Anything that increases the destructive capacity of armed forces while lowering the manpower requirements is going to make it easier for politicians to misuse those armed forces.
Most obvious example would be the Vietnam disaster. It was eventually shut down because of "bring our boys home". Not because of international reputation, human rights violations or the capability to win or lose the war.
Another example would be how Germany used mechanized forces and air power in the start of WWII as force multipliers. Without sophisticated war machines, attacking France and Great Britain would have been suicidal. Simply because they combined matched German population.
The best bet to mitigate such technology? In those examples it was probably MANPAD that killed helicopter cavalry after Vietnam war. And evolutionary steps of Bazooka helped to keep west Europe from soviet tank invasion during cold war. Those specific inventions increased the manpower requirement while adding relatively small and very specific firepower advantage.
> Anything that increases the destructive capacity of armed forces while lowering the manpower requirements is going to make it easier for politicians to misuse those armed forces
Anything that (a) improves peoples' lives and (b) has a logistical dependency, e.g. requires or becomes better with electricity, an Internet connection, package delivery, et cetera, improves the standing of a centralized power. This will be true as long as those logistical dependencies are subject to economies of scale.
Leaving society in the 18th century, before electricity, antibiotics or daily disposable contact lenses, wasn't easy. But you'd have to give up fewer luxuries to do that then that you would today because there are more luxuries today.
This is why saying "this will be used for evil things that centralized powers do" is so inane. It's a corollary of economic progress.
Except the thing is that geopolitics is the dictating form of politics. Everything else comes after that.
Let's say US government needs lots of manpower to stay as global hegemon. Then say that there is culture in US where people will gladly "defend the land of the free". Now if you mimic a degree of freedom, you get that manpower relatively easily.
Then you can innovate things that connect to the grid as much as you want. As long as the DoD needs grunts, they will give you civil rights and freedom simply because they have to. They probably would do that most of the time because they want to. But given enough time, you will see clusters of bad apples to get office.
It's kinda ironic that US has to be "free" and "powerfull" compared to the enemies. If China opens up their internet bit more, US citizens will get net neutrality without fighting. Also if China produces weapons that take away the technological edge or US, then America needs more manpower to the armed forces. That would lessen political polarization, corruption etc. Nothing unites like common enemy. Except capable common enemy.
All this and you couldn't see that the fault in your logic was that sufficiently enforced rules and regulations could mitigate the usage of evil things that centralized powers do. Obviously that infrastructure minimally exists now, but should we keep running as quickly in a direction that makes it more difficult to create such infrastructure?
I mean there's so much more to life than new technology and the corresponding progress in economies. But beyond that,do you genuinely believe that lawmakers are going to keep up with the necessary rules and regulations to keep sufficiently advanced AI under control in more hedonistic acting entities? Obviously that's the extreme case but it's a good thought experiment to test these models of innovation just for the sake of innovation and money.
As someone whose job is innovating where the current state of the art is, it's getting beyond ridiculous that everyone is ignoring the bloated elephant in the room.
Your bit about Germany isn't correct and is a common misconception. Britain was more powerful than Germany, had a considerably larger GDP, had a vast empire which could be asked (and told) what to do in ways its own population couldn't. The population of the empire is what mattered, not Britain’s. By this measure it was roughly 60 million versus somewhere north of 450 million.
Britain had a colosal and distributed industrial base at the start of the war and both countries had a very similar level of mechanisation early on. Britain only fell behind in armoured vehicle numbers around the time of the fall of France. This loss was very swiftly made up and Britain had roughly 25% more armoured vehicles in service by 1941. In no war year did Germany produce more aircraft than Britain.
Attacking Britain was suicidal and the myth of Britain, alone and standing firm is quite intentional, but untrue. The force multiplier wasn’t the tools, it was how they were used, and it took the allies a while to get the hang of things. The most surprising part is how far Germany got with such a weak position.
Britain’s War Machine by David Edgerton covers this well and somehow avoids it being a dry pile of charts.
I meant that attacking Britain in any way would have been obviously suicidal to the point of being complete deterrent without certain war machines.
If Polad would have been taken with only infantry and field artillery and supplied by railway and horses (like WWI was fought), the conflict would have lasted way way more than one month. If the Polish campaign would have lasted long enough, Germany would not have even attempted to attack France.
Landing on British isles was correctly identified as suicidal. So what did Germany do...
That's partly because railroads in the Soviet Union were of a different gauge then those in Europe - and because the Soviets, as much as they could, pursued a Russian classic - scorched-earth policy.
Mechanized armies needed enormous amounts of supplies. If you can't transport them by rail, and you don't have the diesel to run trucks (the only source of oil the Germans had access to was Romania,) you have to do it by horse.
Horse-drawn armies need enormous amounts of supplies, the energy density of animal feed is a lot lower than that of oil. The British Army learned this lesson in WWI and was totally mechanized by 1939.
Depends where you are located and how large formations of troops you have concentrated on single location. Finnish Defense forces pretty much completely relied on horses during WWII and with great success. There are lot's of tales how Finns were able to supply very hard to get places and also had successful practice to bring back all the dead to be buried in their home towns.
They had to give up horses in the 60's because you could no longer find young men who could drive horse carts. The good mobility of horse in boggy and snowy terrain was only matched in the 80's with Bandvagn 206 carrier.
Yeah, but you can grow animal feed in the fields of occupied France, or take it from Ukranian peasants. You can't really grow petrol on those fields. (Although you can produce synthoil out of coal - which the Germans did.) The UK, the USSR, and the USA were, on the other hand, controlled something like 90% of all of the world's known oil reserves.
Fuel shortages for the fascists in WWII were so bad, in the later years of the war, they used horses to pull fighter planes from their hangars, to their runways. They did not have enough fuel to taxi under their own power.
Most obvious example would be the Vietnam disaster. It was eventually shut down because of "bring our boys home". Not because of international reputation, human rights violations or the capability to win or lose the war.
Another example would be how Germany used mechanized forces and air power in the start of WWII as force multipliers. Without sophisticated war machines, attacking France and Great Britain would have been suicidal. Simply because they combined matched German population.
The best bet to mitigate such technology? In those examples it was probably MANPAD that killed helicopter cavalry after Vietnam war. And evolutionary steps of Bazooka helped to keep west Europe from soviet tank invasion during cold war. Those specific inventions increased the manpower requirement while adding relatively small and very specific firepower advantage.