You're asking me to speculate about military and logistics in a thread about normativity... Fine, I'll humor you
I am asking how can you actually do it in a way that doesn't involve the creation of mega firms like Boeing, Lockheed, and paramilitaries like the Blackwater?
Design institutions that make monopoly and unilateral command unprofitable and practically impossible. In practice, it's a combination of keeping defense production and heavy capability owned in distributed trusts (with multi-stakeholder ownership, think coalitions of insurers, communities, and vetted contractors) and not by one private firm, requiring multi-signature activation for offensive use, and separating production, storage and command (different firms with overlapping audits and bonds so that no single actor can seize control. With those kind of market forces and legal covenants, warlording is not just reputationally suicidal but immensely costly.
Who would be paying, storing and maintaining wargear? Who would be paying for it?
Payment is trivial, it's a combination of voluntary contracts, insurance markets, and conditional access rules. In other words, land-owners and residents can voluntarily join a defense covenant that grants access to shared infrastructure in exchange for payment or accepting a lien. Insurance underwriters will offer policies that require membership in vetted defense pacts, and refusing to join increases premiums or results in denied service. Storage and maintenance can be contracted with bonded vendors under audit, with insurers underwriting replacement and demanding transparency. What happens with markets is an internalization of externalities, since those who refuse to pay bear the cost (higher premiums, denied trade, inability to use shared services)
But then what happens if Jimmy Joe did not pay into the pot, yet he owns the land that is strategically important?
Property owners who refuse to join a defense covenant retain their title, but they also retain the risks and foregone benefits that come with refusing shared defense. In terms of practical responses that are ethically permissible, I can think of a couple. The most obvious one is denying services (no insurance, no access to defense-controlled ports/shipyards, no trade with covenant members). Also in scope is pre-authorized emergency rules in covenants (think: if an attack is imminent, a narrowly scoped time-limited defense action may use property, like staging from neutral land, with after-the-fact restitution obligations imposed on those who benefit) and liens or restitution orders against proven aggressors or those who accept protection benefits without paying. The crucial aspect is that any coercive step must be defensive or restitutive.
Because all of those actors could then be needed to be watched for any subversion themselves.
Exactly, which is why checks need to be embedded. Like independent auditors, cross-stakeholder boards, bonded penalties for malfeasance, and market-based deterrents (instant reputation systems, tradable bonds that lose value on misbehavior, etc.). When powerful actors are expensive to maintain without transparent accountability, warlording becomes a bad business model.
Just planning anything more major than a local response would take years of wrangling between the contractor warlords.
Which is why standing mutual defense pacts with pre-agreed protocols (rules of engagement, mobilization thresholds, funding triggers) are important. Think of them as commercial alliance contracts that activate depending on clear metrics (like verified aggression). With such pre-agreement, you avoid last minute wrangling.
You can't just say that you solved the world's problems and just not elaborate on how. Ethics in that case are useless.
Ethics say what is justified (no initiation of force) and implementation is an empirical design task. The clear answer is that defensive coercion is only justified as restoration or prevention of aggression. Accordingly, institutions that operate within that restriction include contracts, covenant, audit, insurance, distributed ownership, pre-authorized pacts, you name it.
It certainly is not the case, and I'm certainly not pretending otherwise, that defense is free or trivial. However, that fact does not justify monopolistic and coercive funding and jurisdiction. That is and remains forbidden under libertarian ethics and there is no situation that permits overriding that. Accordingly, just make warlording expensive, detectable, and reversible, by designing such voluntary defensive institutions
