• bigschnitz@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Norway having a small military and being easy to bully sounds familiar, perhaps the Russians remember how that goes and can explain.

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yup. They’re very efficient militarily, as is Finland. See the Skjold-class as an example of their engineering style.

      • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Efficiency is a thing and Norway might have an advantage there, but for example… the Skjold, there’s 6 of them in existence and the complement for them is listed as 15 people.

        The Norwegian Navy as a whole is 25 boats of various sizes, Israel is not a lot better with 67 and skews towards smaller boats and neither side is equipped to fight anywhere they both could reach. The entire Norwegian Navy is about 4,000 personnel compared to 9,500 for the Israeli Navy. It would be the weirdest Naval battle with two sides that have no business at all having a naval battle, but if they were determined to fight and could figure out where, the advantage is on Israel.

        • bigschnitz@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If you just look at numbers maybe, we can see from Russia (large navy) vs Ukraine (no navy) that there are serious disadvantages when waging a war of attrition, even with relatively near distances and supply lines.

          The Israeli navy has no meaningful capability control Norwegian waters and they would be insane to try.

          • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I’ve mentioned at least a few times that this theoretical would require both sides being dedicated to the conflict and no outside interference, with that I don’t see how that matters as both sides would have that problem to overcome.

            Also, Ukraine does have a Navy. When you compare the actual ships to the Russian Navy or even just the Black Sea Fleet, it is almost a rounding error, but they still have a few dozen small ships floating around out there. The Ukrainian Navy still had 15,000 personnel as of 2022, but I’d guess that things likely have not been going great for them lately, not sure where that’s at now. I haven’t heard of any successful engagements using the few boats left, but they are very outclassed and I’d imagine outnumbered. Does exist though, several naval bases, and they are still fighting.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Finland didn’t have a small military in the Winter War. In the 90s-00s “era of peace” or something many European countries have all but abolished their militaries and forgot how big they should really be.

      Small compared to USSR’s, but it was enormous by measure of today’s European armies, and you still need a lot of people to control territory today, just like 100 years ago.

    • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s unreal how people do not understand the difference between defending a homeland, invading a country via an easily traversable large land border, attacking a country across a geographic barrier and attacking a country in a whole different part of the world. Israel’s ability to threaten mainland Europe would not amount to anything beyond terrorism, though potentially nuclear terrorism. All of Nazi Germany, fielding the industrial capacity of most of Europe was probably not capable of successfully invading even the UK across the English Channel, even if they weren’t distracted on the Eastern Front. They simply didn’t have the naval power required.

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Not wrong from a historical perspective, but Norway would be outnumbered around 10:1 in manpower in modern times. Kind of hard to measure the… ‘level of military technology’, but Israel keeps it up to date and Norway hasn’t had to make that a real priority beyond posturing for awhile. Obviously not the likeliest scenario, but if everyone else stayed out of the way and they could figure out how to fight each other, that’s a really hard fight for Norway.