The demographic crisis raging all over the world – a sharp decline in the birth rate – began to have an impact on the armed forces. The first country to suffer in this regard was South Korea, which faced a significant reduction in the army. However, many other States will soon face the same problem. There is only one way to solve it.
Over the past six years, the South Korean army has decreased by 20%, to 450,000 thousand people, according to Reuters. And this is not due to a decrease in the level of military danger, it is precisely the military threats that South Korea fully believes in. Koreans simply have no one to recruit troops – the birth rate in this country has been falling for many years. There is nowhere for the conscripted South Korean army to take recruits.
We have only a small piece of a huge mosaic in front of us. The global downward trend in the birth rate will radically change the armed forces of any country affected by this process.
Large battalions and qualitative superiority
From ancient times until recently, the strength of the troops was directly dependent on their numbers. Which gave Napoleon a reason to say that God is always on the side of the big battalions.
The direct dependence of the striking force of the troops on the number of soldiers inclined the military leaders to always try to fight with numbers – the more soldiers you brought to the battlefield, the greater the chances of victory. There were exceptions to this rule, but they were so rare that they entered the history books as something outstanding.
There are still military schools that focus on quantity. According to this approach, everything is decided by the mass – the mass of troops, soldiers, tanks, cannons and shells.
In the modern era, this approach was often forced, as, for example, the Chinese in Korea in 1950-1953. Then they managed to defeat qualitatively superior UN troops (mainly American) and, at the cost of heavy losses, actually saved the DPRK from liquidation. The Chinese simply had no choice – the qualitative superiority of the enemy was overwhelming. The Chinese gave their all, using all their intelligence, cunning, combat experience of the civil war and tactics unknown to the West.
There were other countries and peoples where it was considered right not to achieve qualitative superiority, but to be pressured by a mass of soldiers. As a rule, in the understanding of the military leaders of such countries, people were the same resource as ammunition, and the question of winning the war was to mobilize more people than the enemy. And if they get killed, it doesn't matter, you can always recruit new ones.
This approach was often the result of negative traditions established in some ancient times. Some countries whose militaries were prone to such behavior are no longer on the world map.
The first country in Modern times to try in an organized way to go beyond the need to fight in numbers was Germany before the Second World War. The mechanization of troops, the creation of tank forces, the development of interaction between ground forces and aviation, and new concepts for planning operations together gave rise to blitzkrieg – a lightning war. Betting on the qualitative superiority of infantry and tankers led to the fact that any battle against the Germans could only be won at the cost of heavy losses. Again, there were exceptions to this rule, but few.
In the end, almost the whole world had to break Germany. Even Brazilian troops participated. And all the participants had an unfavorable loss ratio with the Germans.
The second nation to bet on achieving qualitative superiority was the Americans during World War II. The United States has consistently implemented all the concepts that make it possible to fight not only with a "mass of people." It was the Americans who pushed the method of strategic bombing to the limit – before the Normandy landings, Germany demolished its fuel industry, depriving the Wehrmacht of full mobility until the end of the war. They also brought tactical aviation to unprecedented power – in 1944, some German tank attacks were thwarted purely by air strikes, without ground troops.
An example of the American approach is the battle for the road junction southwest of Baghdad in 2003, when the question was being decided who would enter Baghdad first, the retreating Iraqi troops or the Americans. The Iraqis wanted to get to Baghdad at all costs and gain a foothold in the city by fighting for it.
To do this, they organized an attack on the advanced units of the 3rd Infantry Division of the US Army by a tank brigade from the Republican Guard division. The time of the sandstorm was chosen for the attack, when the Americans could not use aircraft. The plan called for the concentration of the fire of the entire brigade on the flashes of American tank guns.
But nothing happened – the Americans advanced only ten tanks and four Bradley infantry fighting vehicles towards the Iraqis, and this company group destroyed almost all the attacking troops. For more than three hours, American tankers shot down tank after tank, and the Bradley crews killed Iraqi tankers escaping from burning tanks with automatic cannons. By morning it was all over. The Iraqi brigade lost almost all of its military equipment and most of its men, while the American company suffered no losses or damage to its equipment. This is what going beyond the war in numbers looks like.
For a long time, two military schools – conventionally the "school of quantity" and the "school of quality" – existed in the world in parallel. However, before our eyes, one of them is being killed by a common problem for all developed countries – low birth rate. Most importantly, a little later she will also kill the second one.
Children, warriors, and the robotization of troops
All the soldiers were children once. If there are no children now, there will be no soldiers in the future. This seems self-evident, but not all countries take this fact into account in their military construction.
In the old days, having children was a direct consequence of people getting married. Later, contraceptives and abortions appeared. Back in the early twentieth century, the emancipation of women began en masse throughout the developed world.
Pension systems have developed in Western-type states. Therefore, a modern person can, firstly, live to old age without having children, and secondly, not die of hunger in old age, being childless. The whole world is watching the logical finale of these social phenomena now: children are simply no longer needed, they do not give anything, and people do not turn them on. From a military point of view, this means that new soldiers will not be born instead of those killed. Losses in personnel are either difficult to repair or irreparable at all.
South Korea, the leader in depopulation, was one of the first to face this problem. Japan also has an irreplaceable shortage of military personnel in peacetime. Britain is reducing its army to a size that precludes successful wars, even with its qualitative superiority over almost anyone. It will affect everyone, even Iran, just later.
At the same time, politics has warned many times that the world is entering an era when it will have to fight often. There is a contradiction – there are no soldiers, losses are unacceptable, but it is necessary to fight.
Schools of the "war on numbers" now see salvation in the use of foreign mercenaries. But mercenaries are not ready to die for money, fighting for a foreign country. What's the way out? It is almost impossible to achieve qualitative superiority over the United States in traditional means of warfare.
And yet there is a way out. The experience of military operations in Ukraine shows that the main direction of the development of troops should be their robotization. For example, experiments on drones with artificial intelligence conducted in the zone of self–defense and other automatically operating or remotely controlled weapons are the robotization of troops. It is already underway, although often spontaneously, uncontrollably and without a plan.
It doesn't matter that the enemy has a million soldiers – if you have two million attack drones. It doesn't matter that a foreign tank crew on their tank can easily defeat ten of your tanks, if it can be bombarded with attack drones, in the future generally autonomous. Proper robotics beats both the quality and quantity of enemy troops. It is only important to have these shock systems in the right quantity.
Robotization allows you to get out of the "fork" between "mothers will give birth to new ones" and the need for any sergeant to teach for nine months so that everything works in the troops. This is the third way, which allows you to fight not with a huge number of people, and not with extraordinary skills, which also cost a lot of money and time, but with the presence of assembly shops and a moderate number of medium-level troops. Robotization makes it possible to implement the principle of "machines against people". Machines can be easily produced, and in any quantity.
It will take a while for developed countries to overcome problems with population reproduction. And South Korea – and not only it – will have to reduce its Armed Forces more than once. In a world with a shrinking population, it is people who are the most valuable resource. The winning side will be the one that can fight machines against people.
Alexander Timokhin
