Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "How Wars are Won \u0026 Lost - A Simple Model" video.

I think willingness to fight is still high in the western world. Of course does a human life getting valued differently now when a woman only gets 1-3 kids, rather than a dozen.. and most of them live beyond 50 rather than dying before 30. The point is, westerners want to fight just wars. If ISIS comes rolling with tanks over my countries borders we are willing whatever sacrifice needed to win. A concription army of citizens isn't a bad idea for defensive wars, or for wars where the public knows the goals of the war and agrees with them - like a UN intervention to stop a genocide. But if you plan to attack foreign countries for the sake of the interest of multinational corporations, then a conscription army will lead to making the war extremely unpopular among the population as bodybags filled with the sons of the nation returns home. And people will become angry on the ruling class. So that's why EU now is pushing for an own army, with the object of mobile operations across the globe, instead of a boring army of the masses only suitable for a defensive war against the Russians. If you can have blackwater troops, Gurkhas and foreign legion troops dying instead of your own men, then people will not protest as much about your elites aggressive foreign policy.
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The United States could never have won that war. Not with their stupid body counts doctrine. And the only chance for South to survive would had been a landreform, which is a political action and not a military. There are instances when entire units had been wiped out, so I guess the definition of "battle" is a bit arbritrary. Anyways, Vietminh had control over the situation and started 90% of the firefights. And that casulity ratio have been inflated... both by politicians who wanted the public to believe that the war was progressing, and the numbers was also inflated by commanders in order to get promotions and not getting fired from their job so they can't support their family and send their kid to collage. And each unit also had a quota of enemies to kill, and had to risk their lives to fullfill it. So soliders often lied, they didn't want to die in a pointless battle like Hamburger Hill, so one of their higher ups could have his medals and rewards, while people with the ass in the grass dies for nothing. They said dead civilians was dead VC's. They said that they had a kill, but the artillery bombardment of the area had made that no body was left. The statistics was bullshit, and America never got halfway to that magic casulity number when the enenmy losses men in higher number each month than they could find replacements. Not even with their own manipulated fakestats. Furthermore don't I understand why casualty ratios would be important, since the Russians could defeat Germany despite taking higher losses. And America never managed to control the countryside. In fact they completly misunderstood the entire conflict to begin with. The narrowminded brains of the American political and military leadership just saw the world as either communist or capitalist and ignored all nuance. Ho Chi-Minh was more of a nationalist (and initially also a democrat), than he was a communist. He recieved foreign aid by America when he fought the Japanease occupation, and he was person much liked by America, and Ho Chi Minh admired America and wanted to shape Vietnam after the founding fathers of America. He was an intellectual man who had studied in Europe. But when he suggested a Vietnam with a high degree of self-governence and still being a colony under France, his moderate suggestions got rejected. America didn't want to piss off the french just to make some poor vietnamease happy. So Vietminh had to fight the french, and they had no support from America so they had to turn the communist block to get arms for their national liberation. And after Dien Bien Phu Vietnam won their independence, and it was agreed upon that South would have a democratic election about a reunification of the country in 1956, but that promise became ignored because it was believed that Ho Chi Minh easily could have won that election. So the war didn't have much to do with a communist invasion or the domino theory. This was a seperate event. And the conflict was about many things. It was firstly and foremost a peasant revolt against opressive landlords, it was a war against a corrupth and unjust government, it was a protest against the unpopular strategic hamlet program that forced people from their homes to go into camps where people starved and had their freedom of movement taken away, it was a war about national liberation, it was protest against Diems Catholic governments rule over a Buddist population, it was a war about revenge over the many civilian casulties inflicted by the Americans in free fire zones. In short, it was more than just a war about imposing communism over another country.
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I think warexhaustion + the lack of ideas how to fill the power vacuum are bigger factors than fear of losses in this case. ISIS will continue to do terrorist attacks as long as they exist, so most people are happy to murder those scumbags. But the political elite seems more interested in a regime change in Syria, than solving the ISIS-problem.
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I think that conscription armies are a bit different. Lets say you fight a war with blackwater troops, Gurkhas and the french foreign legion... then the civilian population wouldn't protest as much about having to fight an illegal war on foreign soil in order to steal natural resources. But if you have spend your own peoples blood abroad just for the sake of a rich scumbag wanting more money in his pockets, then people would be furious. On the other hand I think that national conscription army would be superior in fighting moral to a mercenary army when it is fighting a just war, that say a war of defence... or maybe a war to stop a genocide. Then you talk about the economic aspects of war. In the past was an imperial power punished for being militaristic and having an aggressive foreign policy, since the cost of war would mean higher taxes for the population in that country. That in turn would make the products that that country produces more expensive and less competative on the world market, and foreign competitors would grab more shares of the world trade.. while the warlike country sinks to the bottom, and the empire declines. But today America have new system: The petrodollar. All countries around the world needs dollars, since its the only acceptable payment for oil. And that in turn keeps up the demand for dollars around the world, and America can print more money and other countries happily grabs more dollars to increase their foreign currency reserves. And America can pay for things by just printing money. America doesn't have to pay for wars and a huge miliary like empires in the past, she can't dump over that cost on Europe and Asia. So why don't Europe and Asia then just stop taking dollars? Because if the demands for dollars go down, then the value of the dollar goes down. That would hurt America, but a cheap dollar would also help their industry to take marketshares from European and Asian producers. So its simply a dilemma for Europe and Asia.
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I think you have left out many factors. Strategy and tactical skill can compensate for limited manpower and industrial capacity... Germany for example managed to defeat a bunch of countries in the west in 1940 that combined had a 80% larger industrial output than Germany. And then this model lacks much for wars in the 1600s. Sweden could not substain a large Army on its own... the country lacked manpower and money for weapons and supplies. So how did Sweden become a great power in the 1600s and have one of the most powerful armies in the world? It was achieved by France giving Sweden money to fight the war against the Holy Roman Emperor. And enemy lands looted was also plundered which helped with the upkeep of a huge army. Sweden lacked manpower but had great commanders and good troops, so when logistics made it impossible for the holy Roman emperor to concentrate his forces to one locatation... the Swedes choose to attack the enemy, when the enemy lacked superior numbers, and the Swedes usally won. Ironically the Swedish army usally became larger after a great battle, since the mercanaries changed side and prefered to fight for the winning side for anyone who could pay them. So the Swedish army could grow from 20.000 something to an army over a hundredthousand soliders.
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The french had so many tanks that they could both have armoured divisions like the Germans, and tanks over for supporting the infantry. And they also had a strong airforce and the mighty maginot line. And many of their Generals had before the war rightly guessed where the German attack would come, and they managed to also win some tank battles against the germans initially.
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I don't agree, Sweden managed to raise 3 new armies during the Great Northern war in the early 1700s. And only a few regiments were made up of proffesional soliders, while most regiments were peasants who only had some military training a few days per year. And when you can live off was subsidies from other countries and by plundering enemy lands, you weren't so limited by your own resources. And with mercenary troops you could make up some manpower shortages. So Sweden played the game hyperagressivly and became a great power for some centuries. But in the long run, it was of course doomed to fail. For example, the Russo-Danish-Saxon-Polish alliance had a 40 times larger population and a much larger economy when they started the great Northern War. Swedens weak resources made a hyper-aggressive warfare necessary since it couldn't fight a long war, and this doctrine was then taken over by the Germans as well. But the wars in Northern Europe had to be fought differently than in western Europe. The seed-harvest ratio was very low on Poland soil, so an army would quickly run out of food so it had to quickly keep on moving from one village to another in order to feed their troops. When Sweden fought in Germany that was less of a problem, because the seed-harvest ratio was 10-15, instead of 5-10 as in Poland. And when western armies fougt in Holland they could basicly stand still since there was plenty of food there (the seed-harvest ratio was about 20).
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The only way the Vietnam war could have been won would be to do a landreform. The peasants were too poor to buy their own land to live off, so they had to work under a landlord which exploited their poverty and took 60-80% of their production and put in his own pockets. So it was not strange that the farmers were more than happy to get rid of their class of opressors and joining the VC. But US refused to pressure that corrupt elite of landlords that ruled South Vietnam, even when it harmed the war effort when corrupth Generals and government officals stole foreign aid used the military to opress the farmers and to kill ethnic groups. If America had pressured South Vietnam to make a landreform, they would on the other hand have been accused of USA-imperialism and meddling in other countries internal affairs.
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The people and the emperor wanted peace, but the military wanted to fight on. And the emperor who was the most popular man in Japan, was afraid that even he would be assasinated if he spoke out his mind in public.
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Vietnam war was impossible to win for America even if the US population would have supported it. There is neighter any reason to think that the Tet-offensive would have won the war. After all fighting in the cities, the Americans lost the control of the countryside. The bodycount model - which was flawed to begin with - was also taking in new accounting methodologies, which contributed to making the Vietcong and North Vietnameases losses to seem higher. Nevertheless, did the military by now conclude that their enemy could keep on substaining this rate of manpower loss for atleast 20 years before the pool of manpower would get exhausted. And aside from that, was fragging now much more occuring. And the American soliders dicipline and willigness to fight was deteriorating. Which was one contributing factor why Nixon starting to pull American units out of the war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcS-pF5F9PM
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Basicly it was Swedish Vikings who founded Russia, so everything west of the Ural mountains should belong to Sweden. And Norway should get North America back, and Denmark should have most of England.
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Russia comes from the word "rus" - a person from Roslagen, in Sweden. The vikings founded Russia. And Sweden also got claims on Ukraine since Gammalsvenskby got a Swedish speaking population. Poland was Swedish in the early 1700s and Sigismund was a king of Swedish decent, so that land is not Russian land. North America was never Norse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson
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I think Strategy/tactics include lots of things, to just name a few: 1. How you organize things. By german Auftragstaktik, or more by rigid centralplanning like the Americans and the British? 2. The military doctrine. The british tought that the next war would be won by bombers would turn cities into rubble like in Douhets theories. While the Germans saw mobility and battlegroups as the key to winning against a superior opponent who got time on his side. So they prefered spending more resources on short-range aircraft and tanks. 3. Training of the troops. Where should the focus in the training lay, since your country doesn't have unlimited resources to be best at everything. 4. What is your goal/ and how do you achieve victory? Is it by destruction of the main army of the enemy? Is it by taking his capital? Is it by destruction of his wareconomy? Is it bodycounts? Is it to exhaust his will to fight? 5. How do you plan to use exploit your own strenghts and the weaknesses of your enemy, while you deny him to play the same trick on you?
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Nah, the Swedish army was the best in the world back then, but it was too small to play ball with real great powers like France and England. Swedish military tactics and doctrines inspired many countries. And Napoleon was a big admirer of Gustavus Adolphus, and read much about his campaigns. Later on would Swedish tactics also be copied by her enemy Russia, as she then became a great power in the 1700s. And Prussia had Swedish officers as military instructors in the early 1700s before she became a great power. And a victory over the Swedish army, no matter how small, could be seen as a triumph. For example does the battle of Fehrbellin 1675 count as emergence of Brandenburg as a great power, just as the battle of Poltava 1709 is seen as the emergence of Russia as a great power in Russian history. Swedens brutal plundering of Poland have also resulted in their mentioning of Sweden in their national anthem.
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Russia had a large badly equiped and badly supplied army in world war1, and every russian artillery piece could just fire a fraction of the number of shells that other major powers guns did each month... and if you think that France, UK and Germany had problems with ammunition, then their problems were tiny in comparison. The allies tried to open a way to transport weapons to russia, but it failed at Galliopoli. So Russia had to industrialize in the middle of the war, and as men moved from farming into uniforms or into the industries making the uniforms food production fell, and wages for industry workers rose as the factories desperately tried to get enough workers.... and the result became inflation and foodshortages. And hunger, economic problems and military defeats caused the Russian revolution. In theory Russia would have been the strongest of all powers in 1914, when they besides of having the largest army also had the largest reserves with 26million men desposable, while the second largest power: Germany, only had 6 million men in reserves.
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Regarding your model, the "industry/resource" component is well adapted to total wars like WWI&II but in asymmetrical wars and ancient (limited) wars, weapons are often bought on the market (and even soldiers as mercenaries). In this case, the focus is on finding money through any means (taxation/ransoms/foreign support/...) not in building industries, technological innovations and strategic destruction. Interesting theory. Maybe industrialization have become more important as the cost of killing an enemy has risen. During the time of Caesar It did cost about 75 cents to kill a man, under Napoleon the cost had risen to $3,000, and in World War 1 the cost had run up to $21,000 per dead solidier. In World War 2 the cost had risen to $55,000 and then it rose to $170,000 in Vietnam.
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Germany invaded France the same day as Churchill became prime minister and he was new and unexperienced when he got this caos on his hands, and he got a phone call by the french prime minister who was paniced and thought the game was lost and that the sky was falling down (but in reality it wasn't, and french had already won a few minor battles). So Churchill took the french prime ministers word and started a retreat towards the coast. That left the flank open on the Belgian army so they had to retreat as well. So for 10 days they just moved backwards... and the germans could make steady progress. Their advance was spread out on three army groups for Holland, Belgium and France. And that left the allied Headquarters in confusion when attacks occured at many places at the same time. Where was the main blow? Was the other attacks just to trick the allied defenders into the wrong direction? Anyways, the fighting kept on. And the Germans quickly took control over the skies, because the germans had positioned their airfields close to the front so they could fly many missions per day, unlike the allies who had their airfields long behind the frontline. Allied bombers also tried to attack all germans moving on the roads, but the germans had skillfully incorporated airforce personnel with anti-aircraft guns in the army so the allied losses of bombers grew at an unsubstainable rate, that they had to abolish their bombings after a few days if they wanted to have an airforce left of the month. And the germans harden their grip over the control of the skies, and bombed allied troops on the ground and knocked out trains with french tanks loaded upon them before they could even reach the front. And the British army got cut off and surrounded and had to flee back to England, and succesfully done so in the battle of Dunqurk. And the germans captured large amounts of trucks and other equipment. And the british army had lost all their heavy equipment when they had fled. And the germans could now push on into France without having to going across the Maginot line. Paris was taken. And without England and Belgium in the game, France saw it as pointless to keep on fighting alone. The odds was not in their favour, and they knew how terrible the previous world war had been. And unlike 1914 when people was cheering on the streets when the world broke out, people was already tired of wars when it started in 1939.
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