Editor's note: Part two discusses Anglosphere military advantages and India's role in the Anglosphere.
Defense and Military Leadership
United States and the United Kingdom have the world best navies and their armed forces can operate worldwide for extended period of time. This allows the Anglosphere to operate in any theater of the world and deploy appropriate military response to defend their interest. Throughout the world, there are Anglosphere nations at key junctions. Australia faces long-term serious threat in the Southeast Asia as they are in the neighborhood of heavily populated and underdeveloped Asian nations. The United States has bases throughout the world but in a world of shifting alliances and changing world crisis from Far East to the Middle East, a strong Anglosphere alliance will give the Americans dependable and capable allies in crucial areas.
British armed forces are capable of working with American military and probably the only European nation that has the ability to operate with the highly technically advanced American armed forces. Australia provides an Anglosphere armed force that can also be incorporated within strike force in key areas in the Middle East and Far East. The two Gulf Wars showed that presently, the Anglosphere is the dominant military power and that the Anglosphere needs to expand the alliance as the limits or resources are starting to appear.
James Bennett writes, “The United State is facing pressure to reduce the universality of its commitments, combined with a certain fatigue among the populace for the extensive nature of American alliances… Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has already reached the point where it is greatly limited in its ability to go it alone on any major military commitment; its armed forces are explicitly in existence to serve as leverage in a variety of alliance situations.” Bennett correctly assumes that any primary alliance should focus on nations that share the greatest shared value and the Anglosphere has just an alliance in place.
What were the lessons of Gulf War II? Ralph Peters in his excellent series in the NY Post during the second Gulf War summed up his view when he wrote, “Saddam had a classic 20th-century, industrial-age war plan. But our forces fought a 21st-century, post-industrial war.” Peters dismissed the notion that Saddam did not have a plan or that he did not put up much of a fight. Peters states, “Far from technically incompetent, Saddam’s plan was right out of Clausewitz. Its models were the lessons of the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Soviet victory over the Germans in the Second World War. The principles were: Delay your enemy, slow his forces, trade space for time, harass his supply lines and husband your best forces for a mighty counterattack. Wait until the attacker has advanced so far into your country that he reaches a “culminating point” at which point he has lost his momentum and his supply lines are overextended. Then strike. Saddam didn’t so much plan the defense of Baghdad as he tried to re-fight the defense of Moscow.”
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