Why Land Powers Bleed – Sarah Paine

Speaker A

In this world, power is a function of land. Neighbors are dangerous, even the itty bitty ones. If they're unstable, that instability can ooze over the border. Worse yet, if they're strong, stable neighbors and they have an idea that you're going to become a menu item for them, that's even worse. So in a maritime power, the army is for expeditionary warfare. What's the expedition? You cross the ocean and go somewhere else. That's the expedition. Uh, in this world, purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the a ruling regime. So if you think about the People's Liberation army, its goal, number one mission, number one, is to keep the Communist party in power. That's not what the armies are in the maritime world. It's also secondarily, is garrison the empire, prevent defections. And then thirdly, it's for border defense. And as you're fighting at the border, whatever you win, you keep.

Right. As you're expanding outwards, you hope in this world, away games are a rare event. Most of the fighting's occurring right on the border. So these are statistics about deaths, not just casualties. Wounded people, this is dead people. These are the sunk costs. No one's breathing life into these people or sunk casualties. So if you're looking at Axis military Deaths, you got 3.2 million dead German soldiers, 1.5 million Japanese, 330,000 Italians. Now let's look at the Allied land powers. 8.5 million dead Russian soldiers, nearly a million dead Poles, 1.3 million dead Chinese, and 340,000 dead Frenchmen. Okay, look at the maritime powers. By some statistics, Britain and the United states. Britain with 326,000 deaths. The United States, 295,000. By some statistics, they suffered fewer deaths than Italy or France. And France wasn't in the war that long. And then when you add in all the civilian deaths, the numbers for the continental powers go catastrophic, whereas they hardly budge for the maritime powers.

So you've got over 7 million dead Germans, over 25 and a half dead Russians, almost 7 million dead Poles, 11 million dead Chinese, nearly a million dead Frenchmen. So the deaths for the land powers are measured in millions, whereas the maritime powers, it's hundreds of thousands. Still not a great number. And what's going on here? It's because you're not insulated by the oceans, so the fighting tends to be on home territory. If that's the case, you're ruining civilians at a really rapid clip. And no country in its right mind wants to fight on the main front if there are alternatives. But this is the continental power's unavoidable agony that when the neighbor invades, you got a choice on that day. Either you're going to capitulate or you're going to fight. And you're doing it on the neighbor's timing. That's Ukraine's problem. Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded because in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all.

And if you are, what is the timing? What instruments of national power are you going to use? And these are things that the United States needs to think about very carefully before it intervenes. All over the place and overextends, but their advantages if you win this kind of warfare. If you think about Russians, enormous sacrifices. I've just listed that for Stalin, it means he dominates Eastern Europe, or Russia does for the duration of the Cold War. But understand that that kind of territorial domination comes at a huge price. The value of the object had better be worth it before you try it. If you enjoyed this clip, you can watch the full episode here and subscribe for more clips. Thanks.