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National Defense in free Ukraine

The State, Free Society, and Russia-Ukraine War. Alternative scenarios for the victory.

4 November, 2024

War in Ukraine

Politics & Law

Volodymyr Zolotoriov

National defense has been known as the last resort of the statists. Quite a few of them are willing to admit the free market is better in responding to the needs and wants of the people — any needs and wants BUT the defense.

The problem with this discussion is that the statists think the national defense is something special, a feature or function uniquely immanent in the state, while the libertarians perceive it as one more market among the others, unique only in having been monopolized by the state for the longest time of all. Therefore, in any discussion on the matter the libertarians usually stand up for the obvious: nobody can tell in much detail how a certain market will be organized and what entrepreneurial decisions will be made there, before the market actually appears. This is a totally correct stance, but the statists are not satisfied with it and demand a detailed specification.

It’s a pity the libertarians have not made enough effort to elaborate on the defense of a libertarian society against a state. The statists claim this is a critical choice issue for them; they are ready (or pretend they are) to immediately stop whatever statist thing they are doing and get in the line to write themselves into the libertarian book as soon as the libertarians prove to them the free society will be durable enough (that is, capable of winning a war against the state).

We are not obliged to believe their claim, to be sure. However, the fact still stands: there are not many libertarian books on the topic of defense.

So, what the statists essentially claim is that the state is always at an unbeatable military advantage over a free society, which makes the latter essentially non-viable. This claim can be defended along many lines and, obviously, attacked along just as many. However, if my vast experience of discussions on the topic has taught me anything, it is that the participants often forget to make the key preparation, to establish what they mean by “state” (and accordingly “a stateless society”). As long as we understand this properly, there will be no unnecessary heat, and the overall direction of the discussion will look much more productive.

State and its aspects

The greatest illusion our contemporaries are plagued with is their confidence that they know and understand what a state is. Indeed, the phenomenon of state which embraces a huge portion of our life receives, in a paradoxical way, very little scientific research attention — to be more precise, what we find in this line of research is not a proper application of science at all, but pure apologetics with references to fictional constructs like a “social contract”. Also the problem being that the “state” word denotes both the whole phenomenon and its particular features at the same time. Libertarians, which generally study the state to criticize it, are quite competent in distinguishing contextually which aspect is being treated at a particular moment… but their opponents are not.

Two aspects are important in the topic of “national defense”, those being the technological and the systemic one.

Для теми “національної оборони” важливі два аспекти: технологічний і системний.

The technological aspect explains how a state emerged, how and in what direction it evolves. What we call a “state” in all its manifestations comes to life as an answer to the question “how can I secure my living at the expense of other people being robbed?” The “robbery” term, when applied to the state, implies a broad law-based attitude toward its general action rather than a simple emotional judgment of “failures” or “mistakes” made by otherwise well-intentioned and useful people in governmental positions. Everything the state does can be described quite precisely in terms of criminal law. The state applies force, or threatens to, in order to extract on a regular basis a part of the income earned by its subjects. What is important is that there is no mutual agreement whatsoever between the state and its subjects, which would justify such an extraction in any reasonable way.

In a world where the state has been already founded, the technology will be “exercise control over the territory” and then the same as above. Institutions or establishments that work to implement this technology at any particular time are collectively referred to as the State and formally exist as police, government and others.

Both the technology and institutions are in the process of permanent development and improvement. (The fact that the protection racket, mobs, mafias of various kinds eventually come to solve problems of those being “protected” speaks volumes about how the state institutions emerge and what they evolve toward.) Researchers are often therefore mistaken, thinking the different stages of this process are actually different phenomena (some people are confident, for example, there were no “real” states in pre-modern times). However, the State is always present wherever certain people are engaged as a group in a regular violent redistribution of income from a certain territory in their favor and somehow make it “legal” for themselves. A gang engaged in a protection racket is the simplest possible incarnation of this.

If we look at the basic economic level of individual choice, we will find the state right there as a set of permanent, unceasing incentives. Those artificial incentives distort the spontaneous order of people’s relationships; this is the exact angle of view at which the state looks like a parasitic system that evolves, self-organizes and maintains itself. It should be understood that the actual boundaries and components of this system differ from its organizational, institutional structure. Our job is not to describe the system precisely, we need only to realize it exists and is forced into motion by people who pursue their personal interests by using specific methods (“legal” compulsion and coercion, first of all) to achieve their own goals. Those people coordinate their efforts like they do on the market, without even knowing of one another’s existence. To rephrase a famous Adam Smith’s quote, it is not from the malevolence of the government officials that we expect chaos and destruction, but from their regard to their own interest. This is a systemic aspect of the state. It is exactly what makes the results of actions of a great deal of people look like there is a conscious design and intention behind them, what makes us personify the state, say it “wants” something, it has certain “interests” and so on. Most occurrences of the word “state” in this foreword have the underlying systemic meaning.

The existence of this “systemic” aspect explains why the states hardly ever employ the “reasonable farmer” strategy, that is, a minimum government, a maximum personal and economic freedom, which is sure, for a good reason, to yield the highest possible revenue. The matter is that the reasonable farmer strategy is one based on a reasonable design to achieve a reasonable goal. The behavior of a state as a whole, on the other hand, consists of unplanned consequences of actions performed by a great deal of people and institutions which all have different purposes but are united by the same means, the “legal” coercion and compulsion. Thus the behavior of Leviathan is always destructive and even suicidal, and its “goal” is to eventually enslave and destroy the humanity. This is why the reasonable farmer strategy is employed only where and when the system aspect of the state has been minimized and there is a space for personal planning by a truly reasonable farmer — that is, in harsh crisis situations such as post-WWII Germany or in small authoritarian societies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai.

All that has been said calls for the following findings:

State is not neutral, it is by no means a “mechanism” or “engine” to be used to achieve whatever peaceful reasonable goals one has in mind. No, it emerged to serve a very particular purpose, and as long as it is being employed, it will serve exactly that, apart from wants and wishes of its participants or even their understanding of what is going on.
State always “wages war” against “its own” public. This is both the reason why it emerged in the first place and the way it maintains its existence.
State is not a self-sufficient entity but rather a parasite in the society’s body. The society can easily exist without a state, while the latter cannot endure without a society. This is the reason why the historiographic view that separates “pre-state” (primitive) societies into a distinctive group and suggests State is a new progressive phase of social evolution is mistaken. It is more correct to refer to a “state society” and a “stateless society”.
State is ever expanding. The practical manifestation of this is a permanent growth of regulation and coercion. The process is objective, it cannot be stopped by any “constitutions” or “laws” which the State adopts for its own purposes.

The last finding makes it clear why there are no societies left in the world without a state incorporated in them, which is often suggested as a proof that the state is “more effective”. However, the fact itself does not show the state as something “more effective” than a stateless society because, as we just said, “society” cannot be replaced by “state”. A human being infected by helminthes will not become a helminth nor some new version of human being, and the fact of the helminthes presence in their body does not prove a helminth is more effective than a human. The only thing we can say is that the human’s defensive mechanisms have not been sufficient to prevent the infection. And indeed, the victims of those first conquerors had a poor “immunity”, they did not and could not know the consequences of being infected by the state. When today we think about a hypothetical “war of a free society against a state”, we mean the society that has already got rid of “its own” state, the society that understands what it deals with and thus has quite a robust “immunity”.

Speaking of the State being “effective”, what we can say for sure is that it has truly learned how to defend and maintain itself. At an earlier time, its key line of defense was people’s poverty. Those who had enough riches to challenge the power of elites, were already members of those elites and would not have attempted anything against the system that had made them rich (even the leaders of victorious popular rebellions hardly ever wished to overthrow the whole system). After the State had failed to keep everyone poor forever, it “introduced” democracy, thereby having disguised itself as a neutral tool and forced the counter-elites into helping to keep the system in place (“you people just go to elections and vote right, that’s all it takes”). Anyway, this is in no direct regard to the issue of effectiveness, particularly the military effectiveness of the State in comparison with the free society.

The cost shifting ability and the value of victory

Now, having established all the above, we can elaborate on an armed conflict between a state society and a stateless one.

To begin with, we should emphasize that a conventional war between States A and B has four participants rather than two: State A, State B, Society A, Society B. It goes without saying a “society” cannot be a thinking entity and have a uniform attitude toward the war. However, on watching more closely we notice the State’s ruling class is also far from the uniformity of thought. The peculiarity of the theory of war is that it is really hard to fit in the framework of methodological individualism. Therefore we will have to deal with some vague concepts which will necessarily need refining.

It is worth remembering the states always wage war against “their” societies in the so-called “time of peace”; that is, any conflict of this kind can be represented by a 2x2 matrix, and its result is often determined by the stance adopted by the society, the Vietnam war being an example. The strategies that the conflicting states adopt always take this into account. It suffices to know the military theory considers the victory in a war to have been achieved as soon a politically unacceptable harm has been made to the adversary, that is, when Society A ceases to tolerate the war waged by State A. For example, State A may wage war against People A and State B, but it will not attack People B thereby trying to make allies of them. State B may act in exactly the same way. This is the reason why the contemporary states try to make wars total, that is, arrange them as wars between opposing peoples/nations in order to get maximum support from “their” societies. This point will be especially important in our discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Society A or Society B are always subjected to the harshness of at least one war. In a conflict between states, the worst-case scenario for a society is to take part in three simultaneous wars: against “its own” state, against the “foreign” state, and against the “foreign” people/society. The free society has at least one advantage here; it is not involved in a war in times of peace, and when the foreign aggression unfolds, its maximum number of simultaneous wars will be two.

The basic distinction, which is allegedly the advantage of the State over the free society in times of war, is that the State is capable of forcefully shifting the cost of its actions to “its” people, that is, taxpayers. This is a fundamental characteristic of a modern state. The taxpayer not only funds the state's projects but also pays for their repair, rescue, or liquidation. The consequences of state regulation are covered by new, often even stricter regulations, and so on. Political elites do not participate directly in the military action and seldom carry any burden of war at all (recall the daily life of Soviet nomenclature/bureaucracy during the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II). The taxpayers both pay for wars of “their” State and go to those wars as military combatants. The statists view this advantage in the following way. The ability of the elites to shift the cost by using violence makes it possible to carry out very large expenses — such that the people would never afford nor tolerate if there were no state. So, by making the people carry a much heavier burden than they would voluntarily agree to, the elites provide a better defense for themselves (and through that, for “their” people) in war. The free society cannot afford such and thus is bound to lose the war against the state.

The shifted cost can be very high indeed. However, it does not ensure by itself an attainment of the goal. A high cost never means a necessary cost. The success depends on a correct choice of goals and a proper “ends vs. means” analysis rather than the expenses, however large.

Moreover, the stateless society carries out real expenses, with no distortions introduced by politics. Such expenses are the cost of an individual choice, they are not a concrete slab that falls on the head of the whole society without distinguishing between the individual choices of those affected. Thus the free society is able to adjust to such a cost in a better way and make optimum solutions to reduce the expenses.

In other words, even though the forced shifting of costs somehow seems to be an important advantage, by no means it actually guarantees the victory to be won. Its full extent is achievable in totalitarian states only. The society in an aggressor state may disagree to carry an extra burden of war, so the unlucky aggressor may, as it happened in history many times before, face unrest and even a revolution back at home.

In reality, the result of a war, all other conditions being equal, is determined by a value that the aggressor and the victim attach to their respective victories. The example of the war we are facing right now is very clear. If an aggressor like Putin can shift his war expenses to his subjects, while the inhabitants of a hypothetically free (stateless) Ukraine carry out them directly to their full extent, this is not yet a guarantee for Putin to win the war. The question is how high the inhabitants of free Ukraine value their independence from Putin and how much of the respective cost is affordable for them. As the real-life experience shows, even the citizens of non-free Ukraine are ready to tolerate a very high cost of the war against Russia, which seems now to have the greatest effect on this war among other factors.

To give the Ukrainian reader a clearer perspective, let’s do a thought experiment and suppose the current war is waged against Poland rather than Russia. I think the majority would agree the war would have ended long ago by the Polish victory. The reason would not be a better military prowess of the Polish; instead, the key point would be a low motivation of the Ukrainians to continue such a war.

What is most important for the majority of Ukrainians is to win the war specifically against Russia and Putin. It suffices to know the maximum threat the Ukrainians are most concerned with and united in their attitude against — a potential treason of the Ukrainian government bodies, such as the abandonment of territories or other concessions in exchange for peace. Most Ukrainians (including the author of these words) are quite indifferent about the perspective of nuclear strikes; the nuclear threat affects the value attached by us to the victory in this war to a very little extent.

Military superiority of State

The ability of the State to shift its costs forcefully is a basis for many far-fetched claims put forth as valid arguments in favor of a military superiority allegedly possessed by the State. We review some of them here.

State has the right of military conscription.

This includes two implicit suggestions. First, the State has a plentiful source of human lives with which to perform any kind of military tasks (the commonly given example is Napoleonic wars). The “natural” logical conclusion (which is actually the second implicit suggestion) derived from this is that the free society is incapable of gathering as many people for a military campaign. It is worth mentioning that total mobilization had not appeared in a state until it became a republic where participation in the military draft is a duty of every citizen. The State has mastered this method since the times of the French Revolution (which is discussed in this book at some length) by renaming all its subjects into “citizens” and adding the state’s armed force service duty for all adult men to taxes and other pre-existing responsibilities. The answer to the first implicit suggestion is that superiority in numbers does not always entail victory. Small-numbered Greek militias, being highly motivated, beat vast crowds of Persian fighting slaves, and this is not the only historic example. The answer to the second implicit suggestion is that nothing supports the claim that the free society allegedly cannot gather as many fighting men as needed. The ability to do so, I dare remind, is based on the value attached by people to the victory. You can launch military conscription, for example, but prove unable to gather a proper army because of lack of motivation; on the other hand, you can have a great number of well-motivated voluntary soldiers without any conscription whatsoever, as we had at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war. A well-justified suggestion presents itself: the inhabitants of a hypothetical free country would be motivated even better than the Ukrainians were at the beginning of their war against Russia — because, if we confine ourselves to realistic scenarios, those people would already have thrown away “their own” state and would be perfectly aware of what would await them in the case the “foreign” state were to prevail.

State supports its own regular army.

Again, it was not always the case in history that every state had its own regular army; some did so only in particular periods of time. However, even those states somehow won their wars. It is therefore more reasonable to suggest that the advantage of a regular army lies not in the numbers of men who are doing a military service at a particular moment and are hypothetically ready to repel the foreign invasion immediately, but rather in a structural organization that includes a pre-built chain of command, divisioning and supply, all connected, tested and ready to interact. As the war begins, this structural chain will be immediately filled with people and machinery and start its operations according to plans developed in advance. All this should include, of course, storage facilities and other logistics, hospitals, shelters, fortifications, communications, any other structural components and things to fill the overall structure. Literally nothing suggests the free society is incapable of having all this or of acquiring something similar as soon as the need arises. Having other states as neighbors makes it very reasonable to prepare for a war in advance. Some small private armies can exist permanently and be provided with all the needed weaponry such as air defense or interceptor aircraft, the latter having to stand ready even in times of peace to be effective against a potential threat. Getting back to the regular army, we should note all modern European states have regular armies, but the war in Ukraine has shown their ability to resist is nonexistent and they are virtually worth nothing as a defense force. By the way, back in times when I had much interest in warfare history I was often amazed how frequently memoirs or researches of a particular war mentioned that “the country/nation/state was not ready for the war.” It seemed like a regular army created specifically for the purpose of “standing ready for the war” was never able to deliver its promise in the course of history.

State has its army centralized.

A regular army and a centralized army may seem to be the same thing; however, they are not. A centralized chain of command headed by a General Staff (the same thing as a centralized planning body of a nation’s economy) is commonly thought to give a great superiority to the State’s army. However, even the officially recognized military science and practice puts doubt on this point of view. From as early times as World War II, where more decentralized British and American military units showed a better performance in action than strongly centralized Soviet and German troops, a struggle for decentralization never ceased to continue within the military caste. A fairly decentralized IDF has been quite effective in action, and decentralized Ukrainian units performed well enough when holding back and counter-attacking the better armed and equipped Russian forces.

One of the most important episodes of the current war, the Battle for Kyiv, which resulted in a drastic advantage for the Ukrainians, was a model example of “chaos and anarchy”, as the Ukrainian side consisted of various units from different governmental agencies (Armed Forces of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine, police, National Guard, territorial defense) plus a great variety of civil militiamen (including a few hunting associations). Hardly any centralized chain of command existed. Despite that, Russian columns advancing at the capital from northeast and northwest were stopped, their supply lines paralyzed, then they were partly defeated and had to retreat.

I would not even have to write the last paragraph because the army’s centralization is a simple and direct consequence of the state’s force monopoly. In other words, the army becomes centralized for political rather than military reasons. The State cannot afford having multiple centers of military power which would not obey a single center of command because such a situation creates a threat of “power takeover.”

State is capable of producing expensive armaments.

And indeed, modern weaponry is a costly thing. However, it is not quite clear why a group of free people could not afford to buy or produce such weapons if the stateless society is by definition richer and more effective than a state-ridden one. What is worth noting is that the current prices of weaponry are many times higher than they should be, and this practice is rather a systemic rule than an exception, because in the best case the “market of weapons” is a buyer’s monopoly (the State is a customer which orders and buys the weaponry, while private designers and producers are contractors who sell).

Finally, the main question: who says the victory requires exactly those types of armaments that have been approved and are in production now? The types of weaponry in current use are related directly to the strategy and tactics employed by the army, and these reflect a lot of the army’s specifics such as the contemporary dominant ideas of military science. The stories of Covid-19 and global warming show how biased even the common “civilian” science can be when power and big money are at stake; let alone the military science which has always been monopolized and has misused quite a lot of things like secrecy or “national security considerations.” There are always alternative solutions for seemingly straightforward tasks. The current standard solution for intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) is to use antimissiles against their head parts. However, there exists another solution, to create a dust cloud above an object that needs to be protected. The head parts of the enemy’s ICBM move at a great velocity, are vulnerable to any physical damage and therefore just burn away in those clouds. The missile defense of the USA protects some military bases. The missile defense of the USSR (now RF) covered Moscow and a small region around. The cloud-based missile defense can protect any object (against the head parts of ICBM, not against a low-speed projectile). However, such a system has never been produced — probably, due to its being “too cheap”.

Right now, in the war time, we can see how more technologically sophisticated and expensive armaments often perform worse than something simpler and cheaper (Stugna is better for some action situations than Javelin; WWII anti-aircraft machine guns and small-caliber artillery work better against subsonic loitering munitions than Stingers). Practice has shown the Ukrainian state to be extremely reluctant in deploying its own full-fledged production of arms after a year of war, despite the fact the country is packed with facilities of the former Soviet military industrial complex. What is worse, the Ukrainian state puts barriers in the way of numerous private manufacturers of such important weaponry as unmanned combat aerial vehicles — all in order to concentrate the production in the hands of a state-backed monopolist. Clearly, a free society will not suffer from these drawbacks.

Not only will a widespread competition in development and production of weapons flourish throughout the free society, but so will a competition in the development of strategies and tactics.
The free society will have multiple customers of its arms industry, many buyers of weapons and other means of security. Armaments available in the free society will by definition be more innovative and cheaper than whatever comparable weaponry the statists might hope to have.

State is capable of concentrating resources and properly governing the economy (organizing a “wartime economy”).

If the distribution of people, goods, and resources governed by a decentralized system of prices is more efficient than central planning in times of peace, what makes you think it is going to be inefficient in times of war? What does a war actually mean for the economy? This is a chain of crises in supply and demand caused by destruction of consumer merchandise and capital goods, reduction in production because of workers’ flight for their lives, and a fast growth of demand for military-purpose goods. It is weird to think any central planning can quickly solve the problem of adapting to such challenges. The illusory belief that we need some special “wartime economy” presumably stems from the fact that the state owns the army, buys all weapons and ammunition for it, and also owns most of the infrastructure. In the event of war, which looks like a common national disaster, the owner of these resources seems to be the only savior of the nation, so they should be given everything they ask for. The State must determine how many people should be conscripted, how many guns and shells should be produced, how roads and bridges should be used, it leads the army to victory, and therefore it must gain access to all the resources the society has, in the best interest of the latter.

In a free society, all resources are owned by their private owners. There is a great number of arms manufacturers, a respectively great number of buyers and of owners of infrastructural objects. All those people will coordinate their effort through a decentralized system of unrestrained prices, so no special “wartime economy” will be ever needed. To be more precise, the economy will adjust itself to the wartime challenges, and this will happen in an easier way and at a cheaper cost than the state trying to “organize a wartime economy.”

Moreover, we can say for sure that the state army and its respective “economy” is just a particular case of central planning. It is not clear at all how it must become more efficient than the market-driven economy in this particular situation. The last point to make in this section is that the war gives the state, which already owns the army, the weapons and the infrastructure, more “natural” or “logical” reasons for the actual nationalization or, at best, for strict regulation of all related industries. This process can pull any industry, any market into its orbit because no clear boundaries of dos and don’ts are established.

Financing by inflation.

Many historical wars were financed by inflation — from debasement of metal currencies to modern methods that involve fiat money.

Indeed, the state ownership of the money system is the most powerful method for shifting expenses to taxpayers.
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We have to realize, however, that the high cost of war that makes the rulers push the inflation forward in order to finance the warfare is partly due to the army’s monopoly and ensuing inefficiency, its common companion in all stages of activities from the development of strategies and tactics to the production and purchase of weapons and ammunition.

Since a free society cannot, by definition, use fiat money and there is no political center to benefit from inflation, the method of inflation cannot be used to finance anything. However, there is a method of loans, which can be used in a free society where individuals and businesses will borrow money from each other. Under the conditions of real incentives immanent in market relations, these loans will be a much more efficient method than governmental borrowing and inflation.

The experience of our war shows how, despite the claim that the state monopoly in the military industry is a necessary thing for the army’s efficiency, the army is not even able to provide soldiers with everything they need. Supply lines are often organized in such a way that soldiers in the front are armed and equipped much worse than those in the rear. In a free society, where there are no bureaucratic supply chains nor the destructive incentives they produce, this outrageous situation simply cannot exist.

The inability of the Ukrainian state to provide adequate support to its own army has given rise to the phenomenon of volunteerism, where individuals organize themselves and buy the necessary supplies for the army (cars, body armor, helmets, night-vision devices, thermal imagers etc.). At certain phases of this war, volunteers supplied 100% of some equipment items.

Advantages of the free society

We have listed the alleged advantages of the State in a war against a free society. Now let’s talk about the advantages of the free society, some of them being far from intuitive.

Ability to join forces in a collective effort. Experience of multiple discussions has shown the statists believe a free society is a bunch of loners. They contrast the efforts of such loners (each defending only their own persons) with a collective effort, but most importantly, they see the collective effort only as organized by some leader to achieve a specific goal. This view does not apply to the army exclusively; it is also the reason why the statists cannot comprehend the market as a set of collective efforts that allows people who do not know each other to unite without coercion to solve problems that no organization is capable of solving. So, what can a bunch of loners do to oppose a large organization? Statists see a huge organized army invading a country where everyone is trying to defend their home in isolation from others and where organization can only exist at the level of people who know each other, such as neighbors or villagers. That is why they always characterize the war between the state and society as a guerrilla war, pointing out the advantages of the regular army over guerrillas. The subsequent discussion often boils down to whether the regular army can or cannot deal with guerrillas easily. However, a collective effort is not necessarily a (centrally) organized effort. There is a wide range of intermediate forms between “chaotic” spontaneous orders that produce an aggregate result unknown to their participants and a rigid organization with strict discipline that exists for a predesigned purpose. In addition, even individuals who do not know each other can be part of a collective effort to defend themselves independently, if, for example, they subscribe to services of a private defense company or participate in paramilitary competitions, learn to shoot, provide medical assistance etc. Finally, there will be a driver in a free society interested in organized and targeted coordination of efforts and in possession of tools to do that: insurance companies. We will discuss them further below.
State can start a war against a free society but cannot end it. Any war has to end eventually, and its results have to be legally formalized. The State can start and wage war against a free society, but — to the State’s astonishment — it may not be able to finish. In a free society, there is no institution that makes universally binding decisions, in the sense that they can be enforced on the public.

Simply put, a free society cannot declare war on anyone and cannot capitulate in a war.
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It is not possible to capture a totem pole or a sacred leader. An important feature in a state’s war against another state is the presence of a task force to fight specifically against “its own” people, i.e. the state apparatus, the government. It is enough for the invader to capture a totem pole or an authoritative leader, and the governmental apparatus of robbing and plundering begins to work for the new master. This was the case in Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea and Donbas. It was enough to seize administrative buildings, and the entire territory they “governed” came under the enemy’s control. It looks like magic, but it works. In a free society, there is no apparatus of government and no totem poles. The entire territory belongs to individuals. To win, the invader needs to defeat every Ukrainian.
The aggressor needs to reinstall the state. The aggressor in a war against a free society is not only tasked with inflicting unacceptable damage on the enemy army and forcing it to negotiate or surrender. The bigger task will be to reinstall the state as a whole. For ordinary citizens, occupation by the army of another state, as long as it is not accompanied by genocide for ethnic or ideological reasons, does not change anything. The goal of a citizen will be to survive hard times and adapt to new conditions. For a resident of a hypothetical free Ukraine, the occupation changes everything. Now they will have to pay tribute, and their lives will be governed by rules they did not agree to and cannot influence. This will generate strong resistance in the occupied territories. Even worse, the aggressor will have to maintain a significant occupation force that will need to perform the functions of the absent state apparatus and enforcement agencies.
There are no combatants or non-combatants. The division into combatants and non-combatants is useful for states in a war between them. On the one hand, it puts civilians in a special position, excluding them from the list of “legitimate targets,” and on the other hand (which I think is the principal purpose of this division), it makes their resistance to the occupiers illegal. These rules, no matter what purpose they have been adopted for, exist also in international law and preserve the military advantage of strong and large countries over smaller ones. In a free society, this division will not exist. From the military point of view, this means at least the enemy is always in the dark about who exactly and in what numbers oppose them in this or that direction, what reserves they have at their disposal, etc.
The absence of an internal enemy. Our war provides abundant evidence that when people are ready to oppose a foreign aggression, it is the State that creates the greatest obstacles by concentrating the defense efforts in a state-monopolized army. To say more, in the Russia-Ukraine war it is the State which does an outright harm to Ukrainians. Leaving a systemic harm like taxation out of the equation, consider these examples:

State has no systemic interest in winning the war. The State is systematically interested only in strengthening control. In our war this already had sad consequences, as the first months of Cossack-style perseverance have been followed by the ever increasing bureaucratization of the army. This means the Ukrainian army is losing its advantage in motivation and decentralization, i.e. in more skillful and rational use of available means to achieve its goals. Russia is forcing a centralized, resource-intensive war on us, and the Ukrainian state as a system is striving for the same thing. In such a war, we have little chance of winning. In addition, bureaucratization paralyzes incentives for initiative, forcing commanders to be cautious where they should not be and to avoid making decisions that are threatening in a bureaucratic sense. I myself once encountered a situation where initiatives to purchase equipment needed by soldiers were blocked by commanders because they simply did not want to deal with bureaucratic procedures that would impose additional responsibility on them. Bureaucratization is inevitable and irreversible as long as the army remains a monopoly.
State has introduced regulations that require businesses and shops to close during an air raid alert, and those who do not will pay a large fine. This measure is senseless even from a purely utilitarian point of view, as the alert is often not even announced during an attack but simply in case of a potential threat, and it is announced throughout the country rather than in the areas of the alleged immediate attack. The official cost estimate of one idle day due to air raid alerts is $203 million of GDP. To evaluate the military significance of this amount, convert it into tanks. For 203 million, you can buy 20 Abrams tanks. Putin is not destroying them, Ukrainian officials are.
On the very first day of the war, the State closed the borders to men of conscription age. Leaving aside the violation of all and any human rights, we view this decision as catastrophic from a purely utilitarian point of view. It has had a demoralizing effect, has turned men into slaves and forced them to hide from the draft, thus discrediting the very purpose of the war where the Ukrainian state tries to pose as a “free” country fighting an empire of slavery. This decision has caused corruption to rise sky-high. It is also harmful from a pure military point of view, as it creates incentives for commanders to fight with massive human sacrifices rather than effective tactics and high morale.
State disarms people despite the war. In the first days of the war, the state officials distributed small arms between civilians in some cities out of fear. Now they are trying to confiscate them. The State also reports regularly how it takes away trophy weapons that sometimes fall into the hands of residents of frontline regions.
State is very active in regulating prices. During the war, it became significantly more persistent in trying to set price caps on various goods, creating artificial shortages and interfering with the functioning of markets.
State does not cease its legislative activity. Despite the war, the parliament continues to meet and redoubles its destructive activities, introducing more and more new regulations.
State intrudes in the activities of volunteers. As we have already mentioned, volunteers are a significant source of supply for the army, but the State is doing its best to hinder their activities by trying to “regulate” them, creating difficult-to-comply rules that can only be met by chosen volunteers favored by certain politicians.

There is no war of all against all in a free society. In a free society, there is no “war of all against all”, which is constantly initiated by the State that pits one group of people against another. In modern societies, the war of all against all has become truly epic, and these societies often find themselves on the brink of civil war. This not only wastes resources, but in critical cases, such as a war against a foreign invader, can lead to disaster, as it reduces the solidarity of people against the common threat. The war has not diminished the Ukrainian state’s efforts to split society along linguistic lines. It continues and even intensifies, and Russian-language speakers are accused of being the cause of the war, while the accusers do not care that the war is taking place in more Russian-speaking regions and that Russian-speaking cities are being destroyed.
The inability of external players to manage the war in their own interests. In the case of a war between a state society and a stateless one, it is difficult to imagine the situation in which the Ukrainian state finds itself relying thoroughly upon external help. In a free society, there is no monopoly army nor political center, and thus no external dependence can be established. For Ukraine, this dependence on promised Western weapons has already played a fatal role, as Biden’s actual refusal to supply heavy weapons did not allow the war to end in the fall of 2022.
Decentralization matters. Decentralization is one of the key features that characterize a free society. Take a closer look at a few moments of this war that are relevant to decentralization. The first moment is the episode at the beginning of the war with Russian strikes on Ukrainian fuel depots. Not only state reserves but also private warehouses were hit, which led to a fuel crisis (which the state, of course, tried to resolve by capping prices and thereby making things worse). It turned out the state had obliged private companies to geotag their fuel depots and put their coordinates in a centralized governmental database. By hacking into that database, the Russians gained access to the coordinates of all fuel depots. The state creates centralized registries and databases, which make life much easier for the enemy when they get their hands on them. Another typical example is the mandatory registration of firearms and public organizations. When the Russians seized a town, they immediately went to the addresses of the firearms owners to confiscate their weapons, and they easily found and arrested representatives of organizations they considered “nationalist.” None of this may happen in a free society. No one is obliged to register anything, and if registries exist, they are used where necessary (property registries, for example), and there always may be multiple competing registries and registrars. When choosing targets for missile and air strikes, the enemy will have to rely exclusively on photo reconnaissance and intelligence data, which is a much smaller amount of available information. There will be nothing like the massive strikes on fuel depots at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war. Decentralization is a response to another problem that Ukrainians suffered from in the fall and winter of 2022: power outages caused by attacks on the centralized energy supply system. Ukraine’s energy supply is based on a set of quasi-private and state-owned local monopolies formed on the basis of the Soviet centralized energy system. It is a parasitic structure that lacks even a trace of real market activity (there are no real prices, only arbitrarily assigned “tariffs”), and is accompanied by constant corruption and political scandals. Throughout its existence, this structure has been fighting to prevent Ukrainians from producing energy on their own. As a result, missile attacks on this system created a drastic shortage of electricity, which was being resolved by shutting down entire regions.

In a free society, there can be nothing like this, since there is free production and sale of energy, and the reduction in production because of the elimination of some producers will be compensated by a voluntary reduction in consumption as a result of rising prices. This stimulates new production growth, and so on.

Now, a few words about decentralization from a military perspective. Today we have a situation where we can preliminarily compare the results of decentralized and centralized warfare in the same war and within the same army. The perceivable fact is that the Ukrainian army is a hybrid of the old Soviet army and a new type of armed forces. Depending on the situation and the type of command, one side or the other may prevail. Clearly, data for a detailed comparison may become available only after the war, but the general impression is that the Ukrainians were most effective in situations where units on the battlefield and in the near rear were left to their own devices or under minimal care. This is, let’s put it this way, the Kyiv operation (which covered Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy), which resulted in the liberation of northern Ukraine, as well as the unexpected offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kharkiv region. Where the war is waged according to Soviet tactical patterns, there are fewer successes and more losses. The primary example is Donbas. Note another feature of the armed forces in a free society, which is the difficulty of their identification and assessment. The structure, composition and methods of interaction between units of the State’s armed forces are strictly predetermined. The warring parties are well aware of such features of each other. So, for example, it is enough for an intelligence service to identify a few key objects or points of observation based on which it, being familiar with the structure of the enemy’s armed forces, will be able to put together a puzzle and get a picture of the opposing forces with quite a credibility. In the case of a war between a state and a free society, only the latter’s intelligence has this advantage. Its opponent will be fighting in a “war fog” that will only get denser over time.

It goes without saying nobody will be able to steal “offensive plans” from the armed forces of a free society because no such thing will exist. The army’s centralization makes the cost of a potential mistake made by its central command higher than the sky. The armed forces in the free society are safe from this shortcoming.

No systemic problems with property rights. One of the problems of the state’s armed forces is that a single agency acts as the owner of military property on behalf of the state. In Ukraine, it is the Ministry of Defense. Monopoly ownership inevitably gives rise to things like centralized top-to-bottom supply chains. There is also the problem of trophies, which must first be “put on the balance sheet.” In some situations, this creates incentives for commanders to destroy trophies that otherwise could be used if the commander could take possession of them without bureaucratic delays. At the beginning of the war, officers created online exchanges where they exchanged ammunition and equipment, especially trophies. All the while, the military bureaucracy was trying to suppress this practice. In a free society, this problem does not exist. There are many owners of weapons and equipment. Military units and individual soldiers can independently buy, exchange and donate any equipment or machinery. There are also no centralized supply chains (and thus no rationing, for example, of ammunition, and no bureaucratic fuss and intrigue associated with it). Nor is there a problem of “putting trophies on the balance sheet.”
New types of warfare. In a free society, there are various types of warfare, one being privateering. Privateering does not exist only at sea; it can be used in land warfare as well. Privateers can specialize in seizing enemy property and reselling it to compensate Ukrainian owners or to resell it to their own units. In the first phase of the 2014 war, the Ukrainians used this method extensively — for example, there are known cases of buying diesel fuel from the enemy, which for some time rendered enemy tanks inoperable. The Ukrainian military bureaucracy has fought the privateering practices and seems to have won.
High motivation. One of the decisive factors in war is motivation. It will be high enough in a free society. In our war, we can see that the mere fear of losing one’s identity is enough to support a strong desire to resist Putin. In the case of a free society, a whole set of other motivations can be added.

First, unlike a resident of modern Ukraine who is completely uncertain about the future, the resident of a free Ukraine would have no doubt that driving out Putin’s troops would at least return the country to the pre-war status quo.
Second, the people of a free Ukraine will have a high level of solidarity with one another; there will be no state that has been pitting Ukrainians against each other for 30 years.
Third, the people of a free Ukraine will see and understand the real mechanisms of compensation for the damage caused by the war, which will affect their behavior both on the home front and on the battlefield.
Fourth, the people of a free Ukraine will understand that success depends only on their own efforts, their ability to fight and coordinate between themselves. When the Ukrainians find themselves in such a situation (the examples are all the Maidans in Kyiv), they usually achieve remarkable success.
Fifth, for some Ukrainians (soldiers in private armies, privateers, insurance companies), in addition to the patriotic (in the good sense of the word) motive, there will be a profit-to-be-made motive. Finally, sixth (and perhaps most important), there will be no political motivation in the actions of people (owners of insurance companies or private armies) who make decisions that might be called strategic. Their motivation will be rational and useful for the society — a desire to avoid losses and make a profit, i.e., a financial interest which causes an overall strong desire to get rid of the aggressor in shortest terms possible.

We can answer the question of whether there will be those willing to fight in a free society and who they will be by looking at the volunteers, especially those who went to war in its first months. Among them are many people with higher education (sometimes multiple university degrees), knowledge of foreign languages, they are either skilled professionals or even business owners — in other words, self-sufficient people. We can assume it is the unwillingness to lose their self-sufficient life and future prospects that motivates them to go to war. There will be many, if not most, such people in a free society.

The Ukrainian state has long been suspected of pursuing a deliberate policy of destroying the armed volunteer movement. Although it was volunteers who stopped the advance of Russian troops in 2014, the State has been hostile to them from the very beginning. Instigated by Western allies who fear “illegal armed groups” above all else, the state liquidated volunteer battalions and imprisoned many volunteer soldiers. Whether this has been a deliberate conspiracy or just the result of incentives, it is clear that armed, motivated volunteers are dangerous to the system.

In the armed forces of a free society, there will be no such thing as career considerations, which are the pain-in-the-back of the conscript army where the interests of soldiers often conflict with the interests of career officers. The career aspirations lead to false incentives in planning operations, meaningless casualties, conflicts, refusals to obey orders, etc. It can be said the conscripted army of the State coerces those who do not want to fight while restraining those who do.

A court-order war

A very important circumstance commonly neglected by researchers is that private law does not treat war as a special case where common rules lose their force for some obscure reason. War does not fall out of the general concept of private law, unlike public law where war is supposed to be some kind of an exception to the general rule.

The proper category of private law to use is “aggression”, and there is no point in singling out “war” as its special case (although there may be some pure technicalities in dealing with “war”). To private law the event of war looks like a form of aggression by a group of individuals against other private individuals whose property has been seized, damaged or destroyed as a result of the aggression. The enemy army is treated as an ordinary gang, i.e. it is faced with usual criminal offenses (mostly assault and robbery), which in most cases will be classified as a felony committed by a group of persons upon prior conspiracy.

Procedurally, it looks like this: the owners of the property in a free society who have suffered from an invasion, or their representatives, will file a lawsuit against the aggressor. Going to court does not mean the owner has to sit back and wait for the court to decide. The owner can resist from the first seconds of the aggression, as this is their natural right which does not require a court sanction. A court decision is needed to bring the process into the “legal framework,” in particular, for further compensation. We are accustomed to “free-of-charge” courts of the state monopoly where simplest cases can be decided for years. However, in a competitive environment the time for a decision on a case depends on its complexity, and in our case it will be a very straightforward aggression case.

A court of justice will demand that the aggressor leave the seized property and compensate for damage, and then (if there is no response or a refusal is received) the aggressor party will be outlawed.

A very convenient circumstance for the courts of the free society will be the fact that the aggressors are all united into a single organization titled “armed forces of the Russian Federation”. This makes it possible to immediately outlaw the political and military leaders of the Russian Federation (as organizers of the assault and robbery) and all members of the organization “armed forces” (as immediate perpetrators). This means anyone (not just the Ukrainians, anyone at all) can kill or capture any representative of this organization or seize their property or the organization’s property for the purpose of compensation.

The peculiarity of private law is that it does not depend on jurisdiction.

The courts make decisions on the merits of the case, regardless of where the plaintiff and defendant are located, what “jurisdiction” they belong to, and what “legislation” they may refer to in justifying their actions. Of course, except in cases where "legislation" aligns with the law.

It is well known that private law considers the aggressor to be the victim’s debtor. Therefore, from a free society’s standpoint war is an action regulated by law; from the legal point of view, it is the execution of the court orders to eliminate the aggressor and provide compensation to its victims. It is important to understand that claims against the aggressor are made by private individuals, not some abstraction named “Ukraine”. These same private individuals can transfer and sell their claims to privateers or bounty hunters, who will take care of where and how to obtain property or money for compensation. With the states, the war ends by signing a peace treaty. In the case of a state’s war against a society, it ends when the last claims of the victims are satisfied.

Of course, each guilt is individual. One of the tasks of intelligence in a free society will be to extract personnel lists and identify specific names and crimes committed by soldiers and officers. Residents of the occupied territories will have an incentive to document and personalize all crimes they can find out about. The logic of addressing claims will be simple: the initial claim is addressed to a unit that can be identified. For example, it is known that an identifiable regiment is located near city N and is shelling that city. The claim to compensate for the damage inflicted by the shelling will be made to all the personnel of the regiment (and the sum distributed between all of them equally at first). After a while, the ID of the artillery brigade that actually shelled the city will become known. The next claim will be made to the brigade’s personnel (i.e., the debt of the brigade’s employees becomes bigger than that of the rest), and then, if particular artillery crews can be identified, to them directly. Each new shelling increases the amount of debt owed by those people, which will be kindly reported to them by lawyers representing the victims’ interests.

The reverse procedure also works: if a debtor dies, his or her unit “inherits” the debt. The last in this chain of debt inheritors can be the state as such, whose property can be seized by privateers to pay off the debt. In this way during the war the enemy army is encouraged to surrender specific perpetrators that have done a specific harm to Ukrainians, to minimize this harm generally and to give up fighting.

After the active phase of the war, the situation will look even more interesting. For example, you are a poor Russian soldier, you live with your mother in an old, cheap, gruesome apartment and have no permanent source of income. During the war, you were recruited into the army, where you were promised good wages and lots of fun. You enjoyed yourself as much as you could until your army lost and withdrew from the occupied territory, and your fun cost the Ukrainian people a few million dollars. However, the war is not over for Ukrainian bounty hunters and privateers, and they want to be reimbursed for their losses. Since you have nothing to reimburse them with, the Ukrainian bounty hunters will have a strong incentive to simply kill you (for them, you are outlawed until you pay your debt) in order to pass on your bad debt to the rest of your unit. Thereby your fellow soldiers will have a strong incentive to make sure you stay alive. A large number of people, in addition to you and your mother, will be strongly encouraged to find ways to pay your debt. The easiest way to do this is to appropriate and sell state-owned “no-man’s” property.

To stop the raids of privateers and bounty hunters after the active phase of the war and the looting by its own debtor subjects, the losing state can either pay the debts for its soldiers and officers or take over these debts to consolidate them. In this case, there will be an incentive to consolidate the claims of the Ukrainians as well. The losing state can transfer assets sufficient for effective debt repayment to the ownership or management of a company that has consolidated the claims of the Ukrainians. For example, in the case of Russia, this could be the state’s share in Gazprom (51%). Clearly, not all Ukrainian property owners will agree to transfer their claims, so that part of the claims will be satisfied in a different way.

It is worth noting that, unlike the current Russia-Ukraine war or any other war in the foreseeable future, all destruction, killings, and injuries will be carefully documented in a state war against a free society, and damage will be assessed on an ongoing basis. After the war is over, there will be no need for gargantuan projects of “rebuilding Ukraine,” because all damaged or destroyed objects are private property and the owners will have taken into account the cost of restoration when billing the aggressor. There will be no need for “international aid,” “Marshall Plans,” foreign loans and other activities that distort economic incentives in the recipient country, increase broadly understood taxation in donor countries, create new debts and encourage enormous corruption. We can see right now how quickly and efficiently private owners can recover their assets. To see this, you need to drive along the roads that were in the fighting zone at the beginning of the war. You will see numerous ruins and the shining lights of privately owned (and privately restored) gas stations among them.

There is one more point we need to mention in our section on private law and war. Obviously, the courts will recognize the Russian state in addition to the Russian army as the aggressor. This means the property of the aggressor state can be legally seized or destroyed. At the same time, private property cannot be seized or destroyed (unless it is the property of an entity that has provided aid in the war, which must be decided by the court).

Let me remind you there is no concept of “jurisdiction” usable in the court of private law, so if a “Ukrainian” unit destroys the property of a “Russian” private citizen, the latter may apply to a (“Ukrainian”) court of private law for reimbursement and the court will order the unit to compensate for the damage. If the unit refuses, it will be outlawed and face the same consequences as the “Russian” aggressor unit that invaded Ukraine. A court in a free society protects justice regardless of “jurisdiction” or “nationality.” All this creates an important division line between the private and the public in the aggressor country. The “public” becomes dangerous and toxic. The “private” becomes safe and attractive, a sphere where real justice can be found.

The goal of people who participate in the war on the part of the free society is to expel the aggressor party and receive compensation from it. But the unexpected consequence of having achieved this goal may be the collapse of the aggressor state.
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To summarize, we can say war will be governed by law in a free society. Private law treats war as malicious acts of private individuals against the lives and property of other private individuals. Aggressors, whose blame is treated as strictly individual, must compensate for the damage. Those who resist aggression should not become aggressors themselves, and private law guarantees this not to happen. Private law treats politicians and civil servants as private individuals and the so-called state property as objects owned or managed by those individuals. Following private law, the courts should not agree for reimbursement with funds obtained through taxation, i.e. through aggression. The state (represented by politicians and officials) should pay with “its own” property and, above all, with the “personal” property of officials.

An insurance-company war

Now, a few words about whether there can exist a business in a free society to be engaged in defense on a systematic basis. In an unfree society, this role is given to the state, which prepares for defense in all senses: it produces (or purchases) weapons, pays for military research, trains officers and soldiers, builds fortifications etc. Is it possible for a free society to have a business that would be interested in a similar systematic work in defense?

I remind here that we do not know and cannot know what kind of business decisions will be made on the defense market in a free society. From our current vantage point, insurance companies, i.e., businesses that use statistical data to assess risks, seem to be the most suitable agencies for this, but there could well be many other types of business that exchange obligations for regular payments, such as businesses that involve a wager. It should be noted, however, that the “defense in general” in a free society will consist of independent elements, which nonetheless will coordinate their efforts with one another. However, no one can say what exact force, in the sense of numbers, equipment and quality, the free society will be able to gather when a neighboring state decides to start a war.

The obvious ways to organize defense in a free society are militias and private armies. From what has been said earlier, we can add privateers to the equation — people who seize the enemy’s property in an organized manner; their actions will range from computer hacking to armed raiding.

By the way, the state has opposite incentives. Rarely does a state want to end a war as soon as possible, as the war expands and strengthens the power of the state, creates new sources of income and improves the exploitation of old ones (during war, the state gets more legal opportunities and a moral carte blanche to intensify its usual plundering). The Russia-Ukraine war provides abundant evidence on this. The bureaucracy is actually well aware that in order to quickly defeat the aggressor, a free economy and an armed population are needed. At the beginning of the war, when the elites were frightened, there were talks of intentions to radically reduce and simplify the tax system and regulations, and to seriously reduce the state apparatus. People were given weapons on the streets. Bureaucrats and propagandists sang praise to the brave Ukrainian nation in unison. After some time, when it became clear the Russian blitzkrieg had failed, the bureaucrats pretended they had not said anything of the sort. Over time, the regulation only intensified, and the given weapons were taken away. The bureaucracy is not interested in a quick end to the war. The best option for the bureaucracy is a “frozen” or slowed-down conflict, which, on the one hand, provides it with all the opportunities of a “real” war, and on the other hand, allows it to avoid risks immanent in wars.

Insurance companies can be the drivers of “defense in general” because they are authorized to sell insurance against events related to military invasion. In an environment where a free society is surrounded by states, such insurance may be quite popular. In peacetime, the insurance company makes a profit, so it is in its best interest to make sure that a war will never happen or, if a neighboring state does invade, that the war ends in victory as soon as possible, because the destruction and loss of lives during the war leads to the company’s immediate losses. In order to preserve their profits, insurance companies must focus on preventing war and using all means to minimize losses if the war has already broken out. This makes them the drivers of defense arrangements, from the creation of private armies to public training in first medical aid. Of course, insurance companies should not pay for all this themselves; their goal is to find and stimulate initiatives, promote sponsorship and crowdfunding. Insurance companies will seek to commercialize war preparations as much as possible, turning training into competitions, producing simulators and using them to conduct commercial battles, etc. We need to remember there is a huge sphere of skills that modern states consider unsafe for ordinary citizens to have. This entire industry will be available for commercial activities in a free society.

Next, look at the peculiarities of warfare by insurance companies. First of all, they will try to prevent war, which means working through agents to search for beneficiaries of a possible war and deal with them, possibly seeking their physical destruction if no reasonable agreement can be reached. In any case, the insurance companies will have their agents on the enemy’s territory and try to get closer to the political and military leadership of the potential aggressor to prevent a war through influence or sabotage. This is the cheapest way for them to avoid or resolve a conflict.

Insurance companies should also prepare future diversion acts on the enemy’s territory, aiming at ammunition, equipment, fuel, communications, and infrastructure. They should have a bunch of contracts to potentially buy out some infrastructure elements from Ukrainian owners, especially bridges in the area of the alleged invasion. These objects can be bought out, for example, for a certain period of time, blown up, then restored and returned to the original owner. All these preparations should be made in peacetime. It should be understood that in a free society there are no privileged institutional “armed forces”, no “martial law” and, accordingly, no one can freely encroach on other people’s property, drive tanks wherever they want, shell “our” villages in the territory occupied by the enemy, or loot in the rear with impunity. Perhaps the issue of free movement of people engaged in armed resistance to the aggressor will require certain innovative legal instruments, but it is not fundamentally insoluble. However, we can say for sure that the bull-in-the-china-shop tactics used by the armed forces of all states cannot be applied in a free society, since there are no “friend” or “foe” parties in private law, there are only aggressors and victims.

One of the decisive points that determine the course of war is that free society has no restraints of its activities in the form of “international agreements”, “international organizations”, and most importantly, no political games, intrigues of intelligence services etc. The rules of all those games have been established by states to ensure inviolability of the elites, including the top politicians. The physical removal of a representative of the elites is possible only when there is a wide consensus about this; for one such real person, Putin, there is currently none. They are going to negotiate with him, and his elimination is considered dangerous for Russia’s internal stability, which (like the internal stability of the USSR) seems to be valued by the Western elites above almost anything else. No such considerations will restrain insurance companies in a hypothetical free Ukraine. From the beginning of the invasion, after Putin’s outlawing, he and Russia’s top leadership will become a legitimate target for bounty hunters. At the same time, it is very important that there will be no intelligence games around the hunt for Putin. Anyone can try to eliminate Putin, which creates a highly competitive market and makes the process uncontrollable.

It is also important that insurance companies will be highly interested in weakening the Russian regime from within. Insurers will realize that if a Russian man leaves Russia or evades the draft, he will not appear on the battlefield in Ukraine. Therefore, Ukrainian propaganda will insist that the Russian state is a criminal robber who has been robbing Russians and now wants to rob Ukrainians. Any opposition to Putin, all internal separatist movements will be supported by the Ukrainians because it helps them win the war. We see the state acting in the exact opposite way. We hear suicidal Ukrainian propaganda based on the axiom “there are no good Russians” that makes all Russians guilty without exception. This propaganda can have no other result than the emergence of volunteers in the Russian army and strong civilian support for its actions in Russia.

If we try to recreate the events of the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in the setting of a hypothetical free society in Ukraine, we will see how difficult the situation of the Russian army will be. From the very beginning of the invasion, Russian communications will be attacked, and communications inside Ukraine on the Russian army’s path will be destroyed. There will be constant assassination attempts on Russia’s top leadership. The Ukrainians, unlike today, will be able to produce their own weapons, ammunition, and equipment in sufficient quantities (even if they are based on Soviet weapons). In villages and cities, there will be a large number of armed, well-trained citizens encouraged to resist the aggressor. At the same time, the country will not have a parasitic bureaucracy nor a state-backed redistribution with all the false incentives that waste huge amounts of money; the country will not have any non-market regulation, the business will be free to work, it will manage its resources at its own discretion, no one will try to regulate prices and thereby create artificial shortages of goods, no one will force businesses to close during an air raid, no one will organize conscription hunts, no one will cut off electricity and justify these actions by enemy bombings.

Conclusion: findings

The state emerges and develops as a result of one group of people implementing a technology that allows them to seize a part of the property of other people from a controlled territory with impunity.
The state is not a “stage” or “phase” in the evolution of society, it is a parasitic structure. Society does not go anywhere when the state appears, and it gains no good from the state’s existence.
The state, or more precisely, “society with state” does not have any special qualities that give it a permanent military advantage over a free society. On the contrary, a free society is, ceteris paribus, more developed and motivated to repel aggression. A free society is harder to defeat because it does not have a government that can capitulate.
The Russia-Ukraine war has confirmed the findings of the general libertarian theory. The main enemy of the state is always “its own” population, and increasing control over the people is its primary goal, the wartime being no exception. The bureaucracy has no incentive to end the war quickly and effectively by defeating the enemy.

Ілюстрація: згенеровано DALLE

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Volodymyr Zolotoriov

The scientific editor of “WellBooks” publishing house, head of Liberty Education Project. He has many years of experience in political activity and consulting, as well as work in mass media. The author of the books “Plan B for Ukrainians” and “Libertarian Perspective”.

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