Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "Basic Fleet Tactics - 1,000 years of holding the line" video.

Two things. First off - the reason for the excess numbers of Officers - was the ability to expand the military in the event of WW III. In WW II they could draft enlisted men en-mass and give them a few months of schooling in their MOS and likewise crank out a bunch of 90 day wonders to fill the junior officer ranks - but - they didn't have enough senior officers to lead them. It takes decades of experience to become a General Officer or an Admiral and they just couldn't do that over night. So - to avoid what happened in WW II - they planned ahead - and had more senior officers than they needed - at the moment so that if they did need them to command a greatly expanded military - they'd have them. At one point in time in WW II the Army was taking Managers who had run a business with a thousand people in them - and making them Lt. Col.s without ever having been Lieutenants, Captains or Majors. So - having all these people who could function as Admirals and Generals - with the experience to know what they were doing - was a good idea. As such - each one was rotated in and out of actual command positions, alternating with positions on someone's staff or sitting in an office pushing paper. Since the end of the Cold War - they don't do that as much as they did. Second - the problem with technology - is that no one knows how well it will really work - until they try to use it against a real technological enemy. Examples of that from WW II would be of Airplanes and Tanks. There had been all kinds of theories between the wars but much of that turned out to be wrong. If you take a detailed look at the Air Power Enthusiasts like Mitchell and Douhet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet they were WRONG about most of the things they had theorized about. Air Power was very important - but the actual implementation of it - bore little resemblance to what the Air Power Advocates of the '20's and '30's thought. One of the most egregious example of which was the Bomber Mafia running the American Air Force (I know AAC/AAF) which fought any idea that there could possibly be a need for Fighter Escorts and things like Drop Tanks. A lot of Bomber Crews died because of this attitude and how long it took them to fix it. The Americans have been in a number of low level wars against weak opponents but none against a technological equal like Germany. Of course - it hasn't had a real technological equal since WW II but even so - if the Warsaw Pact had tried to come through the Fulda Gap - we do not know what would have happened on land, in the sea or in the air. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were both geared up to fight each other - but - they hadn't actually done it - so they didn't know just what would really happen. We have had a number of Games about WW III but the people making those games do not have full access to each sides real technological information - so - all that they are doing is reading - Jane's Fighting Ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%27s_Fighting_Ships and Combat Fleets of the World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Fleets_of_the_World and guessing. .
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@Shaker626 No. Not really. Just because a few things have been done doesn't mean that these things would be more important than the overt weapons we have. .
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@steveconrad1525 Yes. You see this phenomena with any emerging technology. Look at all the Car Companies you had early on. As with Tanks and Planes - there are far, far fewer of those companies and their cars today than there once were. Computers would ... to a degree ... be the same way though there - what emerged was standards in hardware. In Software though - you really do see that. There were all these Software Companies that were "King of the Hill" for a while, made a mistake ... and were replaced. These were the major players though. There are still any number of minor players that pop up, try to survive and then ... mostly ... don't ... .
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