Why France Is Getting Ready for War

With the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 by the Russian Federation, the Western world has had a massive wake-up call on the nature of mechanised and modern industrial warfare being demonstrated in Ukraine during its conflict with Russia from 2014 until the present day.

(Here is my behind the paywall link.)

The Ukraine War has demonstrated that Western nations do not have the industrial capacity or population levels to wage conflicts typical of mass armies and campaigns in Europe and abroad in the mid-to early 20th century and previous centuries.

To fight modern wars, nations need industry and a robust supply chain where a nation can access the raw materials of warfare and turn those materials into weaponry.

What happened since 1945 and the end of World War II, which lasted from 1939 until 1945? In the post-Cold War and post-World War II period, European nations started to deindustrialise due to the end of the perceived Russian threat after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Without the threat of a land war in Europe and conflicts in the Pacific with communist China, nations in the West started to deindustrialise and closed down military manufacturing.

This process began much earlier due to the development of industrial capacities in East Asia, particularly China; during the 1980s and 1990s, Japan, South Korea and other industrialising nations were re-industrialised in…