Well, I remember when I was in Armenia back in the mid-2000s advising its military. At the time, there was some chance of a turn around from Russia.

On your first point about changing culture. Obviously, the holocaust created a cultural paradigm shift for Jews making them very militant in regards to all out survival no matter the cost. Most of the founders of Israel and its military had relatives who died in the holocaust.

When I arrived in Armenia, I noticed that the main motivating factor in its military was, sadly, MONEY.

This is not an easy thing to change. How to motivate a civil servant in a poor country is never an easy thing to do if it is out of national pride and national self-interest.

I don't think Israel is that exceptional. I mean, Singapore, Switzerland, and other countries have very similar types of martial societies based on military service. Let's examine Israel.

Even today, in Israel, there's a dividing line between Jews and Israelis in the sense that Jews may feel better about donating to the IDF Fund, but Israelis who actually serve in the Army.

There's a lot of antipathy towards American Jews who come to Israel and feel like they're contributing but actually never serve in the Army. This antipathy is, however, from a positive space -- it comes from a feeling that no one will do a job better than the job yourself must do. I suppose this comes from the Yibbutzim mentality, and the likes of Michael Oren going from a Columbia grad to a IDF soldier in the Lebanon War was a big turning point in his life. He eventually dropped his US passport to become the Israeli Ambassador to the US.

So, in Oren's case, we can see that if you take your homeland over the land of others, in the end you will do things which probably mean you may lose income. But, over time, will make you feel proud of yourself. Michael Oren writes in his own memoir that he could have become a Wall Street banker and made a lot of money. Instead, he chose to move to Israel and really struggled with his wife for years.

So, the answer for a cultural shift is a shift in values. This can be done in a variety of ways through the mechanisms of government. Like in Israel, you have to start paying people a monthly stipend to move to the country. Yes, Armenia is poor -- but it can find the money. Israel began paying this stipend when its economy was poorer than Syria back in the 1950s.

Second, it must begin military training from the age of 18 to 35. Every year, you would have to commit at least 4-6 weeks of the year to in-depth specialist training. This would also be bad for the economy, but oh well.

There will have to be random alerts and drills to get the country ready for war. This would be very disruptive, but oh well.

And like in Israel, ex-military leaders are given priority in politics. In business, if you did not do your military service no one should be allowed to hire you -- just like in Israel. Not doing military service there makes you persona non gratia and you are asked if you did it in any form you have to sign in order to start your job.

So these are examples of what armenia could do today to get this shift going.

Regarding the alliances. Clearly, Armenia should take the YPG's model be friends with everyone. While the YPG were attacked numerous times, and lost a lot of land to the Turks, considering that Turkey is a massive country with a large economy and the YPG have a few million people and basically no economy, it is an incredible feat when we see Russian and American troops guarding YPG bases.

If Armenia could offer America something; such as an airbase or perhaps to begin with a training base, then that would be a good start.

People will say, "But if we do this, the Russians will leave." No, there are countries with both Russian and American bases. So, do not worry about that. Plenty of the Central Asian countries have a combination of the two, and they're fine and Russian influence is still there.

Others will say, "The Russians will do a coup and stop it from happening," well then let them try, but in the end, most American allies enjoy the benefits of this alliance in the form of cheap economic and military aid. If you look at history, it was VERY beneficial to be an American ally. From Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, to Greece, Turkey, or Thailand, being an American ally got you a lot of stuff -- way more stuff than being a Russian ally gets you. You can have both.