Is there any point in keeping NATO around?

[Kyriakos]

Take it away and you've not just got 100,000 soldiers or so out of a job, but everyone employed to make their kit, cook their food, sell them beer on a night out, cut their hair... there are better economists than me here, but I can't think that there are many better ways of stimulating the economy than military spending, given soldiers' general spending habits.

Even so, with Erdo and Davu we will soon not have any serious standing army (or country) on the other side anyway, so we will more than gladly stop maintaining our own one as well ^^

Although Erdo may call for reinforcements from Cuba.

 

[ArguCa]

Even so, with Erdo and Davu we will soon not have any serious standing army (or country) on the other side anyway, so we will more than gladly stop maintaining our own one as well ^^

Although Erdo may call for reinforcements from Cuba.

You should have realized that Turkey is not threat to Greece. But you guys obsessed with military, welcomed PKK, kurdish terrorists and trained them in greece and brought your own end.

Tbh, I'm not even sorry for you guys. Hope guys get what you deserve

And dream on about collapsing of Turkey

 

[Borachio]

I think there is. And I think Russia should join NATO.

 

[Ajidica]

Take it away and you've not just got 100,000 soldiers or so out of a job, but everyone employed to make their kit, cook their food, sell them beer on a night out, cut their hair... there are better economists than me here, but I can't think that there are many better ways of stimulating the economy than military spending, given soldiers' general spending habits.

To be fair though, once built tanks and ships don't really add much to an economy. Obviously, some degree of military spending and support can be desirable, but what provides more benefit to an economy: a F-35 (around $100 million each, not counting maintenance costs which I believe are astronomical) or an equivalent amount in education?

This sort of reminds me of the Yes Minister episode where Hacker has the idea to reintroduce conscription to solve unemployment. While it does sort of accomplish that goal, there are better ways to go about it.

 

[Flying Pig]

Oh, absolutely right. My point was somewhat political though, because the sort of people past whom you would have to smuggle Keynesianism tend to be the sort of people who wouldn't vote for more state spending on schools or hospitals but might vote for more guns and tanks. To my mind the entire economic value of a tank is that someone has to drive it, fuel it and fix it ad nauseam. Mind you I'll admit to a native scepticism about any weapon of war that can't be dropped out of an aircraft.

 

[Commodore]

Take it away and you've not just got 100,000 soldiers or so out of a job, but everyone employed to make their kit, cook their food, sell them beer on a night out, cut their hair... there are better economists than me here, but I can't think that there are many better ways of stimulating the economy than military spending, given soldiers' general spending habits.

Then most of the spending should be going into raising their salaries instead of the foreign weapons purchases that Greece has been making since their economic troubles began. Buying submarines and tanks from Germany as well as importing all of their standard-issue battle rifles doesn't put more money in a soldier's pocket for spending. As far as I am aware, the Greek military uses all foreign equipment and has no domestically designed weapon systems. Relying solely on imports to supply your armed forces is not only a huge security risk, but it is definitely much more expensive than designing and producing your own weapon systems as well.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Then most of the spending should be going into raising their salaries instead of the foreign weapons purchases that Greece has been making since their economic troubles began. Buying submarines and tanks from Germany as well as importing all of their standard-issue battle rifles doesn't put more money in a soldier's pocket for spending. As far as I am aware, the Greek military uses all foreign equipment and has no domestically designed weapon systems. Relying solely on imports to supply your armed forces is not only a huge security risk, but it is definitely much more expensive than designing and producing your own weapon systems as well.

But it's good for Germany, and isn't that what the EU is all about?

 

[Commodore]

But it's good for Germany, and isn't that what the EU is all about?

Sure. Good for the US too since Greece has shown an interest recently in acquiring US-made M1 tanks and M4A1 rifles to replace their Leopard 2s and H&K G3s.

 

[Flying Pig]

Then most of the spending should be going into raising their salaries instead of the foreign weapons purchases that Greece has been making since their economic troubles began. Buying submarines and tanks from Germany as well as importing all of their standard-issue battle rifles doesn't put more money in a soldier's pocket for spending. As far as I am aware, the Greek military uses all foreign equipment and has no domestically designed weapon systems. Relying solely on imports to supply your armed forces is not only a huge security risk, but it is definitely much more expensive than designing and producing your own weapon systems as well.

I'm not convinced by the argument that imported military goods are a security risk. British ration packs (or at least some of them) are made in New Zealand, but I don't think anyone's really worried about the Kiwi's poisoning our bacon and beans. Of course, if the strategic situation changed or we were talking about a war in which it might become impossible to ship food from NZ to the UK, we might have to change that. In the same way there's nothing wrong, security-wise, with the Greek army using German rifles (though most countries who use foreign-designed weapons make their own under license, don't they?) as long as they're confident that Germany will always be on their side.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm not convinced by the argument that imported military goods are a security risk. British ration packs (or at least some of them) are made in New Zealand, but I don't think anyone's really worried about the Kiwi's poisoning our bacon and beans. Of course, if the strategic situation changed or we were talking about a war in which it might become impossible to ship food from NZ to the UK, we might have to change that. In the same way there's nothing wrong, security-wise, with the Greek army using German rifles (though most countries who use foreign-designed weapons make their own under license, don't they?) as long as they're confident that Germany will always be on their side.

I don't think the security risk is about poisoned bacon and beans. I think the security risk is "since we built all your planes we can prepare to invade you by the simple expedient of cutting off your spare parts supply". Of course, as you point out, this is okay as long as they are convinced Germany will always be on their side. But seriously, who trusts Germany?

 

[Flying Pig]

Well, the other worry would be that they'd sell the schematics of our aircraft to the enemy. Incidentally I remember hearing that the British sold a large number of Enigma machines after the war to various countries without telling them that they'd broken the code, and could then listen in freely to their communications.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, the other worry would be that they'd sell the schematics of our aircraft to the enemy. Incidentally I remember hearing that the British sold a large number of Enigma machines after the war to various countries without telling them that they'd broken the code, and could then listen in freely to their communications.

Having just seen The Imitation Game, accompanied by someone with an advanced CS degree who at one point was required to design a Turing machine who could vouch for certain technical aspects, I am going to call this unlikely.

The original Turing machine used to decrypt the output of the Enigma machine was far too slow to actually do the job...except the operators were able to vastly reduce the magnitude of the task because the German communications being decoded had a telling overuse of the words "heil Hitler". Without that advantage the development of a Turing machine fast enough to decrypt the output of an Enigma machine in a timely fashion was decades away at the end of the war.

They may have shared the Enigma machine with their allies, but not with intent to be able to decrypt the output.

 

[Borachio]

I heard that one branch (the Navy) of the German military never had its communications compromised simply because they intentionally didn't use such easy to guess initial codewords as Heil Hitler.

Was it Heil Hitler though? I thought it had to be eight letters. Or was it six? I can't remember.

Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural flaws, operator mistakes, laziness, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

And it was the Poles (Oh, the Poles!) who did the foundational work, in any case.

 

[Flying Pig]

By 1945, according to Wiki, they could decrypt almost everything the Germans were sending within a day or two. I don't think they would have been listening in as a matter of course, but they would absolutely have been able to read anything that they decided to.

Incidentally, the Enigma keys were three or four letters, chosen from code books. One way in which they worked out these was by reading the dispatches of a station set to report daily on the weather - more often than not it sent 'WETTER NULL'. Another quite clever method was to have the RAF plant mines in positions for which they knew the German grid references, so that the messages sent would read 'MEINEN' and those references, or alternatively give the other references which were clear. Either way, they were inducing the Germans to encrypt a phrase that they had given them - what's known as a 'chosen plaintext attack'.

EDIT: I'm slightly wrong on the key phrases part: usually the weather stations reported WEUB (short for Wetteruebersicht) and then the time, which would be NULL _ NULL NULL. Other times they'd use key phrases like KEINE BESONDEREN EREIGNISSE ('no special occurrences') which cropped up again and again.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That's a point. The "decrypt in a timely fashion" would be different post war. During the war they were focused on getting close to real time information out of a code that changed daily, but in a post war situation if it takes three or four days to break Monday's code that's still worth doing.

 

[Flying Pig]

Which, if it's a diplomatic cable, almost certainly would be. But absolutely it was a different ball game.

 

[Commodore]

(though most countries who use foreign-designed weapons make their own under license, don't they?)

For small arms, yes, but that's not always the case. Interestingly licensing was the main issue that delayed the US adoption of the FN SCAR. Fabrique Nationale wanted to manufacture the rifles themselves and deliver them to the US, but the US government wanted the license to manufacture them in the US. The two went back and forth on the issue for quite a while until they apparently reached an agreement.

For more complex or bigger weapon systems like tanks and aircraft, they are usually imported. For example, Greece hasn't manufactured any of the 353 Leopard 2s in their arsenal, they were all imported from Germany.

 

[Kyriakos]

But it's good for Germany, and isn't that what the EU is all about?

How cynical ^^

And true. But maybe the EU still has a chance to be a union in the future. We will see.

 

[Farm Boy]

But surely not so as to go to war against other nuclear powers.

Nah, conventional military is still relevant even in counterbalance to other nuclear powers.

It allows exertion of force upon targets which are not important enough for the other nuclear state to burn for.

Let me put it this way, in the hypothetical situation that the ROC(for whatever reason) were to happen to elect a government with the party line of full and permanent independence from the PRC: do you think that a conventional-arms-poor United States would be willing to burn for Formosa if the PRC decided to push for it? No, I think the US government would decide that California and Massachusetts are more important, much less everything else in between, screw defensive obligations. I'm not entirely certain that the conventional-arms-rich US would decide to pay the price required to stand up to open confrontation with the PRC. But the fact that it could changes the equation. If it thinks it can relatively easily, that changes it more.

It's the same reason France decided that it needed to possess its own nuclear weaponry during the Cold War despite US obligations to retaliate on its behalf in the face of conventional arms inferiority on the European continent. It had decided, quite probably correctly, that the US very well might decide at the end of the day that France and all of Europe combined is probably also not worth Nebraska in a MAD situation. They wanted to possess a trigger capable of forcing the issue.

 

[Flying Pig]

FB has it precisely. I'd only add that there's some things - reconnaissance, search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, disaster relief and so on - that you simply can't do with a nuclear weapon. War isn't all of the military's business.