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Invades Poland with what? More drones?
The Poles have quietly been building one of the largest militaries on earth. They’re not trying to let themselves get conquered or partitioned again. I don’t think it would take much for them to go eagerly to war with a belligerent Russia. More likely Russian’s next conquest will be against small and vulnerable countries like Georgia or the Baltics if they can get NATO to crumble (or Trump goes to war against NATO over Greenland).
Russia moving their nukes to Georgia is the most telling sign yet that they’re not serious. Our intercontinental ballistic missiles are marginally closer to you is not the brag they think it is. It means they’ve given up on military superiority and are now resulting to chest thumping in an attempt to intimidate, they wouldn’t do that if they still had a functional military.
So I’m reasonably confident that Poland is safe from Russian aggression.
I also can’t really see the US going to war in Greenland. It’s a wholly unpopular idea both with civilians but also with the US military who know that all it would result in is them losing a significant chunk of their forces to hypothermia since the US is very weak in cold weather combat. They already have a US air base in Greenland, controlling the rest of the country wouldn’t increase US national security and the only person who thinks it would is Trump.
I seriously doubt even Trump thinks Greenland is a national security issue. He wants it because some other billionaires want it. Some for resource extraction and some who want to build a planned city to push forward their techo-feudal agenda.
I think there wouldn’t be any serious combat, to be honest. Denmark isn’t that stupid, worst the yanks would get is a belligerent hunter with a rifle. So, all cold weather deaths would be on them, tbh. Besides, they have a military base on Greenland anyway, it’s not like it’s completely new to them
The Poles have quietly been building one of the largest militaries on earth.
Look, I’m all for a prepared Europe, but this quote is a joke at best.
Poland has 300k troops (all numbers are active and reserve combined), Germany has 862k, France has 300k, Ukraine has ~2.2 million, China has 2.53 million, Russia has 3.57 million, the US has 2.8 million.
Poland might be building one of the largest European militaries, but they’re still 10x smaller than the belligerent players.
The most recent year that numbers are widely available for was 2024 when Germany had 184,000 active-duty military personnel. Poland had 216,000 active military personnel; among NATO countries only Turkey and the US had more. Poland had the 13th highest military budget on Earth and was ranked 14th for military expenditures as a percentage of GDP: 4.1% (the highest in NATO).
Their reserves ARE limited in number, but they’ve been spending their funding on large quantities of equipment and weaponry.
I spent some time thinking about your response and I’ll give it to you that Poland is heavily investing in their military which is probably a good thing long term for themselves and the EU. I think my qualm was specifically with the statement that they have been building one of the largest militaries on earth.
On the evaluation of their investment by % GDP they are certainly investing heavily, this website puts them somewhere in the top teens out of ~265 regions (broken down even more than the 195 recognized by the UN). Another metric to look at is the raw total military, not just investment in %GDP. I don’t think it’s particularly fair to compare Poland with other countries which have dissimilar GDPs, for example that website says that Armenia invested 5.5% of it’s GDP in comparison to Poland’s 4.2%, but Armenia’s GDP is $27 billion to Poland’s $1.1 trillion and their military is ~1/3 the size.
To your point (investment in equipment) we have to take into account the quality of the military, not just quantity; you can have 100x more troops but it doesn’t mean much if they are completely outclassed in gear.
So yes, of the ~195 countries of the world Poland is in the top ~10% and if you review their investment by %GDP they are probably closer to the top 5%.
The top 4 militaries by troops (China, the US, North Korea, and India) all have >1,000,000 troops and the top 4 by raw expenditure (US, China, Russia, and Germany) are all >$88.5 billion (and Germany is pulling that group way down).
Let’s break down these metrics. 5% of the average of the top 4 in quantity is 76k troops and only ~50 countries have that amount or more. 5% of the average of the top 4 in expenditure is ~$19.3 billion and only ~21 countries meet that value.
All this is to break down that Poland is in the top 5-10% of world militaries, but if you remove all the countries doing basically nothing they are basically in the middle (31/50 in quantity, 13/21 in expenditure). Poland is definitely making one of the strongest militaries in Europe, but a big part of that is that the other countries in the EU aren’t doing much. If you count up the EU countries that are included in that 21 listed above (UK, Germany, Ukraine, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, and Netherlands) Poland makes up $38 billion of the groups combined $423.5 billion (~8.9%), but all of those are half of the US expenditure ($997 billion) and 77% of the combined BRICS members in that group ($549.1 billion).
EDIT: I totally missed that the Ukraine isn’t part of the EU, I had removed Algeria and Turkey as well, so that should change the % values; however, I kinda feel like if the Ukraine pulls through they likely will join the EU so I’m not gonna change things here.
In what world does Germany have 900k soldiers? Google says 180k active duty, you only get to 900k if you count someone who did mandatory service back when he was 18, which was like 30 years ago, and hasn’t touched a gun since. If you define military as “people who train regularly and would be ready on a short notice”, we have nowhere near as many (since mandatory service was effectively stopped 10+ years ago)
Point is, those numbers mix active and various qualities of “reserve” personnel
all numbers are active and reserve combined
I literally said that.
Sorry, i should have been more precise myself and should have read your answer more clearly.
My point is, those numbers are a bad indicator for military strength.
Someone having gone through a few months of training decades ago doesn’t make them a soldier who is ready to fight on a short notice.
Likewise, a country at war with less personnel but a huge stockpile of resources and working structures will likely conscript a lot of citizens anyway.
Poland doesn’t have conscription at the moment (they stopped at a similar point in time as Germany), and their number seems to count only “proper” reservists. Germany counts everyone who at some point was part of the military as (legally) reservist, regardless of their current state, fitness, or motivation.
No worries, I thought you might have confused the statement as only applying to the first group. I see what you mean about how you count reservists and think it’s a totally valid point.
Nice propaganda you got there lmao
Russia’s own state media already admits to over 1m lost in Ukraine. I doubt most of their nukes work. More likely, NK invades SK while China invades Taiwan. The hollowness of the USA quickly becomes clear when the doors fall off of all the Boeing aircraft. The neodymium supplied FPV drone army of AliEx then comes knocking. The US is then cut off from all advanced chip foundry fab nodes.
Meanwhile, the enormous fleet of starlink satellites are already on the verge of Kessler syndrome according to a recent white paper stating they are less than 3 days way. Just targeting one of them will cut off all access to space for decades rendering ICBMs obsolete or high risk where they are very likely to be damaged and return to the region that launched them. Cutting off access to space is a superpower total war move.
…More likely, NK invades SK …
Yeaaaahh. I don’t see that one happening. South Korea is on point with a military response that would be the end of North Korea. Have friends that are Korean and they say the military there does not fuck around. Even now, with the public perception of the boy bands and k-pop meaning the country’s gone soft… It’s window dressing, and why the Kim family has NOT launched an invasion.
I think the South Korea military would triumph over the North Korean military but NK would cause substantial civilian casualties with the large amount of artillery it has along the border.
Yeah, that’d be about the only way… then with the food rations going to NKs war effort, the northern populations would all-but starve… Which is happening more than it should in that country, already.
The Kim family can’t go extinct fast enough. What wretched people.
Kessler syndrome […] less than 3 days way
Fuckin’ ace. Actually colonizing space would be a centuries long endeavor of fostering an ecosystem from scratch. So until we start propping up the ecosystem we’re living in, nobody has any business wasting resources on space boondoggles.
