Timeline for What percentage of available manpower can a developed state afford to lose before they they experience a collapse in strategic cohesion? [closed]
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| Jan 20, 2023 at 6:02 | comment | added | time takes its toll | Your "strategic cohesion" threshold is also pretty opinion-based. TBH, I suspect analyses of modern (non-guerilla) warfare don't ake manpower into account as much as weapon systems loss, on that kind of "strategic cohesion" angle. Might want to look at the brief war in Georgia 2008. Or, better, Iraq 2003, before it turned into a guerilla war. Even Libya 2011, as external armed intervention focused on destroying that kind of regime cohesion. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 5:39 | comment | added | time takes its toll | Sprinkling in "modern opposing force" makes this rather unanswerable with actual data, as opposed to speculation. The historical answers based on WW1/WW2 may be more suitable to history SE. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 5:34 | history | closed |
Joe W Italian Philosophers 4 Monica Rick Smith Brian Z time takes its toll |
Not suitable for this site | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 1:48 | comment | added | Italian Philosophers 4 Monica | Yes, I know that was your intent. Still, you have a case here where who you lose may be more important than how many you lose and you're seeing that at comparatively low casualty rates. Generally speaking, on a tactical level, a unit "chewed up" to 30% casualties is going to be hard to do much with - soldiers are not videogame units that will fight to the last man - not accusing you of thinking so. WW2 was extreme because Stalin was extreme (to the Russians) and Hitler was extreme (to the Germans). So was WW1, but the very static nature of the war for most of it may have kept it going. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 1:17 | comment | added | Jarrad | Thanks but I'm trying to steer this away from that conflict and keep it as any generic developed state with a modern combined arms military. Percentages help here to scale for any population size. The answer provided by DJClayWorth was exactly the type of analysis I wanted to start with, and I think I can be expanded to come to a reasonable figure | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 1:04 | vote | accept | Jarrad | ||
| Jan 20, 2023 at 0:28 | answer | added | DJClayworth | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 0:05 | comment | added | Italian Philosophers 4 Monica | nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/… or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties About 5M deaths? Ukraine and Russia could keep on doing this for a while. However, it certainly isn't an existential war for Russia (and they are not really mobilized or a true war economy yet). At most for Putin, which is why calls for war crimes tribunals and reparations is, IMHO, counterproductive if it gets Russia to prolong its aggression to protect its leaders. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 23:50 | comment | added | Jarrad | All good and yeah I've been wondering if this is the right forum. There's also virtually nothing on Google about this topic and might be too deeply academic for a forum that mostly relies on current news articles to answer these questions. Although that's the only reason I asked here, because I can't find the answer anywhere and it's such an interesting question that I've put a lot of thought into. The only slight reference is that Nazi Germany "exhausted" it's manpower pools toward the end of ww2, but nobody says what that really means in terms of real numbers. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 23:31 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 20, 2023 at 5:37 | |||||
| Jan 19, 2023 at 23:21 | comment | added | Italian Philosophers 4 Monica | I am sorry you are experiencing bad results with this series of Q. But it is again speculative and this site is also much focused on politics than on pure military. Still off topic. Wrt to giving you a partial answer: much has been made lately that Russia has lost too much of its front line officers to maintain tactical efficiency. That's at not that high an overall casualty rate, but they've been losing the wrong people. Ditto with cannibalizing their training personnel. Of course, this is in the pro-Ukraine Western media, but seems credible enough as phenomenon. We'll see | |
| S Jan 19, 2023 at 23:08 | review | First questions | |||
| Jan 20, 2023 at 1:05 | |||||
| S Jan 19, 2023 at 23:08 | history | asked | Jarrad | CC BY-SA 4.0 |