Interesting piece on demographics and war:
"What was the most important battle of the late 20th century? You could argue it was the one that took place on the southern border of Morocco on November 6, 1975. Of course, we�??re not talking about another Stalingrad here.
In fact, what happened that day isn�??t usually called a battle at all. Its official name is �??The Green March.�?? On one side were 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians carrying green (Islamic) flags, and on the other�??miles inside the border, because they were hoping not to have to confront any of the marchers�??was a shaky, demoralized token force of Spanish troops pretending to defend a former Spanish colony, the Spanish Sahara.
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What makes this weird episode my nominee for �??Most Significant Battle of the Era�?? is that it showed the new way of winning disputed territory. If there�??s one thing that we should have learned over the past hundred years, it�??s that traditional armed conquests are getting less and less effective.
This is one of the most surprising twists in all military history. All through the nineteenth century, the European powers, led by the British and French, took the land they wanted on the grounds that they had better military technology, transport and organization.
Locals who disputed that notion tended to disappear as casualties of inevitable progress. And that was just an updated version of what had been happening all over the world for thousands of years: bigger, stronger tribes displace and wiped out weaker tribes whenever they could.
That was the norm, even in pre-contact North America, where the Navajo were displacing the Ute in the American Southwest long before the white guys showed up.
Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers�?? countries.
What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn�??t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you�??re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.
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So there�??s a shocking lesson that military buffs have been slow to face: military superiority doesn�??t matter nearly as much right now as birthrate and sheer ruthless will.
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As the population of Mexico increased and the living standard rose, the fertility rate actually went into an amazing dive, to the point that the rate for Mexican women now is only 2.39 kids per woman, just two places up from Israel�??s 2.38.
And the only thing that�??s brought the Latino birthrate down�??in their home countries, not among the ones who immigrated to the U.S.�??is getting enough money that peasant families start thinking of themselves as consumers, and get more excited about buying a new truck or a flat-screen TV than having little José.
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If you can handle these new faces, you�??re likely to be surprised to see your �??weak�?? American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants."