Why Diplomacy Is Our Only Option

Day 477, 15:52 • Published in Australia Australia • by Lee Deity

As surprising as it may be to older citizens of Australia, there are a lot of citizens who still seem to believe that we should "stick it" to the Indonesians, that we can take our country back through military means, and that our attempts at Diplomacy with our giant neighbor are fruitless and will inevitably fail unless we show the Indonesians that "we mean business".

Today, I'd like to show you the numbers about why such an approach is simply not a workable one.

Australia has, at the time of writing, 1955 citizens, with an average strength of 2.38 and an average level of 8. Today we have 66 new citizens, and we have about 11 people online right now.

Indonesia has, at the time of writing, 8429 citizens, with an average strength of 3.71, and an average level of 14. Today they have 265 new citizens, and they have about 120 people online right now.

So, looking just at these figures, Indonesia has over four times the population, who are on average 1 1/2 times the strength of us, and who are almost twice the level we are, growing at about a similar rate per capita (which means many more citizens per day), and they generally have about 10 times the number of people online. They also share our timezone, for the most part, so we have no advantage of "surprise".

Further, Indonesia is in a near-constant state of war, and their economy is well-built to pump out weapons to support their conflicts. We'd need to radically increase the number of weapons-makers in our economy to catch up with Indonesia's production. And of course, weapons are still expensive - we'd need to supercharge the rest of the economy so that our soldiers could all afford those guns. Such a change in the configuration of our economy would be very easy to notice, especially since the Government would have to be involved.

But wait, you may say, couldn't we wait until they're involved elsewhere and pull their pants down then? This might seem like a good idea in theory, but in our case, it's not so useful. In the event that Indonesia fights two fronts, and divides their forces evenly, we're still outmanned and outgunned 2:1. If Indonesia fights four fronts, it's a bit more even, but they'll still have more people than we do in the war, and more strength to throw at us. If their attention is divided six ways, there's probably a chance we'd succeed, but Indonesia'll still have the advantage, since they have a wartime economy running right now, while we don't.

But wait, you say, surely we could convince allies to fight in the war with us? This is an option, but not a good one. In terms of total experience in the country, Indonesia is number two at the time of writing, so the only country that could single-handedly take out Indonesia is Romania, who are currently already in a war with Indonesia that's not completely going their way.

Of course, no sane commander would ask just one country to participate, they'd ask everyone, right? So let's assume that the top 5 non-Indonesian countries came to our aid, liberated Australia. So, umm, what happens next? Indonesia is still right next to us, and once the allies leave, what's stopping Indonesia from just taking us over all over again? You'd pretty much have to totally conquer Indonesia to nullify the threat, and even then, Indonesia would just start a resistance war until they had most of their original country back, and then we'd be in exactly the same place we were before. Except now we have a very pissed Indonesia with no reason not to attack us and take our resources.

Now, people ask why Indonesia would bother with Diplomacy, considering how large they are, and this is a good point. We have no reason to assume that a diplomatic solution would succeed in liberating all of Australia. But we do at least have a chance with Diplomacy, while a Military solution is pretty much guaranteed to fail very quickly and take Free Australia down with it.

Thank you very much for listening, I hope we've learned something from this presentation.