The Starved Battlefield

[Weaver]

This is an idea that came to me whilst thinking about the Never Retired GB proposal.

In real life, the USA's policy towards Central America was, for many years, to prevent their acquisition of high-tech weapons as much as possible to avoid fuelling the local arms race. Thus you had the extraordinary spectacle of Honduras and El Salvador going to war with Mustangs and Corsairs in the late 1960s, as Mach 2 Phantoms and MiGs duked it out over Vietnam.

Now What If ALL the superpowers adopted that policy to the whole world?

Let's say there's an international treaty, in the mid-1950s, which everyone signs up to, which forbids the signatories from exporting new or post-war-second-hand arms to any country outside of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, declared neutrals and various exceptions. Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan get an exemption, South Africa does too (but then loses it over Apartheid in the 1960s), Finland, Austria, Israel and the Arab states don't, and nor does anyone else. The age threshold for 2nd-hand arms does NOT roll forward, but stays fixed until all signatories can agree on a revision, which happens only at infrequent and unpredictable intervals.

Non-treaty countries would therefore have to make do with either endlessly re-fitted elderly equipment, or develop their own industries. Ex-German designers would be at a premium, with Argentina, Brazil, Egypt and India actually putting into production far more of their own early designs based on their input. Israel would develop it's own industry faster and further with semi-legal help from their vast support-base in the USA. However all these local industries would be hamstrung by the unwillingness of the high-tech nations to export components: if they want jet fighters, they have to develop their own engines, do their own research, build their own radar and missiles etc....

As a means of preventing conflict, it fails, as Honduras and El Salvador demonstrated IRL. What you therefore get are the same conflicts, but fought with older, odder hardware. Israel and Egypt have just got rudimentary jet fighters by 1967, but their attack and close support forces are still prop-driven. In say, 1980, the treaty threshold is advanced to, something like 1958 (it's bound to be some odd, horse-traded date), and all the early jets and MBTs which the high-tech nations have carefully stored suddenly become available and the world is flooded with re-built Sabres, Hunter, MiG-15s etc.....

[Madoc]

Weaver,

Admit it.  You're just looking for a way to justify slapping laser target designators, JDAMs, Smart Bombs, and some AMRAAMs onto that Hawker Hurricane kit you have on your workbench.

Go on, admit it!



Madoc

[Just call me Ray]

In a way this was kind of the attitude the Soviets had with their "monkey models" and I guess you could argue the F-5A too. They were high-performance but still very limited in capability.

[dy031101]

I couldn't help to think...... pusher-prop fighters? 

Or ROCAF F-86 (which IIRC arrived before and around mid-1950s) soldiering on against PLAAF J-7...... but then again, technically the US considered the ROC as the China until the '70s.

[rallymodeller]

I like this idea -- with a caveat. If the fighters/weapons themselves are embargoed, then all the goodies (radar, laser designators, missiles) would also be embargoed. This would make any, say, UN or NATO intervention incredibly one-sided -- as is intended. Gun duels in the 1990s, while UN forces can use BVR missiles.

Cool!

[Weaver]

I like this idea -- with a caveat. If the fighters/weapons themselves are embargoed, then all the goodies (radar, laser designators, missiles) would also be embargoed. This would make any, say, UN or NATO intervention incredibly one-sided -- as is intended. Gun duels in the 1990s, while UN forces can use BVR missiles.

Cool!

True, but then over the Cold War period UN interventions were more often than not vetoed by the Soviet Union or China anyway. Plus the non-treaty nations that do develop defence industries of their own will be keen to spread the development costs by trading with each other, so the UN colud get the occasional nasty surprise.

Basically, I see this treaty failing, but creating some interesting situations in the process. The same wars would happen for the same reasons just with different hardware. Indeed, some wars might be made worse by the lack of overmatch capability: for instance, What If Israeli simply couldn't generate the bombing rate to make it's 1967 pre-emptive strike work, and the the Six Day War became the Six Month War? However, the people in this timeline wouldn't know that it's a failure because they couldn't "look over the fence" into our timeline and make comparisons. They'd probably assume that there would have been more and bloodier wars without the treaty, and it might well become the political moral high ground that no-one can been seen to back down from, thus stifling rational analysis of it. What you'd end up with by the turn of the century is a two-speed military world: the First World nations having the best cutting edge technology to fight each other with, and the Third World having a second-rate, but vibrant, defence sector of it's own. Then with the end of the Cold War slowdown in First World defence progress and the changing nature of the technology, the Third World would catch up to a large extent.

[rallymodeller]

I see where you are going, Weav. In that case, I can almost see a second arms race happening -- one in which the first-world never destroys anything (including the tooling), but holds them in reserve to unload at fire-sale prices to their various client-states once the treaty permits. By your example, license-built Starfighters (made by IAI, for ex.) would be the F-16s of the Western-leaning Third World, whereas late-model MiG-21s (eg. bis) would be the same for the Soviet sphere.  I can see the world you envision having a much larger air element with more third-world nations having 1950s-style air forces. There would also be an impetus in this case for first-world nations to keep their "edge" and more diverse aircraft would find a place.

A few questions crop up, though -- for example, what of the Phantom? Would it still be updated by the US or would it be completely replaced in the West by, say, 1985?

[Madoc]

RM,

True, but...

The mere existance of some of these technologies in the A Team nations would inspire their creation in the minor league countries.  Thus, after a while, they'd have many of the same goodies.  They'd be a generation or two behind the majors but they'd have them.  I could also see lotsa advanced tech being applied to the older airframes if for no other reason than the lack of manufacturing capacity to build new airframes.

Thus you might actually see those old Hawker Hurricanes soldiering on well into the age of modern composit fiber technology.  Now, wouldn't that be something?  A Hurricane with all its canvas doping replaced by high-tech, high strength resin impregnated carbon fiber composite and all of that wrapped around its tubular fuselage structure where those steel tubes are either themselves carbon fiber or high tech aluminium alloy as well.

Hmm...

Madoc