@Not James Stockdale
hey how about u try to explain your thesis in the context of:
Yom Kippur 1972
Sino-Vietnam War 1979
Iran-Iraq War
Gulf War I 1991
Operation Iraq Freedom
Donbass 2014
Can you explain to me how those wars (the last times when anything close to symmetrical were fought) didn't have front lines and had armies wondering the countryside instead?
You obviously don't understand the OP. We are talking about modern, symmetrical war. The two wars you listed that were symmetrical, Yom Kippur and Iran-Iraq, were not modern. The Yom Kippur War was fought between symmetrical Cold War-era conscript armies, and the Iran-Iraq War was fought between symmetrical World War I-era armies. Obviously, neither of these are modern.
Then you don't understand how big modern armies are, and even if you take out sat/air recon because magical cloaking devices or something you still have to deal with motorized recon/radio intercepts hum/sigint on the homefront etc all of which are much much more effective today than in the past.
Technology have gotten better at finding armies, the terrain havn't gotten better at hiding them
what this translates into is your tanks have no fuel good luck fight a war with that
Let's talk about Serbia in 1999. Despite deploying a thousand combat aircraft and flying 38,000 combat sorties, NATO warplanes found and attacked Serbia military vehicles and artillery only two thousand times. NATO claimed to have destroyed about a thousand vehicles and artillery pieces, but later Serbian and third-party reports put that number at fewer than fifty. NATO also initially claimed to have killed more than 5,000 Yugoslavian soldiers and wounded 10,000 more, but quickly revised their numbers down to 1,200 killed, close to the Serbian claims of 956 soldiers and policemen killed. Throughout the air campaign, the only thing that impaired the capabilities of the Serbian army was the continued bombing of road bridges and railway infrastructure; those strikes began later in the campaign as it became apparent to NATO that continued airstrikes against Serbian ground forces were ineffective. Furthermore, despite 78 days of continuous airstrikes, NATO never fully destroyed the Serbians' integrated air defense system and never operated with the kind of impunity they had over Iraq or Afghanistan.
The takeaway here is that air power is, first, simply bad at finding enemy forces on the ground (look at the SCUD hunts in the Gulf War if you want), and, second, has a hard time actually interfering with the aforementioned ground forces if they do find them.
This doesn't matter because geography hasn't gotten larger, French population is bigger, it's not ratio of army to population that matters it's ratio of army to geographic size.
You were the one talking about the ratio of population to army size and saying that was what mattered. Even if we did want to talk about geography, the French Army's two divisions and six combat brigades would have difficulty covering more than forty miles of front. The rule of thumb is that a division is capable of covering - not attacking or defending, but simply covering and surveilling - about twenty miles of front. In an attack, a combat division could be compressed to cover as little as four miles of front before front-line units start becoming too laterally compressed to operate under harassing artillery fire. The French border along the Rhine is a hundred miles long, plus another hundred miles to Luxembourg. There is no way that two combat divisions could completely cover this distance, and they'd be too spread out to counter a concerted enemy attack if they did attempt to do so while leaving the rest of the country entirely unprotected.
Also that's because an actual war fought on French territory is non-existent
We have historical records of two thousand years of warfare on French soil, from Julius Caesar's conquest through the Hunnic and Frankish invasions to the war with England up until three disastrous wars with Prussia. In only one of those wars, WWI, were the French able to cover the full extent of their contested frontiers.
in WWI the French army called up 8.3 million men on a population base of 40 million: an actual levee en masse type war in which a nation-state's core territories are threatened is going to result in armies much larger than current French forces as porportion of total population
Why did the French have to maintain 1.3 million men under arms in 1914? Was it because they wanted to, like Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to have a navy, or was it because they had to, because there was no way they could call up, train, and equip as many soldiers as they needed before the Germans made it to Paris? Right now, the US Army needs six months to train raw recruits for the infantry. More specialized fields often take longer. After those first six months, combat units may require another six months of training to become combat-capable. While that year of training is going on, your country's factories are going to need to be gearing up for production. However, this is where costs begin to become a problem. While it was possible to equip 8.3 million soldiers over 4 years with a helmet, uniform, rifle, and ammunition, shortages of heavy weapons were almost constant. The increased expense of modern weapons systems would magnify that problem to such an extent that fielding an army of more than a million would be extremely difficult for a modern nation like France, Germany, or the UK.
See the state of Israel for a good example
Israel is a terrible example of what we're talking about. They have a conscript army (second-rate at best, but they only seem good because their enemies are fourth-rate armies) and large numbers of moderately trained reserves. Except for equipment, there is little difference between the Israeli army and any of your standard WWII European armies. They simply do not have the small, professional forces that we are looking at in this thread.