hundred. When a lot of combat was still hand to hand, one needed a lot of soldiers to get anything done.
The side effect was, a fighting force could be a decent occupying force on conquered land. Fresh from defeat, now army-less, generally demoralized, and with more enemy soldiers walking around than any citizen could take in a bar fight, whatever terms and ideas the other side had suddenly became a lot more appealing.
Since then, we’ve gotten pretty good at doing more with less, to the extent that relatively few resources have to be committed to just ruin an entire military’s day. Chalk it up to the march of specialization, but as armed forces got really efficient at blowing stuff up and killing lots of people using less of their own, they became increasingly bad at policing and maintaining hegemony.
Put another way, one can make peace with cruise missiles, but one may find it difficult to keep the peace with cruise missiles.
If history has any say in all of this, the correct way to get any power to disarm is to destroy their military in its entirety, kill a decent chunk of the population, and leave them in a state of such destitution that they can’t even afford weapons, let alone manufacture them. Maybe it’s a lesson that everyone sort of knows but just seems totally barbaric to act upon. The civilized way to fight a war military engagement is to blow up the other side’s toys, then essentially go home with crossed fingers and the hope that aid money will not go towards buying more arms.
But even on that count, Celestial Being is doing it wrong, the first step being destroying whole branches of a military instead of some slap on the wrist of a battle. So while 10 minute steamrolls are pretty, that’s all they are.
3 Comments
Certain European militaries have moved, if not quite in the opposite direction, at least in a different one, becoming heavily-armed police forces ill-suited to war war. When you consider the relatively priveleged and peaceful existence we Western Europeans have lived since World War II, it’s easy to see why.
Your penultimate paragraph reminds me of a long-running debate surrounding the Versailles Treaty (post WWI settlement). IIRC, the argument runs a little like this: said treaty irritated and humiliated Germany by taking away superflous land and nominally forbidding the possession of a military, but it failed to seriously damage the country’s industrial capacity or to put in place a stable political system. The WWI allies should’ve either avoided humiliating Germany altogether, or broken the country up and instituted long-term foreign rule.
I am not well-placed to judge this argument, having abandoned History shortly after encountering it.
Reminds me to pick up Gundam 00 again - dropped it for a while now.
The Germans weren’t really shelled halfway back to the stone age, it’s true, but at the end of the day no one was on the ground to enforce anything. It’s a lot easier to get away with stuff when no one’s looking over your shoulder.
To effect any long term change with force is tantamount to conquest and occupation, which is unacceptable given that it violates sovereignty. The consequence is that today war accomplishes nothing other than blowing stuff up, which I think is something amounting to progress.
I don’t know about some forces becoming more police like. To me, that amounts to a decrease in destructive power, and no one looks to be downgrading.