At the same time, all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar.

Similarly, it had been the firepower of the forces that had invaded Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban that had been the cause of the destruction of national infrastructures.

This fouling up is a continuous thread running through American military interventions since the Vietnam War. The US deploys overwhelming firepower, either directly or by arming opposition groups, shatters local governmental structures, and then pulls out, leaving the country in shambles.

The ESM has limited firepower, and, along with the ECB, will buy only the bonds of governments that ask, something that proud leaders are reluctant to do. The end 2013 deadline for implementation of the banking union is a long way off.

China and most of the other emerging Asian economies have strong government balance sheets the GDP shares of their budget deficits and public debt are relatively small. As a result, they have the fiscal firepower to boost consumption in order to mitigate the effects of declining exports.

Here, the EU summit in December was an important step forward in terms of deepening political union and strengthening governance among the eurozone s member states. Nevertheless, more will be needed to restore financial stability, such as enlarging the total firepower of the European Financial Stability Facility.

While the government has assembled considerable firepower to limit the unwinding of a spectacular bubble, the overhang of highly leveraged speculative demand is disconcerting. Indeed, in the 12 months ending in June, margin financing of stock purchases nearly tripled as a share of tradable domestic equity market capitalization.

The ECB s refusal to be a lender of last resort forced the creation of a surrogate institution, the European Financial Stability Facility. But everyone in the financial markets knows that the EFSF has insufficient firepower to undertake that task and that it has an unworkable governance structure to boot.

In the short term, the London summit mitigated financial contagion emanating from southern Europe gave the World Bank additional resources to deal with the problem of trade finance for emerging market exports appeared to give the IMF more firepower and legitimacy and seemed to catalyze coordinated fiscal stimulus to restore confidence.

One reason for doubt about the euro and the EU is that, since the spring of 2010, Europe s leaders have rushed from one crisis summit to the next, each time devising supposed solutions that provided too little and arrived too late. Europe s leaders have never fully deployed their economic and political firepower.

To date, more than seven tons of such arms have been seized. They include AK 47, M 16 and M 14 rifles, Low missiles, RPG 7 grenade launchers, 60 and 30 calibre M 50 machine guns, large amounts of ammunition, satellite telephones, grenades with various levels of firepower and other military supplies.

These hybrid wars are fought using a wide variety of weapons not all of which have firepower. With cameras in every cell phone and photo editing software on every computer not to mention the prevalence of social media the information contest has become a critical aspect of modern warfare, exemplified in the current wars in Syria and Ukraine.

Recapitalization of the banks should wait until then only the holes created by restructuring the Greek debt would have to be filled immediately. In conformity with Germany s demand, the additional capital would come first from the market and then from individual governments and from the European Financial Stability Facility only as a last resort, thereby preserving the EFSF s firepower.

Had the European Central Bank been entitled to deploy enough firepower when the Greek crisis first erupted, the threat would have lasted only two hours. Instead, it took three weeks to grant the ECB only partial authorization to act, causing speculation to take hold and spread to Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian debt, thereby jeopardizing the euro s survival.

One result of this promise is that pledges to boost the IMF s funding have now reached 456 billion. These pledges come on top of the 430 billion expansion of IMF funding that was announced in April, so the Fund should have the financial firepower to act in any crisis if, that is, the money pledged at the G 20 summit is actually contributed.

The second, which culminated in World War I, was driven by massed firepower, and is expressed in the saying, reportedly coined at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, artillery conquers, infantry occupies. And the third generation perfected by Germany with the blitzkrieg method employed in World War II emphasized maneuver over force, with militaries using infiltration to bypass the enemy and collapse its force from the rear, rather than attacking frontally.

With that sentence, Draghi eliminated the perceived re denomination tail risk that was highest in the case of Greece, but that was driving up borrowing costs in Spain, Italy, and Portugal as well. It was not a populist message, because the ECB does indeed have the firepower to buy enough sovereign bonds on the secondary market to put a ceiling on interest rates, at least for many months.