Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized"
channel.
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
World war II was a bit special, America had its great depression and lots of unemployed, and women were outside the labourmarket, so it was possible to smoothly move workers into new jobs.
In a future war I do think the west still got much to give in a war effort. The post-industrial society is largely a myth. Fewer people work in the industry today and more people work in the service sector for two main reasons. Firstly because there is a trend that companies wanna specialize in their core activities, and back in the old days a car manufacturer, for example Volvo, could hire people to work as cleaners and having people handling all the bills. But now those same cleaners and finance experts could do the exactly same jobs as before for Volvo, but now they work for a separate cleaning or finance company that works for Volvo.
Nothing has changed in the real world, but in statistics things seems to have changed because the cleaner and banker no longer works in an industry company but are now instead classed as service sector workers.
Another reason why less people are working on the factory floor is because industrial robots and machinery can do the job more effective oftentimes. You don't have any worker strikes, no paid vacations, no maturnity leave, no sick workers staying home, and no gossip.
And robots can also work in enviroments too dangerous for human labour, they can work in noisy dirty enviroments, and they can lift things that weight many tonnes, and they can make things with greater precision than a human surgeon.
So I wouldn't say that the industry lacks capacity, in fact I think the contrary is true. And in terms of money that are going into the government by taxes, we still see that the industry still plays a huge role in most western economies.
And if a world war with China starts, then I think people would consume less and money would instead be used for investments in more industrial robots and new production plants.
And labour-intensive production methods would be replaced with capital intensive production methods, since we got lots of money and techological know how, and little manpower.
And China would do the opposite since they got much people that can become workers, but they can not afford many machines.
So the west would be able to send a larger proportion of its male population to war since fewer people are needed to produce a tank than what China would need due to its lack of robots.
We still have high unemployment today today, and most people do work with bullshit jobs - marketing/advertisement, tourism, selling financial products of no use to society, genderstudies proffessors, making goldplated toilets and luxury yachts for billionaires, salesmen of anal bleaching, public relations executives and management consultants....... yep there are lots of people one can pick and either dressup in a military uniform or put to work in a factory to make that uniform.
1
-
USA is still the largest economy in the world and most of the highly productive Fortune 500 companies are stationed there, and the country holds a technological leadership. And Britain is still one of the largest economies in the world despite their shrinking importance of their manufacturing industry, the country still produces a lot of things, but if we divde up the industrial production with the number of citizens, then country produces very little nowadays and needs to reindustrialize.
And Germany, Japan, Scandinavia are still making things.
I would not go so far as to say its decline has been a statistical illusion
To some extent it is. And it can explain atleast some of the decline. People always say that we live in a post-industrial society, but I would say that manufacturing is still the most important sector in an economy.
Neighter farming or the service sector can make the same productivity increases.
We are 400 times more productive in making cotton clothes than we were in the early 1800s, and while a skilled worker could make 2000 cigares per day in the early in 1800s, there are now machines that can make 5000 cigarettes per minute.
So could a farmer do the same and increase his harvest 400 times bigger than his ancestors? nope.
Can a service sector person make two hundred more haircuts per hour than a barber in Rome? no.
Can a chef serve a hundred more meals? no.
Only manufacturing can also bring in foreign currency into the country to pay for all the imports. So I would say that manufacturing still plays a key roll in the modern economy. Unfortunatly it has often been neglected by modern intellectuals who say that a service based economy and banking is the future.
The US will be fine, lots of cash protected by two oceans, the worlds biggest navy to keep supply lines open and an abundance of most resources. Europeans, Japan, Russia ect. I might be alot harder for them.
Germany and Japan could build a huge military, but they have just choosen not to do so. And if they were to spend more on their own military - as America wants - then they would get some substantial military forces, as West-Germany had during the cold war.
And Britain and France still got some of the most powerful armies in the world. And the German, South Korean and Japanease airforces are still quite large, and relativly strong compared to the Chinease airforce which still uses ancient garbage like MIG-17 fighter jets.
1
-
1
-
Even with this definition of victory Japans way of acting still remains increadibly retarded. I can understand japans feelings of frustration and anger over unfair treatment from the west. But that doesn't change the fact that Japans decision to start a war with USA was stupid and suicidal.
Yamamoto knew that this would never end well. But the rest of Japans leadership was naive and thought that all what was needed was a hard punch to knock out the American fleet and the war would be over, because America would just be okay with a sneaky suprise attack from a country of an inferior human race.
As I said. This was just wishful thinking. America would never accept such dirty tactics, and especially not in a time period when racism was mainstream. There would also be too much national pride and prestige loss to surrender to a developing country in Asia.
Pearl Harbor would never be forgotten or forgiven.
And this idea the japanese had that combat experience against shitty armies in Asia, and fanatical combat morale could fully compensate for Americas industrial superiority is also naive.
The japanese racist stereotype of Americans as materialistic and afraid of death were also far from true. Just like Hitler and the nazis did the japanese leadership know nothing about America and its industrial might. And the consequences of that would become equally devastating.
The war Japan started was just a mess of miscalculations on so many levels. And the lack of a Plan-B seems typical for the caotic japanese regime. They just started wars everyware and landed troops on islands everyware even if they didn't have any logistical capabilities to support small garrisons on every goddamn island in the pacific.
They were nowhere near victory in China, and yet they started new wars with France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, USA and New Zeeland. As if the problems with China and Russia was not enough. And they also managed to piss off the local population in every land they occupied, and they lacked any economic plan on how rule their many stolen colonies so the local economies took severe damages and suffered from shortages of everything, higher prices and massive inflation.
The war could never have ended well in the long run - as you said. But the war didn't even run well in the short run. The turning point of the war came only half a year after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
And the battle of Coral Sea was an indecisive small loss for Japan. And the battle of
Pearl harbor never became any knockout punch, but instead could many ships be repaired and brought back to service within a few months.
And if Japan could not do better the first months of the war, then what says that they would do better the next coming months and years when America would get more modern planes to combat the Zero fighters with?
The next big disaster for Japan came only months after Midway, when the battle of Guadacanal costed Japan hundreds of aircrafts and enormous amounts of transport ships that it would never be able to replace.
And after that did Japan lose the iniative in the pacific theather over to the Americans.
And the massive sea battle at the Philliphines in 1944 could at best only have won Japan a little time before defeat. Japan was at that point starving and the merchant navy laid at the bottom of the ocean. And the industrial production was stopped by the lack of raw materials.
And even if the resources had been there so would the japanese production been too little to save the country. America was producing more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war. And Japans aircraft designs were comparably outdated and the pilots was badly trained.
And with the end of the war in Europe would any prospects of peace on good terms be over with as Britain, USSR, USA and China would gang up on Japan. America had never even used their industrial muscles 100% during the war - and yet were they able utterly outproduce rest of the world.
And one can only imagine what would happen if America full hearted attempt if Japan somehow managed to win some battles in the pacific. The US Navy even canceled the orders of new battleships after the victory at Midway in 1942. So had the battle of Midway ended differently then the Montana monster-sized super-battleships could still would have been under construction.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1