Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History not Visualized"
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Airwar:
Strategic bombing - attacking factories, cities, railway hubs, bridges
Tactical bombing - Supporting your own ground troops by attacking tanks, infantry, bunkers and such.
Land war:
Tactical level - Units of a minor size (less than say 5.000 men) fighting battles of very limited importance to the outcome of the war. And the study of tactics involves much around co-ordination between tanks, air support, artillery and infantry... and what tanks attack formation should look like, and how trenches, machine guns and land mines are best put to use, and how helicopters best can cooperate during a helicopter landing so that losses can be kept low by careful planning and cooperation between attack helicopters, recon helicopters, transports and attack aircraft.
Strategic level - Are about seeing the war from a bigger picture and ignore the minor details (such as what type of tanks and machine guns that being used by each side). A Strategic General is much more interested in the logistic situation since supplying and feeding big armies of 200.000 men are much more of challange than to someone who is just leading a battallion of 750 men.
Getting supplies forward to your own troops and cutting off the supplies for the armies of your enemies are much more important than worrying about how many men who died in a small battle with 50 men of each side.
For a strategist terrain does matter, mountains, trenches and minefields are excellent defensive positions. While bridges, railway hubs, oil fields, industrial centres, powerplants and such are valuable key areas to take. And encirleing enemy armies can destroy them more cheaply and effectivly than winning a 100 small tactical battles.
Then there are of course not always so easy to put things into the right box. Its not always black and white. There are sometimes greyzones between tactical and strategic level combat.
Fighting about a single building in a town is usally just an unimportant tactical level operation - but in Stalingrad did thousands of men die over the control over builds such as Pavlovs house. And it was not uncommon that small German and Finlandic units could fight off entire soviet armies during world war 2, So should battles with 2 Finnish regiments fighting against multiple Russian divisions
be classed as tactical or a strategic battle? I think it is often hard to tell.
Small battles can sometimes impact the larger strategic situation.
And while losing 50 tanks might not be a big deal for the allies, but losing 50 panthers in the battle at Korsun can have much negative consequences also for the eastern front as a whole.
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France had a larger population than England, and while America was friendly to England during the world war, it was not so friendly during the Napoleonic wars. And the British dominance at sea was total in World war II. Germany was forced to dismantle her entire Navy with the peace treaty at Versaille, and after that she was prohibited from building a new one. And building a new powerful navy would have taken decades even under a militaristic dictator like Hitler, so Hitler never started the war with a Navy powerful enough to challange the British home fleet, and much less so when it was combined with the enormous fleets Britain also had in Asia and mediterranean.
And the loss of Graf Spee and the costly Norway invasion left Hitlers navy in even less shape to invade England, and nor was there any suffiecent amount of transport ships for an invasion. And plundering food and living off the lands could work for an army of the 1300s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700 and even early 1800s.... but a modern army doesn't work that way - it need tonnes of petroleum, and tonnes of ammunition. The 6th Army at Stalingrad consumed 13 railway cars of small arms ammo each day. And then we havn't even included artillery that consumes even more ammo than that.
So I would Guess that Napoleon had a better chance. France had a naval tradition as well as her allied countries, while Germany never really been a naval power. England didn't have much timber of her own to build ships, and her population needed food imports.
German uboats was quite close to starving England, but they were never any threat to Englands dominance at sea, and Germany would never outnumber England at sea as Spain and France did at Trafalgar.
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I think the German assumptions on where the allied D-day landings would go were reasonable - after all it would be dumb to make a landing outside air cover, and having long distances for ship to transport, and not taking a harbour so that the invasion force can get supplies and reinforcements.
Making an attack directly into Prussia would give the Germans all the advantages of having short supply lines, knowing the terrain, having men more determined than ever to defend their homeland (instead of just a outpost in France). And meanwhile would it the allied ability to use their massive air power be very limited as no planes had the range and no paratroops could capture bridges and protect the flanks of the amphibious landing.
So a landing in Germany looks foolish to me. And same goes for an invasion of Denmark since the land is close to Germany and far away from Britain, and Germany could easily gather troops in Germany and by land just walk into the country. And German air fields would be perfectly in range of reaching any invasion force, while the allied planes would not be able to reach the area.
Norway is a country with excellent defensive positions. The country is basicly just mountains and forrests, and it was not this rich oil nation back then as it is today, so the bad infrastructure would probably also become a huge allied invasion force.
And the climate is not so friendly either. So it is a country which is suitable for defensive warfare. And the allied advantage of air power and large numbers of tanks would not come to its right in this terrain. It would simply be more wise to use them elseware.
The Balkans were a more credible threat to the Germans. It could potentially outflank the German eastern front in the south, and its proximity to the Romanian oil fields were probably also worrysome. Even having allied bombers in airfields in Greece that close would be problematic enough.
But on the other hand did the balkans and Greece have many mountains that offered good defensive terrain - as Mussoline learnt the hard way. And Germany could use airpower and send reinforcements to the area by land. So an allied landing here could very easily just have ended in one deadlock after another just like the campaign in Italy.
Taking Greece could probably be done since most of the country laid in good range for naval bombardment, and bombers in North Africa and Italy could reach it. But then breaking out further from there would be hard and would require so much troops to get through the bad terrain that one could once again start to wonder if it would be worth it?
France and the Benelux countries offered bigger rewards, and they allowed the allies to use air power and not overstretching their maritime supply lines unnecessarily much.
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The Ukrainians are not perfect. They still have much old Soviet equipment mixed with their Nato stuff. So of course will they be stuck with some old Soviet tactics which they have to use for their Soviet weapons. Firing rockets from a distance from an attack helicopter and then flying low to avoid manpads and radars is of course a very ineffective Soviet way of fighting a war, but I guess they are stuck with what weapons they have so there is not much else they can do.
Their military is also a mess. With Soviet, USAish, British, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Spanish weapons and old WWII stuff is the logistical system of course a mess. The troops are civilians with Ukrainian military training, combat experience, and some have foreign military training.
So the diversity is very large in this army. And this do of course create much limitations of this force. I do not think that diversity is a strength. But I do not think one can deny that in some few instances can be very useful. The Russians can never know what type of weapon system they will face in an area - it can literarly be anything, so it is very hard to plan and prepare for any kind of surprise that can await them. Who knows? If they walk over a field they might get HIMARSED, or hit with Caesar, PZH2000, Archer, and Krab.
And it might be difficult for every russian tank crew where to aim on weakspots on Ukrainian tanks when they use so many variants of Slovenian, Polish, Czech, Albanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Russian tanks with all kinds of armor modifications and upgrades from different time periods.
The Ukrainians have the option to use cheap anti-tank weapons like AT-4, PV1110 and RPG7 to destroy Russian tanks. But they also have large amounts of more sophisticated weapons which all have their unique strenghts like the long range Javelin, or the short range Panzerfaust-3 with 800mm armor penetration which then can theoretically turn any tank on the planet into a burning wreck even if you hit it where the armor is the thickest.
All this will of course make life a nightmare for a Russian tank commander. The options that their enemy have are so many that it is impossible to fully guard yourself towards all of them. You can never feel secure and relax. You are always stressed out, afraid and feeling uncomfortable.
Your enemy is very creative, innovative and brave so every turn on a forest road is a potential ambush site. And with the crappy infantry support and crappy coordiantion with helicopters and such are you and your tankers left to your own to fend off Ukrainian attacks - which is not fun. Especially not old outdated commie cocker tanks with flying turrets, no gun depression and no vision what is happening outside the tank - so when the enemy stars shooting you quickly get blind as the commander have to dive down into the turret and close the hatch to avoid getting hit from machine gun fire or snipers
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A good army got brains. Finlands army in the winter war and in the continuation war had brains. The Israeli army in the six day war and the Yom Kippur war had brains.
The US army does not have as much brains. It got more muscles than brain. It is a bit like the Roman army. It is large and well supplied and can afford to take heavy losses and still win a war - unlike Finland's big brained army that lacked the muscles to destroy Russia.
USA do not have the smartest Generals, its doctrine is stupid (it have neglected Auftragstaktik unlike the Israelis for example) and it have become a bit lazy by beating their enemy by using air power, fire power and technological superiority instead of finding ways to win their enemy without using such luxuries.
But with all that contempt for the US military I shown, do they also deserve some admiration and flatter.
They are extremely good at technological development - DARPA gave us internet, GPS, microelectronics and so on, so without the US military would there have been no economic wonder with great IT companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon that gives USA enormous economic power around the world and brings them enormous economic wealth.
The US military is also extremely good at organising acute medical care for wounded soldiers. Both military and civilian healthcare around the world have copied the model of the US army and is now organized by the same model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(medicine)
And like the Romans, are the Americans good with logistics and at organizing things like planning for a military operation.
And sometimes are the Americans creative as well - like operation Bolo.
And there are of course a few good american Generals, like George C Marshall, Matthew Ridgway to just name a few
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The Americans were overconfident in themselves and not so realistic. They rejected the Hobart Funnies because they thought that airpower would be able to cancel out any problem. But at Omaha it didn't. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong at that beach. The bombers all missed their targets. The ships with rocket artillery also all missed their targets so the rockets fell into the water instead of hitting the German defences on the beaches, and the smoke the rockets created prevented the Americans from seeing the German defences. So the Americans had a rough day at Omaha beach.
And once the beach had at Normandy had been secured, then the Americans tried a breakout. The Americans thought that once the tanks was ashore then the advance would be easy. But things turned out to be harder for the Americans than expected - it turned out to be more difficult to do tank warfare in Normandy than in the open training grounds in Louisiana. The Terrain at Normandy was filled with ditches, narrow roads with stone walls on the sides, and hedgerows (the infamous bocage) everyware.
The ideal terrain for ambushes and defence, and the American attacks were driven into a halt. Since it proved to be a difficult task to get through the thin but excellent German defensive line and things wasn't so easy as in American theory. The British troops also got stuck in their breakout operation, but they faced more German divisions than the Americans and the brits were short in manpower as many British divisions were sitting in Italy.
And the Normandy landings seemed to end up in a disaster for the allies after being stuck on the beach for 2 months without being able to make a breakout. According the plan should they have conquered a harbour and being able to send in supplies to their 1.5 million men strong army on the beach. But without a harbour it would be impossible to supply such a large force in the long run, and enormous amounts of allied troops would be stuck in a little prison of northern France and not being able to be used elseware.
Had the allies not been able to push through the German defences before the end of that year, then the Germans might have won their greatest military victory ever. And the Brits and Americans started to blame each other for the failure.
But then Hitler decided to save the allies from defeat. He took his small number of troops and ordered them to do the same mistake as the allies - attack with tanks in the Normandy terrain totally unsuitable for armour and the losses were of course high. And unlike the allies did the Germans not have any reserves so once the operation was canceled (the Avranche offensive) after its failure, then the German army around Normandy had been weakened and the allies could now punch through the German defences and finally do their breakout.
And the German defences were completly rolled up and the allies won one of their biggest strategic victories as the westfront collapsed.
So I think it is fair to say that the Americans were overconfident in themselves. And they were inexperienced and not very realistic in their goals. Their lessons from the fighting in Sicily were perhaps too much in recent memory for the Americans to being able to absorb the knowledge.
For a long time did I think that the war was basicly over for the Germans by 1944 and that the superiority in numbers was so total that there was no way the Germans could win on the western front - The Luftwaffe had only 2 planes to take on ten thousand allied.
But now I think that I was wrong earlier. I see atleast 3 possibilities how the Germans could have won.
* During D-day did the Germans act logical and reasonable like any of us would. They heard that the situation at Omaha beach was reasonably under control and that the much more acute danger were in the other landing zones so they therefore rushed their reinforcements to those places instead of sending them to Omaha.
But history could have ended very differently if the Germans had done the complete opposite and reinforced Omaha instead and pushed back and destroyed the allied landing there. And once that had been done, then the Germans could free up troops to fight back the allied landings on the other beaches and place after place roll back the allied offensive back into the sea.
And D-day would have ended in an allied disaster.
* A second possibility is of course that the Germans would never have launched its Avranche offensive and that the allies would have been stuck in a siege at the Normandy beachhead and that the entire allied operation would end up in a disaster for that reason instead.
* And a third possibility would have been if the Germans somehow have gotten into clarity about the situation. Even after 2 months of fighting in Normandy was the Germans unwilling to send more than half of their troops to the Normandy area because they still believed that the Normandy landing was not the real landing but only a distraction for the "real" allied landing which would take place somewhere else. And the Germans expected that this real landing would probably happen near Pas de Calais, so they concentrated the bulk of their forces there. Later on would they become a little more hesitant in their earlier beliefs so they reluctantly sent away some of their divisions to support the German defence at Normandy.
But during the entire battle did the Germans choose to keep their 15th army in Pas de Calais instead of helping the 17th army fight the allied invasion at Normandie.
Had the Germans concentrated their forces elseware then the defensive line would have been able to hold the allies back. And the allied troops in Normandie would have been starved from supplies.
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@callsigndd9ls897
"if you look closely, the amount of arms and equipment supplied by Britain is no greater than the amount supplied by Germany"
Not true. Britain have sent tonnes of NLAWs at the beginning of the conflict. Germany did send no anti-tank weapons for two months - 300 panzerfaust came to Ukraine, but they were from the Netherlands and NOT Germany.
Britain have sent anti-ship missiles. Germany have not sent any anti-ship missiles.
Britain has sent APCs, Germany has not sent any APCs but they like to take steal honor from Czechia who sent some BMP-1 to Ukraine.
Germany did send some strela - which is good altough being 40 years old, but Britain did sent some Starstreaks which are the most modern manpads that exist.
Britain have promised to send MLRS to Ukraine, while Germany have not sent any MLRS.
Britain sent troops to train Ukrainian forces early on in this conflict - while Germany did not.
Britain have also talked about all kinds of other support as well, some sources say they will perhaps send AS-90 and perhaps even some Challanger2 tanks to Ukraine. Britain have also been one of the strongest stupporters of rebuilding the airforce, and have recently given Ukraine a bunch of drones.
Britain has been one of Ukraines strongest and bravest defenders. It is not part of the EU and is a bit isolated in that sense and have recieved nuclear threats for its help to Ukraine. Boris Johnson was also an early vistor to Ukraine before it was cool by world leaders to go there. That gave Ukraine a strong moral support boost and helped to get other countries on the train to support Ukraine.
Britain has also put itself into even more danger by guaranteeing the independence of Finland and Sweden the coming months as they plan to join Nato.
So no, Germanys lazy half-assed disinterested support of Ukraine is lame compared to Britain. Its even insulting to claim that Britain had not done more. No other country in Europe have supported Ukraine as little as Germany in relation to its GDP -- aside from Hungary, Serbia and perhaps also France.
Britains economic support has been larger. And the weapons it have sent have been better, more effective and more modern. And while Germany did almost nothing for two months, did other countries - and USA and UK in particular save Ukraine from dying.. as their shipments of NLAWs and Javelins gave the Ukrainians a chance to stop the Russian tank armies.
There are porbably many reasons for dislikeing Boris... and maybe one can see his actions from a cynical angle and say that he do not care about Ukraine, but only wants to get involved in this war to shift focus away from party gate to save his own political career. However, despite his flaws do his love for Ukraine and his support for their cause seem geniune. And he have also invested a lot in building relations with foreing powers lately.. Ukraine, India, Sweden, Finland.. which suggests that Britain is breaking out from its post Brexit isolation.
Germany is slowly abandoning its failed Ostpolitik and finally listening to Eastern EU and begin to support them against their Russian threat by aiding Ukraine and looking for alternative sources of energy and stop throwing friendly countries under the bus for the sake of trade with Russia.
But countries all over Europe are frustrated how slow things always are going in Germany... and that nagging is always needed to get something done.
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@vladimirpecherskiy1910
"80% of the tank crew died when the tank caught fire" - and source of that info is?"
Ostfront: Hitler's War on Russia, 1941-45 by Charles Winchester
Russian vehicles had durability problems throughout the war and tank losses remained enormous throughout the war. Its perhaps no surprise that quality is not the best when you have old women and young children working in heavy industry in long shifts building those things. But that those tanks could be built by using such unskilled labor is an impressive achievement in itself. But Russian tanks were also primitive and lacked crew comfort, crew safety, good optics western tanks had.
Britishers are also better at self-criticism than russians are. In russia you can go to jail if you say T-34 was a crappy tank.
But the same is not true in England. So unsurprisingly are the Britisher more self-critical, and often times too much so. Crusader is often called a crappy tank. But I disagree. I think it was a quite good tank for its time, but it was never built for warfare in the desert so unsurprisingly did it not perform well there with its sand filter constantly getting clogged up.
Matilda was a pretty strong tank, when you consider that the most common German tank 1939-1941 was the Panzer II. Only in 1942 did Germany get more powerful tanks, but then did still the majority of their tank force consist of weak junk like Panzer II, Pz38t, and PanzerIII that Matilda easily could handle.
Cromwell was not a bad tank either. Comet was competative with the best German tanks. And Centurion is considered the worlds first MBT. And Black Prince was a heavy tank that could fight German heavy tanks on equal terms.
Indeed, Centurion, Chieftain and Challanger were all some of the most powerful tanks in the world and very succesful ones. They also helped India to design the Vijayanta.
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@geniusderweise400
"It is more that its typical that russia is only thought of in superficial clichés, and only the fitting parts of russian history are taken out and the losses of the other side are rarely considered"
Not really. You Russians can never look back at history and learn from your mistakes, because you can never admit that you sucked.
But remains that Russia have lost almost all the wars since the Crimean war if we exclude small countries like Georgia which were so small that it did never have a chance.
Russia lost the Crimean war. It got humiliated in the Russo-japanease war.
It lost World war 1. It lost the Polish-Bolshevik war. It got humiliated in the Winter war and in the continuation war against Finland.
It suffered catastrophic losses against Nazi-Germany, but with lend lease help it still managed to stay alive until victory.
Russia then lost in Afghanistan against Mujaheddin which should be considered amateurs in guerilla warfare compared to Vietcong. And no match for the North Vietnamese army.... but russia had its ass kicked anyways.
And then it got defeated again in Chechenya.
So Im not that impressed by Russias track record.
And I am not impressed by its performance in older wars either. Like the Great Northern war 1700-1721.
It outnumbered the Swedes 4 to 1 in the battle of Narva, and still managed to lose 9000 men and get 20.000 men captured. While the Swedes only suffered 667 dead.
A few months later in 1701 there was the battle of Düna. Russia and Saxony outnumbered Sweden 2 to 1.
And yet Russia lost with 1300 dead and 700 men captured. While Sweden lost 100 dead.
And next was the battle of Rauge the same year, where 7000 Russians faced 2000 Swedes. The battle ended with 50 Swedes killed, while Russia lost 2000 men killed, wounded or captured.
This humiliation was followed by the battle of Saločiai in 1703. Here did 6000 Russians face 1,100 Swedes. The battle ended with a Russian loss of 1500 men killed and over a thousand flags and banners captured.
Sweden lost 40 men killed.
In 1704 did a Russo-Polish force of 15.000 men get beaten by a Swedish force of 3000 men with 2000 Lithuanian auxilliary troops.
Sweden won the battle with 238 men dead, while the Russo-Polish side lost 2300 men dead and 500 captured.
In 1705 there was the battle of Gemauerthof and 7000 Swedes faced a Russian force of between 13 or 20.000 men. Sweden won with 1900 men casualties, while Russian losses numbered 5000.
In 1706 did a Russo-Saxon force of 20.000 men go to battle against 9400 Swedes in the battle of Fraustadt.
Sweden won the battle with 400 men killed, while the Russian and Saxon losses were 7377 dead, and 7,900 captured.
In January 1708 did a Swedish force of 800 men attack a Russian force of 9000 men, in the battle of Grodno. Sweden won with
11 men killed and Russia had 150 of their men killed and 50 captured.
In 1708 was the battle of Holowczyn, 12,500 Swedes went into battle against a Russian force 28 to 40.000 men strong. The battle ended with a Swedish victory with 265 men killed, while Russian losses numbered 2000 men.
This dangerous river crossing became the favourite victory of the Swedish King Charles XII.
A few weeks later it was time for the battle of Malatitze. A 5000 men strong Swedish force faced 13.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle with 1050 men killed or wounded, while Russia lost 2,700 men killed or wounded.
A month later came the battle of Rajovka in september 1708. 2.400 Swedes fought against 10.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, and lost 100 men killed while Russia lost 375 men killed.
In 28th of January 1709 was the battle of
Oposhnya, and 2000 Swedes fought against 6000 Russians. The battle ended with a Swedish victory with 19 men lost versus 450 Russians.
12 days later came the battle of Krasnokutsk–Gorodnoye. 2.500 Swedish riders went to battle against a Russian force of about 5000 to 10.000 men strong.
The battle ended with a Swedish victory, with 132 men lost while Russian losses was 1200.
Well I can go and on... but I am too tired to write more.
You can however see that pattern yourself.
You outnumber the enemy 3 to 1, and oftentimes 10 to 1 and still manage to lose time and time again.
And not losses with a small margin, but usually numbers 10 times higher than your opponents.
If any other country behaved like this, then their genepool would have been ended. Because losses like this are unsubstainable for countries with smaller populations, and socities which puts a value on human life - something Russia has never done.
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I think Japan was desperate for friendship with countries with white men. It had an inferiority complex towards the west, and despite Japans succesful industrialization and victory against Russia in 1905 was the country still treated as a typical non-white country to be bullied around rather than a recognized modern country and an equal to the powerful countries in USA and Europe.
Japans love for the west was unanswered, and the unequal trade deals and racist immigration policies and the bullying and contempt from western powers on the other hand fueled anti-western feelings among the japanese who began to despise the materialistic greedy west. So Japan had many strange contradictory feelings towards the west, as a great teacher and admireable civilization on one hand and as a hypocritical stupid racist materialistic and overly-comfy civilization on the otherhand.
Modernization brought Japan much pride over its great accomplishments. And it carefully selected the best from the western world and copied over to Japan. Here is what proffessor Ha-Joon Chang says:
"The best example in this regard is the far-reaching institutional reform in early Meiji Japan (details can be found in Westney 1986, ch. 1 among other things). Having been forced open by the Americans in 1853, the Japanese realized that they needed to import Western institutions if they are to industrialize. After scanning the Western world, they imported institutions that they thought were the most effective with suitable local adjustments – the Navy and the Post Office from Britain, the Army and the criminal law from Prussia, civil law from France, the central bank from Belgium. They also imported American educational system but ditched it in favour of a mixture of German and French systems, after it was revealed to be ill-suited to their country."
Modernization in Japan did however also face much backlash by traditionalists who throught that much had gone too far and that too much bullshit had been imported from the west and that Japan therefore needed to lock those things out and go its own way.
Japan had modernized their own country, but not everything was possible or desireable to copy from western countries, so they did not for example copy Prussian economic policies to 100%. Prussia was a different country than Japan, and they had both different strengths and weaknesses and economic policies therefore had to be adjusted a bit before they could be transfered into Japan.
But even if Japan did an industrial revolution with a Japanese touch, did the changes become dramatic for the Japanese society and many traditionalists didn't like what they saw. Ironically did Japan import European fascist ideas about the modern decadent western music like jazz and its harmful effect on society.
And Japans extreme nationalism that didn't exist before was also a new created built under western influence, since the idea of the nation state, and extreme worship for a powerful emperor was ideas borrowed from western countries. Japan have had an emperor since long back in history, but he was quite an unimportant person for most of Japans history before period of modernization. Dying for ones country and ones emperor now became a sacred ideal above everything else in Japan. Japanses culture was celebrated during the mid-war period while western culture like jazz got despised and the japanese who was seen as too westernized got bullied on the streets - like muslims who acts and dress too westernized are today in many parts of the world.
Japans nationalism also borrowed ideas from Europe about one people under a common empire. Germany had its pan-German dreams, Russia dreamt about bringing all slavs into a common empire. And Sweden, Norway and Denmark also dreamt about becoming one country.
And Japan dreamt about creating a gigantic empire that unified all Asians under one ruling country - like Prussia did with the Germans. And if Japan did that, then western countries would be forced to accept Japan as an equal and as a great power. Indeed, if Japans dream came true it would probably be the mightyiest country in the world.
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I never given this topic much thought, but when I think about it I see that...
Hitler was nervous and wanted the invasion of France to happen under the winter, but it happened in the summer. The final push at Dunkirk in 1940 got deleyed. Barbarossa was supposed to happen in may, but was launched 22 of june. The battle of Moscow got deled because of the need to deal with troop concentration at the Kiev. Malta was bombed for months, and the air invasion then got canceled the same week it was supposed to take place. The evacation of the Rzhev pocket was a very old idea when the order to abandon the position finally came. The order of breakout from Stalingrad was also supposed to happen but it never came, and at one point it got too late for that to happen. Germany's handeling of the Afrika korps in late 1942 - early 1943 was wishy-washy, and the Germans couldn't take a firm decision to either evacuate the troops from Africa, or to plan a strong firm last stand, or to reinforce Nort Africa and try to play the game to win.
Mansteins rescue campaign of army group south was filled with much hesitation from Hitler and decisions back and fourth, and the Kharkov offensive was partly part of the same story. And the Kursk offensive also got several deleys. The Korsun pocket was plagued with much bad luck, bad weather, mechanical failures of panther tanks, lack of big bridges to carry the heavy panther tanks etc.. so the rescue operation to save the encircled troops suffered from many deleys.. even if the operation itself started early.
The decision of no evacuation of the German garrisons during operation bagration turned out to be fatal mistake, even if a permission to retreat came only a few days later - but then things were already too late. The German reaction to D-day was also deleyed. Hitlers Ardennes offensive had been planned for months before it was finally launched in december 1944, the operation had been deleyd several times and was therefore not launched earlier.
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I think Russias economy will outlast the russian army in this war. The fastest and easiest way towards an Ukrainian victory is probably on the battlefield. I hate to say it, but so far has russian capital controls effectivly prevented the ruble to in price against other currencies. This has effectivly limited the harm from inflation - at least for some time.
Furthermore is Russia rich in natural resources, it have money reserves stored up from before this war, and it have customers in China and India that can to some extent make up the loss of the western markets. Something like 20-30% of Russias population don't have any water in their homes, and they are used to extreme poverty and their knowledge about the world outside russia is zero and their entire worldview is based on the manipulative lies that Russian stateowned TV brainwashes them with.
Furthermore do I think that the tax increases that the Russian state has done so far has been very moderate. 1.5 billion Euros in extra taxes is not even much money for a smaller country like Sweden where the government yearly takes in about 150 billion in taxes.
And we have peace time here. And I would expect that the tolerance for higher taxes would be higher in a country at times of war.
And as immoral, stupid and evil Russias war effort has been does over 80% of the Russian people still support Putin according to polls. So there is therefore plenty of room that the Russian government would have for tax increases to pay for the war if the money reserves starts to run low.
And raising taxes will cause deflation. And that deflation will compensate for some of the harm that inflation causes.
Just like inflation will compensate for some of the damage that too high deflation causes. So the Russian economy can be stabilized through those means as well if need be.
Wests economic war have not been a success.
But in a few areas have it been very effective. It sanctions have caused a severe lack of advanced components that are needed to make advanced weapons. And the result is an extremely low montly production of cruise missiles - which lead to the failure of Russias terrorbombing campaign on Ukraines energy grid.
The lack of components have also forced Russia to cancel tank production of Armata, T-90, T-80 and T-72 and the country has to rely more and more on old garbage tanks like T-62 and T-55 instead. And those tanks cannot get excellent gun sights and such because of the western sanctions.
The Russian civilian aviation is living on borrowed time. The 500 passanger planes that Russia stole from western countries will sooner or later become impossible to fly due to the lack of spareparts.
And when Russia began the war it had over 50 car producing companies. And now less than a dozen remains. And China is taking over more and more shares of the Russian market. So the future does not look good for Russian industry, and it seems highly unlikely that Russia will ever recover its lost trade with the west for decades. I do not think Germany is eager to undone all its hard work to switch off its energy dependence on Russia, Russia to go back again and piss off all her allies and anger Germans at home who no longer see Russia as a geostrategic friend but more as an evil dictatorship and a potential threat after it just have threatened to nuke it. Such things will not be forgotten.
Overall have the sanctions been effective in depriving Russia from war materials.
Of course does Russia smuggle components - and that was just expected before the sanctions were introduced as well.
However the smuggeling does not render the santions worthless. It becomes harder and sometimes impossible to obtain components, in any significant large amounts to make military production worthwhile.
And the lack of cheap easily accessible components also dramatically drives up production costs for making advanced weaponary - which in turn means that less of them can be produced.
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I think it is worth pointing out that Swedens army was one formidable opponent at this time and Prussia, Poland, Austria, Denmark, Saxony and Russia all feared it and usally got beaten by it.
But Swedens population was small and the resources were limited, and in the end could not great administration and tactics compensate for all the superior strenght of the enemies... but even so, was Sweden able to put up hell of a fight against a 40 times stronger enemy and almost win and crushing the Russian empire in 1709.
Most contemporary people (including foreigners from countries all over Europe) thought that Sweden would soon retake her lost provinces, so the loss of the great northern war wasn't necessarily the end of the Swedish empire - but a pro-peace administration took power in Sweden for the coming decades so nothing of that happened.
But times would later on change...
The times of civil war and caos in Germany, Russia, Poland and the Baltics had made it easy for Sweden to expand it territory on it their expense during the 1500s and 1600s. But in the 1700s, that oppurtunity was beginning to dissapear as Prussia and Russia were building their mighty armies.
And the Baltics fell into Russian hands, while Poland would get cut to pieces by Russia, Austria and Prussia later on. So all the oppurtunities for cheap victories were gone.
Sweden was a poor country and it opted for peace time policies and spending cuts for its military after the great northern war. So the army became smaller and underfunded and the army was no longer the best in Europe by the mid-1700s, but instead other armies had more modern equipment and the Swedish wars declared on Russia in 1741 and Prussia in 1756 would both end in failures.
And Frederick of Prussia didn't think as much about the Swedish threat as he more worried about his much more powerful enemies - Austria, Russia and France.
So 1721 became the end of the Swedish empire from our todays hindsight perspective, but things never needed to be this way.
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The North Korea military is like a 1950s museum.
The army is unmodern but large, and most of its equipment is just garbage eventough a few weapons can still be very capable despite their old age. Some I would try to not underestimate the army.
But the airforce however is a complete joke. And no, even if it is an air force with a large numbers of planes I will not take it seriously. Any airforce with MIG15 jets in service is just fucking joke.
And yes, I also think the Chinease airforce is garbage for the same reason.
North Korea can never defeat South Korea with its badly equiped army, that is underfed, untrained, and have low fighting morale and lacking of oil and spareparts.
And no matter how a World war wiith China vs USA would play out, I feel pretty sure that USA would get 100% air superiority over China within just a month. F35 might be hugely over-rated. But it would still outclass Chinease Mig17 jets.
And Chinease tanks from the 1960s would simply be target practice, unless they break apart by themselves just like low-quality Chinease toys do the day after Christmas.
So even if China would intervene also in the next Korean war, I still think that North Koreas regime will only be able to exist under the mercy of the leader in Washington. Because if he wants to take over North korea, then the Communists would be unable to stop them.
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Frederick conquered the province from Silesia from Austria in the first Silesian war. And in the next Silesian war (also known as the Seven years war) the Austrians were determined to take back Silesia and crush Prussia once and for all. France was angry for Frederick had signed a peace instead of helping them in the previous war, so they also wanted revenge.
And Russia was also ruled by an angry lady just like France and Austria, so they ganged up on Frederick, who realized that a war was on its way and therefore decided to strike first before the odds would getting even worse. And then the Seven Years war had started and Frederick had no allies except Britain - which was a sea power with no troops to help Frederick with.
So had to fight on his own and rely on his well trained troops and his own skill as a Commander. And without those things Prussia would never had survived. The 1700s are known as a boring age in military history when battles were fought with two lines firing on each other and the side that runned out of manpower first lost... so no impressive crushing victories were won with big losses on one side and small on the other.
But Frederick turned upside down on all this with his bold, agressive, and unorthodox kind of warfare. Things looked very dark for Prussia in late 1757 when massive enemy troop concentrations were massing around the Kingdom. And Frederick striked back first with the crushing victory at Rossbach where the French army got a bloody nose.
But even after the victory, did Prussia not seem to survive for long. Frederick had to kick out the Austrians from Siliesia or lose the war. That rich Province had large economic value and big importance for its military industries, and even a temporary loss of it would be devestating. So Frederick decided to make a large flanking attack on the Austrian army at Leuthen with everything he had, only a month after the battle of Rossbach.
He set off his men in the very early hours of the morning and they took the Austrians completly by surprise and managed to inflict heavy losses on a much stronger enemy force and suffering much smaller losses on their own.
Prussia had been saved for the moment, and Frederick had become a popular national hero in Britain. He got financial aid from Britain. But the war was far from over. Morale was high and Prussia had won some crushing victories, but even the tiny losses in Leuthen were felt for such a small nation. And every man would be needed for the rest of the war against a mighty coalition of Austria, Russia, France, Sweden and Saxony.
There was simply not enough troops to hold all the enemies back at all places at once. And the overmight would eventually take out it right when Frederick's luck was running out. He would take some heavy defeats in battles against the Russians and Berlin got plundered. And Britain was happy with their victories on other continents, so they abandoned Prussia to its own fate. And the King was once again thinking of commiting suicide.
He and his troops had fought well but it led nowhere. And suddenly the monarch of Russia died, and the new Tzar
was a mentally ill boy who literarly liked to strangle rats. And he was also a great fanboy of Frederick the Great, and he used to dress himself in a Prussian uniform. So of course did he want to sign a peace with Prussia as soon as possible, and which he later did. And he even wanted Russia to join the war on Prussia's side against Austria - but that was too much for many Russian who protested. But he would become assassinated before such an alliance could be signed. But the peace between Russia and Prussia would remain.
And the future started to look much brighter for Frederick. Soon would also Sweden sign a peace deal with Prussia, since its half-assed military campaign had gotten nowhere despite the Swedish occupied provinces had been the hardest plundered in the war. The Queen of Sweden was also Fredericks sister so she of course never liked this war to begin with.
And then Austria was fighting alone had to sign a peace with Frederick. The war had been a costly world war. But Britain could heal its wounds by the riches gained from her conquest of America and India. Prussia, Austria and Russia decided to make peace with each other and fix their economic problems by grabbing land from Poland.
And France was left with economic problems - which became worse with the involvement in the American Revolution. France had no land to steal, and ending up with social caos and the French revolution.
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Prussia and Austria was unfriendly of each other from 1740 to 1871 because of reasons. They both wanted to unite all the German speaking people but only under an empire under their own leadership. One of them was catholic and the other one was protestant. Prussia and Austria also fought some wars over the province of Silisia, which Frederick the Great took from Austria. And then Austria and the Habsburg monarchy had wanted to crush all small German protestant states and force their globalism/papacy and central government upon its unwilling subjects with military force for much of the 1500s and 1600s, and a third of Germany's population had to die because of ambitions of the Austrian monarchy to dominate Germany....... so there was a lot of hostility towards South Germany from the North Germans, and vice versa.
Many Germans still kept on dreaming about a unified Germany in the 1800s, where Prussia, Austria, Switzerland, Hannover, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Saxony and all other German speaking lands would join into one single empire. But the Austrian and Prussian monarchs simply didn't wanna give up their own power and prestige for this project to come true.
And then Germany was created without Austria. And Bavaria decided to join Germany despite it had more common interests with Austria than with Prussia.
So it was only later that Austria and Germany became allies and fought the first world war together. And then the outdated Austro-Hungrian empire died in this war, because the multicultural empire could only be hold togheter by a monarch... and then this fabric of society was torn apart, and Habsburg lands was turned into many different countries.
So one could say that the 1800s was a conflict of nationalists vs Conservatives. And the Conservatives liked the monarchy, they like multi-culturalism and they hated the nationstate and democracy. And the nationalists were strong patriots and liked democracy and the idea of landwehr mass-conscription army and they were very intolerant towards minorities such as jews and slavs in occupied lands who refused to assimilate.
And the nazis would simply pick the worst things out of both these movements from the 1800s, and incorporate the old conservatives hatred of democracy and the nationalists intolerance of jews and slavs.... and all this added with militarism and flagwaving of course.
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Russia deploys small groups of men because they did know that Ukraine had a severe artillery ammunition shortage so they would not shot on russian soldiers unless there was a high chance of inflicting heavy losses. But by deploying few men that are spread out would Ukraine face a dilemma of using up their ammunition to stop russian assaults for very small gains. And that would leave Ukraine without ammunition and become very vulnerable in the future.
Ukraine also made attacks against the russian military with small groups of men to avoid getting easily seen by enemy drones and getting crushed by massive enemy artillery.
Its hard to tell what the solution would be. Outflanking the enemy defensive lines is one possibility - like the Germans did in France 1940.
Another solution would perhaps be superiority in firepower and using brute force to punch through enemy lines. Sure did this solution not work well back in the battle of Somme in 1916. But on the other hand was there no way that troops in the frontline back then could communicate with artillery and coordinate artillery fire with radio ask for reinforcements and request changes to orders. Today do we got artillery with much better range and precision. Counter-battery radars can slaughter enemy artillery, and drones can drop grenades vertically into enemy trenches and fly into underground tunnels where artillery cannot reach.
Drone technology is also just in its own infancy. Future generations will perhaps laugh at those primitive drones used in Ukraine like we do at the primitive WW1 aircrafts. With purpose built drone weapons instead of using surplus Soviet hand grenades and RPG-7 warheads and american cluster bombs, or artillery grenades... could the drones launch much deadlier explosives and also reduce weight.
Artillery shells have a thick metal wall that allows it to survive the brutal forces of being kicked out from an artillery tube many hundreds of meters per second. But if you are just going to fly a drone and drop a grenade from the air or slowly fly into a target with a drone you no longer need a thick metallic casing for your explosive. You can save that weight, and use that weight for carrying extra much explosives instead - like airplanes do with flying bombs. And that is the reason why flying bombs are so much more powerful than artillery fire.
I also expect AI and better sensors to revolutionize drone warfare even further and make it more deadly.
And then might drones replace helicopters to some extent. And instead of having an air cavalry division with hundreds of helicopters carrying supplies, could troops get their supplies delievered to them by drones that comes with packages of food, medicine, ammo, and fuel. And those supplies will be less vulnerable to enemy fire than a helicopter. A cheap drone could easily be replaced, while a helicopter can't. America with its economic and industrial force could afford to lose thousands of drones, while its not so willing to lose manpower.
Drones will probably also be used at rescue operations at sea with its powerful sensors that could easily detect a human body more easily than a human eye ever would.. heat seaking, optical sensors and other types of sensors could be built much more superior to the human eye. This could also be a powerful tool to help people in other emergencies like finding a human body out in the snow.
Sea drones is another chapter in itself, and they will revolutionize warfare at sea just as much as the invention of the torpedo and cruise missile have.
Drones will lay mines or work with mine clearance. They can fly behind enemy troop concentrations that are retreating, and block their retreat by dropping land mines. And then will the enemy be trapped and fall victim to enemy artillery or be forced to surrender.
Indeed the uses of drones are enormous.
Maybe drones could also be used to carry daisy cutter bombs to make landing zones for helicopters in the middle of forests. And perhaps they could carry mine clearing snakes to create passages through enemy lines.
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Europe was very backward compared to the rest of the world during the early middle ages. The Song dynasty in China led the country into prosperity. And Arabia was having a golden age when it collected knowledge from east and west and exchanged plants and technologies from Spain in west to Pakistan in the east.
Europe was a backwards place.
But things Changed. The Mongols crushed the Song dynasty in China, and slaughtered millions of arabs and destroyed irrigation and caused so deep harm on Iran that its agriculture would never recover until 600 years later. And the bubonic plague which were spread by the Mongol's did cause more harm in the muslim countries with densely populated big cities than what it did to the underdeveloped European countryside.
So Europe came in better shape from those problems than what the east did. Egypt was an economic superpower during the time of the crusades, but the black death killed more than 7 out of its 8 million inhabitants and wrecked the country.
But despite the crusades, the plague and the Mongols would the Ottomans still have some power left to expand into Europe for some centuries...
Europe did however have something that other cultures lacked: curiosity. The willingness to learn from other cultures.
This was demonstrated by the fact that China had invented gun powder, paper, the compass and the printing press. But it did not use those technologies to any large extent, unlike the Europeans. China used their gunpowder for fireworks instead of war, while Japan banned all use of fire arms. And book printing was not very useful in a language that uses pictograms to write things down. And the use of the compass stopped when the new rulers in China stopped all maritime trade and exploration, because they thought it was a useless waste of money and they thought that the rest of the world had nothing interesting to offer. And sea trade and shipbuilding stopped, then did of course the skilled shipbuilders not pass on their skills and technologies to the next generation of Chinese. So the knowledge was lost.
Also the Arabs lost their fantastic shipbuilding skills the same way. Shortage of trees among other things had pressed up production costs of ships and it was cheaper to buy ships from other countries. And the neglect of the navy led to navigational skills and shipbuilding knowledge to being lost. The problems was so large that Ibn Khaldun complained about it in the 14th century, and he said that ships that muslims in the past could build by themselves no longer were possible to build without importing foreign experts with the know-how.
India was never interested in the printing press and never took it to use. While the muslim world never got interested in doing so either. It was not until 1729 that the first muslim country adopted it - the Ottoman empire. However, it was quickly banned again after a few years. Religious leaders hated the innovation because they thought it undermined the written word, and the oral tradition of transferring the Quran was seen as holy.
So to conclude was India, China and the MENA-countries unwilling to use the innovations they themselves had created. While the Europeans did put all of them to great use. Gun powder weapons were perfected. The compass came into great use as Europeans explored, conquered, traded and settled the world. And the paper allowed Europeans to store information over generations, and reducing the cost of producing books down to a fraction. Knowledge became available to more groups of people, and literacy rates improved greatly in Western Europe.
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@cv990a4
"Some posit that its a way to use up Javelins - $250K weapon against a cheap tank (with sacrificial mobik crew)."
Using up 4 crewmen in a suicidal move and a waste of manpower so stupid that the Russians might actually think its a good idea.
And Russia is now sending 800 such tanks to Ukraine. And I believe that Ukraine easily can afford to spend 800 javelins for that. But I don't think they will use 800 javelins for them. Many hundreds of them will fall victim to mines, artillery, drones, Stugna-P, NLAWs, and cheap weapons like RPG7 and AT4.
So in a cost benifit analysis will it be the Russians who suffers more, unless those tanks can do much useful stuff on the battlefield - which I doubt.
Not only because Ukraine are a dangerous enemy with its wide range of anti-tank weapons. But also because of the sad pathethic shape of the Russian military. Had the Israeli army used T-55 and upgraded it, and put skilled, highly motivated crews inside and used good tactics with excellent support and teamwork from infantry, artillery and so on then I would fear this as a powerful force that I would treat with much respect.
But now are we talking about the Russian army of 2023. The Russian army of last year was incompetent. But the army of this year have almost no skilled troops left, and consists of newly mobilized, very poorly trained, and low motivated troops. Those troops are not good for offensive operations. And after a few weeks of training they barely know how to handle their weapons, and they don't know much about combat tactics. And they know even less how to fight along side tanks and combined arms teamwork.
So combine that. And combine that with bad tanks, and infantry with rusty AK47 and World war 2 rifles and I think that the combat power of those units is a bad joke on a battlefield of 2023. Indeed I think it would be considered a very crappy kampfgruppe even back in the 1980s if we sent the Russian army back in a time machine to that time.
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Germany did only have short range aircrafts and they lacked heavy bombers. And they didn't have enough transport ships. And their Navy took a heavy blow at Norway, and the air force lost much of its transports while it was trying to take the dutch airfields.
So operation Sealion in 1940 seems totally unrealistic to me.
But Hitler could of course wait until next summer and focus on building warplanes instead, which would probably be a better strategy. But still, he would need some new types of planes because the JU87 was completly worthless against capital ships with its tiny bombload of firecrackers. And the BF-109E didn't have the range to escort the bombers - which would make the bombers an easy prey once they were out of range of their own fighter protection.
And the new Fw-190 fighter would enter service in August 1941 - which would give Germany just one month to defeat England, which seems pretty unlikely to me.
So a long story short, Germany had to remodel its entire airforce which would take time, especially since German aircraft production was running at a very slow rate in 1940. And it is doubtful it could have expanded much more than it was already producing, since the German airforce liked their Messerschmitts and only agreed to start producing the Fw190 after it realized that it didn't have the production capacity to build more Bf109's. The Fw190 proved itself to be superb plane, but at first it was only built as complement to the 109's.
Britain on the other hand only needed to focus on building fighters, and they had the advantage of not getting their pilots become POWs if they had to jump out in a parachute, as well as they could rely on support from AA guns and the British weather for the defence of the island.
And by 1941, Britain would also be more well defended against a German land invasion since obstacles would have been put in places, more men would have been trained and more tanks and guns would have been built to replace the losses at Dunkirk. So even if Germany probably could get more transport ships, it would probably not be enough to compensate for this.
And then of course Britain could call upon their homefleet in Scotland if a German invasion fleet was starting to cross the channel. And even if the Germans somehow managed to land a few divisions by surprise, they would still have the problem of supplying those men when the British fleet would block all the supply ships and starve the invasion force into submission.
And by 1942, the USA entered the war with their huge industry, its huge navy, and its superior airforce.
And while Germany lacked rare earth metals for making fighter jets, and aluminium to make planes... the Allies would not suffer from any such constrains when the resources from America and the British Empire was combined.
More ships could be built than the German uboats could sink, and soon new types of planes was built that could provide allied ships with uboat protection over even the most distant corner of the Atlantic.
Better sonars was being developed, and the enigma code was cracked. And in mid-1942 Germany was suffering heavy uboat losses that could never be replaced, and the battle of the Atlantic was permanently lost.
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I have heard that the USA threatened Finland to not treat them gently if the assisted the Germans too much and helping them take Leningrad. So as a small country, Finland needed to act carefully to not upset major powers.
Finlands goal with this war was to retake the land it had lost in the winter war. Of course did most countries that sided with Hitler probably also dream about conquering land from Russia when Stalins armies had been defeated.
But Finland was quite moderate in their demands compared to other axis nations.
Finlands careful diplomatic attitude towards Russia in combination with its great little army saved the country from Soviet occupation in 1944. Stalin no longer saw them as threat. And getting peace with Finland would save many Russian lives, so Russia would be able to send more men towards Berlin. The war in 1944 was still a life and death struggle for both Germany and Russia, and losses had been heavy on both sides.
So securing peace with the finns was important. Finland was the poorest country in Europe, but its army that consisted of poorly equipped finnish conscripts and Swedish volunteers still proved to be a formidble opponent that time and time again punched above its own weight. Russian tank losses were high despite the finns only had panzerfausts and 1 armour division consisting of a few stuGs and captured russian tanks (KV1, T34, T26 etc).
Russia could probably have taken Finland in 1944. But the price would have been extremely high. Thousands and thousands of tanks and men would have died... and all what Russia would gain from its victory would have been the conquest of the poorest country in Europe filled with not much else than mosquitos, lakes and trees.
The war was going into a critical end phase in july 1944, and operation Bagration had not happened yet. So German army group middle still posed a great threat to Russia, and removing that threat would be more important than conquering Finland. And if Stalin changed his mind, then he could just crush nazi-Germany first, and then instead take over Finland in the post-war period during the cold war.
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1939-1940 I would say Bf-109 was better than most allied planes and equal to the rare spitfire. The Germans did however get more out of their machines since they made surprise attacks on other countries. They had experienced pilots. And they had better tactics and doctrines. In 1941 would those advantages make Germany able to destroy the worlds largest air force - the soviet one - in only 2 weeks. The Russians had some good planes, but bad pilots, logistics and the idea of lining up planes nicely on formation close to the border with Germany made them easy targets for German planes attacking the airfields. And in 1941 Germany finally brought the excellent FW190 into service which was probably the best plane in the world at that time. And Japan had the excellent Zero fighter as its naval based carrier, while USA had deployed mostly their outdated planes in the pacific while Japan attacked.
In 1942 things began to change. America had the resources to produce more planes than anyone else and they also knew the art of mass production. America had access to aluminium while other countries were starved of it. And America also had high quality oil in large amounts so they didn't need to sacrifice the performance of their airplanes like the Germans because unlike them did they have excellent aviation fuel.
But America also had many good aircraft designs early on in the war - P51, P47, P38. And P39, P40 and Wildcat was only slightly inferior to the axis planes and could still be quite competative.
And by the mid-1942 - only half a year after the war between Japan and USA had begun, did USA start to dominate skies totally and completly after the battle of Midway. And Japan would never recover from her loss. Her best pilots were now dead. And many planes had been lost. And things would only become worse for Japan since American planes would only become better and better technologically.
And Japan would also get less and less oil stolen from other countries transported to her homeland, so japanese pilot training would be very bad for the rest of the war. And while Japan would be able to compete with wildcats and hellcats... it would be very hard for them to take on later designs such as the Corsair and Bearcat and all landbased planes.
In 1943 did Germany begin to lose the dominance over the skies in the east. And the Germans had given the american P38 pilots in North Africa some beatings in the first round. And the daylight bombing raids the Americans did during their early involvement in the war generated catastrophic losses for themselves. And the German airforce would be able to put up a good fight in italy even in mid-1943.
But from here on would things go downhill.
And better versions of earlier allied planes came into being and La5, La7 and Yak9 would become superior to the old German planes and equals to their better ones - as FW190. And the P51D became one of the best planes of the war along with her successors like the P51H version. And the P47 and spitfire also got improved and remained a force to be reckon with.
The German He163 and me262 were for a short time the planes of the war. But not much with a wide margin, since since the American ace Chuck Yeger was able to shot down two such planes himself. And he was not alone in killing those rare birds.
At this late stage of the war did USA have the best propeller planes, and Britain was using their meteor which was a worthy opponent of the German jets.
So overall do I think that the Axis had better planes upto late 1941. And then the allies started to overtake the axis pretty quickly as America joined the war, the battle of Midway and Guadacanal meant the end of the japanese control over the skies.
And Germany did suprisingly well in their airwar considering the numerical superiority the allies had and their access to resources... while the Germans needed to build aircraft components of suitable materials and lacked the same good fuel the americans had.
They improved their Me109K so it could last to the end of the war. And old and failed planes like Bf110 found their role as nightfighters.
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I believe that M-55S would at best be equal to a western MBT of the 1990's. Perhaps equal to a Leopard1 or Leopard2A4.
While I believe that the un-upgraded T-55 tanks in Russian service would at best be roughly equal to a M48 Patton or a Centurion.
The skills of the tank crews will however be very bad on the Russian side, and given the total incompetence regarding tactics will I not be surprised if the 800 or so Russian T-55 tanks gets eaten up very fast without accomplishing anything - just like how the Russians wasting their tanks attacking Vuhledar and getting destroyed by mines and artillery before they even came into direct contact with their enemy.
And getting close to the enemy would not be fun for the russians as it would be extremely dangerous to them. The Ukrainians got large amounts of anti-tank weapons, and even old and relativly weak weapons like AT-4 and RPG-7 could easily wreck such machines.
And the Russians are sending in their T55 tanks without explosive reactive armor, but even if they had ERA I don't think it would help them much given the enormous amounts of anti-tank weapons in Ukrainian hands... at least 20.000 AT4 from the Swedish army alone, plus all thousands of RPG7, and strange exotic weapons like PV1110, to more familiar names like TOW, Carl-Gustaf, Stugna-P, Panzerfaust-3, Matador, MILAN, NLAW, Javelin, and so on.
So getting into close contact with enemy infantry will be dangerous. And given the long range of Javelin and Stugna-P that can reach 3000-4000 meters, I don't think that lobbing long range shots of direct fire would be risk free either. Just about any anti-tank weapon could kill that crap, and only long range between the tank and the enemy can prevent the enemy from using their RPGs and AT4s against it.
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@RussianThunderrr Its not an oxymoron. It was a good tank. The problem was that it was not the type of tank Germany needed for the war they were fighting in 1944-45. It was too expensive to build, which resulted in low production numbers, which in turn made the problem of maintance worse... I mean if your tank needs to go often to repairs it doesn't matter that much if you got many thousands of tanks in reserve like the allies. But if you like the Germans only have 500 tanks (or less) spread out on three fronts that are ready for combat. And then you will of course have huge problems when your small number of local tanks have to be inactive because of maintance.
It was a good tank but in 1945 did Germany not have any fuel for them. And they did not have enough crews for them these machines that were too precious to be allowed to be lost. Nor could these tanks use their full potential because of the sad state of the army in 1945. They could not get air support because Luftwaffe had been trashed, they didn't have recon units that could warn them of enemy units and traps, their artillery was short on ammunition, the supporting infantry had been decimated and so on..
So of course could these tanks not be used properly most of the time. But when they was used properly they were invincable and not a single Tiger II was lost due to a frontal hit during the entire war.
"Well, you kinda over-glorify those AFV(aka SPG) that have serious limitation, that is why tanks are preferred as AFV then SPG, it was true during war, its still true into present day"
Not at all. The infantry loved the StuGs and they served Germany well throughout the war and produced a nice killratio. And their cost effectivess made them the most produced tank of the Wehrmacht.
I bet that the Germans would have loved to have many more Ferdinand tanks as well since they had the best killratio of any Axis or Allied tank used during the war. Turretless tanks have their advantages in protection, firepower and production cost.
The only reason why you would want a turret is if you do offensive combat and doesn't know which direction the enemy will come from, and then a turret gives you an advantage to fastly respond to the situation.
But the Germans was from 1943 and onwards fighting mostly a defensive war, and they kind of knew what direction their enemies would come from so they could prepare their defensive positions and set up ambushes and use their superior optics and low silhouette and prepared defensive positions to their advantage.
Also, remember that this was also a time before gyro-stabilizers and such, so a tank needed to stop before it would start firing. So not having a turret was not a big problem - the S-tank for example was one of the best tanks when it entered service.
And should Germany have need a few medium tanks for launching counter-attacks then they could just have used old Panzer IV tanks instead of VK30D.
From what I have read on the internet, did Guderian not want any new panther or VK30D line at all. He wanted as few production lines as possible, and thought it would be a better idea to give panzer IV a better gun and some sloped armour.
Something akin to the Panzer IV Ausf. K
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They built the panther-line, and then they built "fortified cities" and created the flak towers at Berlin. But they proved themselves to not be enough to stop the Russians.
The nazis made many incorrect priorities on where they should put their limited resources the last years of the war, and maybe a better handled defensive policy on the eastern front could have halted the Russians for some years.
Many special interests wanted the same steel and concrete as the defensive projects in the east used... steel which could be used for tanks, guns, warships, and concrete which could be used for building factories, and bunkers on the western front.
And manpower was needed to build all the fortification and dig all the tank ditches and trenches... but the industry also wanted workers, and the Hitlerjugend and volksturm units needed manpower, and all anti-aircraft guns in the German cities also needed manpower, so there was always this issue of limited resources.
And giving MG42 and panzerfausts to untrained useless infantry in Volksturm and Luftwaffe felddivision units were perhaps not the smartest thing to do when veteran Wehrmacht units often lacked the most modern equipment.
So could a great wall on the eastern front have been of a great use to the Germans?
I say probably. The distances on the eastern front are huge, so a Russian offensive would quickly run into supply as the attacker overextended themselves. And then the Russian troops would become very vulnerable to German counter-attacks and entire armies would become encirled and destroyed-
Landmines would inflict losses on the Russian troops without any sacrifice of German blood. And Russian offensives would be slowed down so Germany would have time to concentrate their forces and punch back the Russian attacks on one front after another.
And soon would the Russian military have suffered so big losses that they realize that they could not keep on attacking the German, because if the war was kept going this way then they would run out of Russian men before the German army had been defeated.
So the war in the east would then turn into a stalemate.
And just like in ww1 would the economiesing of troops of one front enable to free up army units to fight on another front. When you have barbed wirse, trenches, minefields, and bunkers prepared then you will need less men to defend one front, so then you could afford to send your solidiers away to fight on another front.
THe German army could send troops from the western front to fight on the east in 1914. And had the Wehrmacht done the same thing then they would have been able to do the same thing. And after the Russians had been tamed the Germans could have afforded to send more units away to fight on the western front.
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Feels like Russia have bought up much of our western politicians and media and tries to manipulate the public discussion in a pro-Russian way.
Trump, Salvini, Le Pen, AfD, Orban, Tucker Carlson have all proven themselves to be Pro-Russian traitors. They all do the talk about patriotism, and the need for their countries to show muscles - including military muscles. Former rightwing US presidents like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon were strongly against Soviet-Russian totalitarianism during the Cold war. But the todays so called right do not say a blip when Soviet-Russia tries to annex a free country. They even go as far as strongly vocally supporting Putins Russian dictatorship and his war. Had someone expressed such ideas during the cold war it would have been seen as treason, and especially so in rightwing Thatcherite, Reaganite circles.
One can now say that the bought up fake populist right are basically just Putin-puppets that are anti-western, and anti its own people and always put Russian interest first before its own citizens.
Also on the far left do we see people bought up Putin. Among pro-Russian traitors have we got names like Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders.... and Gudrun Schyman here in Sweden. Plus some "charitable organizations" such as Amnesty international and Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society
Sometimes one can wonder if some people have been bought up by Putins oil money, or if they are just stupid and act as Putins useful idiots. Jason Unruhe (aka "Maoist rebel news") on youtube for example claims to be a maoist while he at the same time supports Putins rightwing fascism, imperialism and opression.
Much of the social media and TV have also been infiltrated by anti-western pro Kremlin elements. Tucker Carlson is probably the most obvious example. But you also got news channels that spreads Kremlin propaganda on youtube, like for example "The Real News Network". Sargon of Akkad and his gang at the youtube channel "The Lotuseaters" have been pro-russian from the start of this war, and some of the staff of this channel has openly admitted that they been getting a paycheck from Russia Today (which is the Russian state media TV channel).
Steve Turley is a rightwing talkinghead on Youtube which also have taken the very unlogical stance to support Putin, despite that would go against everything else he have said about rightwing ideas.. such as the right of a country to decide its own fate, democracy and nationalism. But that does strangely only apply when a country wants to be independent from the EU, but not when a country wants to be independent from Russia.
Some people have also openly participated on Russia today. And later on also supported Putins aggression on Ukraine.
Like for example economists such as the rightwinger Gonzalo Lira and the leftwing economist Michael Hudson.
And then of course there are a few centrist pro-Russian traitors. Olaf Scholz, the socialdemocratic leader of Germany, and Macron the president of France
The only solution to this problem as I see it is a total 100% boycot of everyone who have proven themselves to be a pro-Russian traitor. One should ignore their youtube channels and refuse to vote for them.
The west should also make large arms shipments to Ukraine as soon as possible to crush Russian imperalism as a force in this world. The monster should lose its teeths so it cannot go from talk to action. And Russias economy should be drained so it cannot afford to waste tonnes of money to try to buy up influencers in the west and infect our societies with their poison.
They also should be called out for what they are - traitors.
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@iteachyou1575 I agree with John Keegan and Marco Smedberg that the fighting morale was in extremely bad shape in 1917 and that a German offensive could have crushed the French army, if they had managed to assemble large amounts of troops at this critical period of time.
After the "solidiers strike" would morale improve somewhat in the French army thanks to a combination of concessions and hard and cruel punishments for striking solidiers to set an example for their comrades that execution would await if they refused to follow orders. And more importantly did the French army agree to not making any more large offensives, and that was a message which the French solidiers wanted to hear.
And now we should discuss the next talking point.
The war in 1918. Personally I think Germany made a mistake.
It could either have launched all its force on the British army and knocked it out of the war, and then when France stood alone they could focus all their men at kicking France out of the war and the end conflict with a German victory.
Another solution of winning the war could have been to destroy the demoralized weak French army first, and the use all the last forces of Germany to throw Britain out of the continent.
But Ludendorff got confused at the last moment before the great battle would take place which would decide the outcome of the war. He launched one offensive against the British and one offensive against the French and his troops got spread out and failed to knock out either nation out of the war.
And then would more and more American troops come over the atlantic to fight the Germans.
If America had not joined the war, then Germany would probably would have won it by this point. But now was Germany too exhausted to keep on fighting after having to do all the fighting for herself (since her allies Turkey and Austria were worthless and lost almost all their troops the first months of the war.)
Germany had crushed Serbia, Russia, Romania, Italy and nearly also done so with Belgium, France and Britain... but in 1918 her power has been depleted and the 200,000 new American troops coming to Europe was too much for a country which had lost so many men and been under a blockade for 4 years.
Ludendorffs offensive is a case what can happen if you do not concentrate your forces to reach on objective.
As Sun Tzu warned us, "If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak".
And that is what always happens when you spread out your troops everyware. You will become weak everyware. And then you will not accomplish anything against your opponents.
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I think the EU is also to blame for much of this third way nonsense.
George W Bush was the worst president in US history and a warmonger and a war criminal. Many were rightfully pissed off with USA in the rest of the western world after its criminal war against Iraq, and the scandals at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the CIA torture cells in Europe, the patriot act, the suspension of habeas corpus and the Geneva convention etc ect.
And in Europhile countries such as Germany was this used as an argument for a stronger EU, that should replace USA and Nato.
They wanted an EU army to replace NATO + USA. And the anti-Americanism wave that came with Trump's presidency increased this rethoric from the EU about the need for an EU army and to cut ties with USA, and to make a big EU that would stand on its own legs.
And in Germany did anti-Americanism flourish. And combined with old nonsense ideas such as the Ostpolitik - which was Germany's flirt with Soviet Russia to build friendship through economic trade, did this silly idea of power bloc between USA and Russia flourish.
And the EU would represent this third way.
But all what this stupid anti-Americanism from EU and Germany have managed to do is to cause division in the western world. Germany and France are often at conflict with USA... over trade, over contributions to Nato, over North Stream, over Franco-German ass kissing of China's dictatorship that throws Uighurs into concentration camps, and over taxing Microsoft yada, yada...
And all these conflicts are exploited by Putin.
Putin sees that the west are busy fighting with each other so it cannot organize a unified front against Russian imperialism.
When Canada and Sweden was bullied by China, did European countries dependent on Chinese trade not lift a finger to support their democratic allies in the west. So one can definatly say that Germany's double loyalties is a problem. It is throwing western countries under the bus because of its economic ties with China and Russia.
And to some extent can France and Germany also be blamed for the war in Ukraine as those countries blocked Ukraine's membership into Nato. And without Nato protection, did Putin see Ukraine as an easy prey for Russian aggression.
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@TheStugbit I didn't say that the panther was useless, but I don't think the Germans was able to get the full value out of this tank. Had they had better crews, more support, not fought so outnumbered, and made this tank more mechanically reliable then it could have done some wonders in this war. But instead were many machines wasted in the dumbest ways.
And this make me think that the panther was maybe not the right kind of tank for Germany then.
It seems wiser that they would have built a 10 tonnes lighter tank which was more mechanically reliable and easier to mass produce. If they wanted to then they could probably have added the same gun on it, like they did with Jagdpanzer IV.
The panther was a nice tank with good optics, good penetration, good precision, frontal armour, good suspension and great ground pressure thanks to its wide tacks, and the sloped shape also great. So there was much to like about this tank.
But as I said earlier, I don't think the Germans were fully able to capitalize on its strenghts.
The impression you get from watching episodes of great tank battles is that German tankers in the later half of the war often behaved stupid and wasted good tanks. While the Americans on the other hand were able to use their tanks in ways that in a tactically smart way.
They fired smoke grenades to deny the panther tanks the upper hand in long distance gun fights.
And they used sneaky flank attacks to take out the panthers by outflanking them and hit their weak sides.
Or they just used air power to take them out instead of involving themselves into costly frontal assault duels.
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I think not.
Most countries cannot afford any big airborne arm. And even the few who can (USA) I still think that it is hard to see them as units with any heavy strategic impact. They are light units that lacks the ability to fight enemy armour, and the low amounts of supplies makes them vulnerable to other attacks as well - especially in long term isolation.
Airborne units are useful for operations with small duration to capture things like bridges or closing an enriclement of an enemy army. And for the last half of the war did Germany use their paratroops as regular infantry in the frontline, since their excellent elite training have made them superb infantry units.
So I think airborne infantry is still limited in their capacity because helicopters and airplanes cannot carry big cargoes, they can easily be shot down by even a single rifle bullet, and they cannot usally be used in bad weather with snow, rain, and night darkness.
And they also need lots of trained pilots and maintance - which limits the use of the machines even more.
So supplying an entire army from the air is still difficult today... I mean the 6th Army at Stalingrad used 11 railway wagons of rifle bullets each day of fighting. And beside from that they also needed tons of food, fuel, high calibre ammo, medicines, and much else.. So carrying stuff with a tiny helicopter carrying 0.5-2 tonnes or a hercules carrying 20 tonnes will demand many, many (more than a thousand) sorties before an army can get the minimum of supplies it needs.
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The numbers that you believe in are utter nonsense so I assume that you are a complete newbie to military matters.
First of all the Russian military in Ukraine is at best 200-300.000 thousand strong. It cannot be a larger force than that because Russian logistics suck. Russia is a 3rd world country that has not yet invented the wooden pallet, and its military trucks cannot even handle small amounts of mud without getting its made in China tires from exploding.
Russian troops are fed outdated combat rations, the troops have to buy their own equipment or ask family members for tampoons to use for treating bullet wounds.
Having an army that is 500 million strong will be worthless if you do not have food for the troops, ammunition for the guns or fuel for the tanks. And the Russian economy, and the military transport organisation cannot supply more than 300.000 men in Ukraine.
Even the invasion force Russia threw into Ukraine in February last year which was 200.000 strong and had not yet lost thousands of military trucks and had many months of preparations behind them before this war could not succeed in providing its troops properly, but instead was a gigantic traffic jam created north of Kyiv where the Russian army was in a standstill.
And this is just the beginning of problems Russia have. I have not yet even mentioned all the enormous corruption that have led to army units lacking the equipment they should have because someone have sold stuff off to put profits into their own pockets - like with for example diesel for the military vehicles stationed in Belarus before the invasion of Ukraine. And when the war started was the Russian invasion army short on gas so it had to spend time on plundering Ukrainian civilians instead of fighting an enemy. The entire thing feels like an army of the 1600s which spended more time on plundering potatoes from farmers than preparing for combat with the enemy 🙄
And Russian tanks and IFVs are garbage. Leopard 2 got no Russian equal. Russia have no equal to Combat vehicle 90.
Nor does Russia have any artillery which is as good as Archer, Caesar, or Panzerhaubitze 2000.
Add to that all crappy Russian logistics, crappy (if not non-existent) combined arms tactics, lack of thermal imaging systems, crappy tanker training and you will have a mess...
Russian equipment losses have been catastrophic even if this war have not yet lasted one year. Tank losses have been horrible by western standards. And now is Russia forced to use more and more of their old tanks because their new ones have been destroyed in large numbers.
And to make matters even worse have all Javelins, NLAWs and Stugnas exploded so many Russian tank turrets that there are not many experienced tank crews left inside russia.
The Ukrainians will now get more equipment form the west. A dreamteam of say 100 Leopard 2 tanks, plus 150 IFVs such as Combat vehicle 90 and Bradley... and the older marder of course. And they Ukrainians got a bunch of archer, PZH2000, HIMARS and Caesar that can support them.
So it is indeed a very powerful armored spearhead that can make powerful offensives in any local area where they are being deployed.
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Many useless Generals got their job thanks to their connections and aristocratic background (Haig probably only got his job because his daddy was a rich whiskey distiller). And that can be an explanation why British generals also sucked in the Crimean war and why many backward dumbasses still served in WWII.
And France huge losses in 1914 could probably be explained by the high age of most Generals - so most of them were stuck in old thinking from the 1800s and their stamina to actively lead their mean in crucial times was not the best. The average age among French Generals in 1903 was 61 years, while the average German general was 54.
The Generals also lived a life totally detached from all the realities at the front.
Joffre had the habit of eating 2 hour lunches while he refused to let any thing interrupt them, no matter how urgent the situation at the front was. Hindenburg had his 10 uninterrupted hours of sleep per night. Haig had roads near his headquarters sanded so that his horse would not slip during the field marschal's morning canters. And Stavka had their huge Champagne partys.
By contrast did the solidiers at the front had to spend their days in muddy uniforms, wet boots, cold food, destroyed bedplaces and lice and enemy fire.
So I can understand Sassoon, Remarque, and Barbusse's strong criticism. All the common excuses that they needed to stay behind the front to get information (due to the limitations of the communication system of that time) holds no merit to me when Generals in other times in history regularly visited the front and ate the same food as their troops, slept close to them and sometimes even fought along their side, as CharlesXII did in the early 1700s. And Erwin Rommel would also pay many visits to his men and eat their food to get a picture of their situation. And the modern Israelian army would also have a culture of leading men from the front.
So I think that the least one could have expected would be that the Generals would have paid regular visits to the front to get a good first glance of the situation and hear about the solidiers situation of the war and boost their morale.
And prioritizing lunch and sleep over doing their job should have gotten them fired immediately - just as in most other workplaces. If a patient is pressing the alarm button, then a nurse can't just ignore it and have his 2 hour lunch break. Because then the patient could be dead.
And if a nurse cannot do that, then what resonsability would then not be on the shoulders of a field marshal with the fate of hundreds of thousands of men under him? The fate of an entire empire could be doomed by his nonchalant careless behaviour.
And a few of them actully did destroy their own empires - like how Conrad von Hötzendorf destroyed 65-75% the Austro-Hungrian army in just the first 4 months of the war, and he neglected pre-war promises to the German about protecting Prussia from an invasion while the Germans would crush France. So Hötzendorfs incompetence forced the Germans to move troops to the east just when France stood near defeat and the war was almost won.
Hötzendorfs accomplishments in World war 1 can therefore hardly be overstated. He managed to destroy the 640 year old Habsburg empire which was one of the most powerful empires in the history of Europe.
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It was a war and old tanks quickly got obsolete. So building mountains of spare parts would be pointless if the tank would becoming obsolete 2 years ahead if it not would have become a burning tank wreck before then. Why build spare parts for tanks so they can last 100 years, if the war is probably going to be over within 5 years at most? Why create spare parts for a tank that soon has to be taken out of service as it is becoming obsolete?
Even if Germany had mass produced tank, and mass produced spare parts, would the German panzerwaffe and the German industry soon run into problem. What should Germany do when panzer IV and Stug III starts to become inferior to the new allied tank - Centurions, ISU152, IS2, T44, T-34/85, Comet and the late m4 Variants?
Germany need a new flow of tanks since old tanks needed to be replaced (panzer III, pz38t and panzer II) and some super tanks could be good to have just as a pre-cautionary measure so Germany would not have get into more unpleasant surprises, as the summer in 1941 when Germany stood against KV1 and T34 tanks that were nearly hopeless to destroy for everything but the most powerful guns.
It is also possible that German tank designers underestimated the amount of mechanical failures the Panther would have as they quickly tried to press it into service. And if the panther had not spent so much time in the repairshop, then it could have made a much larger impact on the battlefield. A problem with being outnumbered was that Germany's enemies could choose to attack at one place to tie up the German panzers, and then attack with another force upposed and trying to outflank them.
So trying to make more panzers would make sense then to counter this problem, so Germany could have enough forces to beat back the enemy attacks at multiple places at the same time.
Germany did also lack the luxury of the allies to have access to lubricants to extend the lifecycle of different component, or to have access to rubber that made tank tracks to last longer, or to have access to rare earth metals that improved the quality of the steel in tanks or the lifespan of the aircraft engines of me-262.
So Germany could not make things that would easily a long time as the allies could.
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@BobSmith-dk8nw
"And no - in Vietnam - you still had to be careful where you dropped your artillery."
My point was just that rocket artillery was unpractical in Vietnam because the Vietnamese loved to hug their enemy. Had USA used nebelwerfers in such situations, then would many American troops have been killed by their own artillery.
"There are MLRS systems today"
Of course there are. Rocket artillery can be very practical in certain situations. Especially in real wars, and not colonialist BS.
"Western powers are in these countries now to kill terrorists who are attacking them"
There are more terrorists in Libya today than it was back when Khadaffi ruled it. Syria under Assad have been fighting ISIS, Al-Qaida and FSA, and yet do USA and EU rather side with the terrorists than Assad. Exported American, Swedish and French weapons have been found in the hands of FSA terrorists, which later on handed them over to ISIS.
The suggested Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Irans links to terrorist that caused 9/11 have all been bullshit.
So no. These wars had very little do to with fighting terrorism.
If you want to fight terrorism, then you can start bombing FSA instead. And bully the terror-state Saudiarabia into submission, since it have been sponsoring foreign terrorism and the preaching of jihadist islam.
"It's much cheaper to just buy the oil from who ever is selling it - than it is to put military force into the area."
The oil company Total and Blackwater do not care about what is best for the tax payers. They care about their own profits only. The French oil company Total could make big profits when it could just steal the Libyan oil production after France had completed its war of aggression.
And Halliburton and Blackwater could make big amounts of money from the Iraq war, so of course they liked that pointless war.
And what the real point of this war was, that is something you have to ask the liar George W. Bush which himself have admitted that the original reason to invade Iraq was a lie. So I guess we now can just execute the man as a war criminal who starts a war of aggression that killed 600.000 people.
Same of course goes for Tony Blair, Hollande and the politicians that in secrecy exported weapons to FSA.
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I don't think Charles XII was as interesting as Frederick the Great. But the Swedish army during the Great Northern war is interesting since it was the peak of Swedish military sophistication. It wasn't the strongest army in the world (like it might have been under Gustavus Adolphus) but it was a high quality force with good organization, tactics and leadership. Sweden faced an enemy coalition which had 40 times more resources, and despite those hopeless odds Sweden nearly won.
Charles was simply a warrior king without any clever intellect like Frederick. Charles was a warrior king and nothing else.. except perhaps immature and a christian fundamentalist. His parents died from disease when he was young, and Charles was having a fever as well, and the doctor told him to urinate in a cup and drop an egg into the urine, and then eat it.
Charles would survive the disease and crazy medicine cures and become king as teenager. And as such he was immature. He wasted money on wine and party. He liked to be drunk and hang out with Frederick of Holstein, and togheter they had "funny" games like trying to chop of the head of cows with just a single blow from a sabre. And at another occation they invited a tame bear into their palace and let it feast on a pile of food left on a dinner table and afterwards did it drink 2.6 litres of wine and got drunk and walked up the stairs and fell out from a window, and broke its back and died 3 days later.
And foreign ambassadors sent home reports about this immature, wasteful, irresponsible King. And with such a fool in power, many thought that Sweden would be easy to defeat.
August the Strong was among Charles enemies. And he was called the "strong" because he was a strong man who could bend horseshoes with his own bare hands. He and Frederick Vilhelm of Prussia (Frederick the Great's father) used to hang out on partys togheter which August arranged. Either they could eat a large cake made with 600 eggs, or listen to gun salutes made with hundreds of guns.
August also had a big harem with over 300 ladies and he was probably a father of atleast a hundred kids.
He wasted lots of money on other stuff too - like bribes to polish noblemen so he could become King of Poland and he waged war against Sweden of course.
Peter the Great was the modernizer of Russia. And he founded sankt petersburg with swedish POWs and made Russia agreat power. And his hobbies was to blow people up with fireworks which he put in peoples mouth. Or he could knock peoples teets out with a pickaxe.
He was a tall man (over 6feet and he always wore boots) and liked to get drunk togheter with August.
And he also founded a colony for dwarfs.
A not so normal person either with todays standards.
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@Britannic hayyomatt
""The easiest way to farm it is to have loads of children (5 maybe 8) and get them to work on your farm."*
It was a deliebrate imperial strategy to expand the population so China could then expand its territory so that China then could expand its population even further so it could expand its territory even more.
"However it also means that the individual European had more energy than the Asian or African or American."
...
"Having large families is also not a problem because there's loads of rice to go around."
I think you just contradicted yourself here. Rice produced large yields as you said and that also meant that the Asians also could keep their calorie intake very high - unless they overpopulate and have to share their fixed food supply among a larger population, which would then result in a lower number of calories per head. (source: The great divergence - Kenneth Pommeranz)
As I said earlier so did east Asians have a higher standard of living than Europeans, and their daily average calorie intake was higher than that of Europeans. Europe suffered from deforrestation, and exhaustion of their farmland soil because of its overpopulation in the 1700s while China had much less such problems.
So one can therefore say that China lied ahead of Europe.
And things only changed as Chinas population continued to grow and forrests were cut down and soil got exhausted and lakes dissapeared. And the standard of living began to fall as the population grew faster than the economy, and the country got stuck in a Malthusian trap.
Europe on the other hand got saved in the last moment before it was also about to get stuck in a Malthusian trap. And instead of economic growth leading to more population growth (as in China) so did economic growth instead lead to higher incomes and higher standard of living.
Europe discovered that the could use coal from the ground instead of burning trees to make coal for heating their homes and making steel. So Europe did then not have to exploit the forrests as harshly as in the past.
Furthermore did the East India company also discover the art of forrest preservation when they took control over India, so thanks to this could Europe get more forrests in the 1800s than what they had in the 1700s.
And while Chinas growing population had nowhere to go, so could Europe dump their surplus population on America and Australia.
And while China was struggleing with their land use, so could European settlers in America exploit the huge natural resources there. And the could start to grow wheat in the American mid-west, Sugar in Caribia and Beef in Argentina and send all those calories over to Europe to relief their overpopulation problems, in exchange for European manufacturing goods.
"Play time and relaxing is important in all cultures but it's probably the most important aspect in European cultures. Think, the only "freemen" that existed until the 1900s were Europeans"
The west dominated the world in the year 1900. But things were not always this case in the past. It could very well be argued that China was well ahead of Europe in various time periods.
Europeans and Americans were still miserable places up until the late 1800s (just like the rest of the world).
It was common for men to die before they hit the age of 30. Child labour was still common. Governments were corrupt and aristocrats could buy government offices. Democracy and freedom of the press were not the norm. No social safety net system existed.
Most of those nice things did only come about around the 1900s in most western countries - 100 years after the industrial revolution had begun. So most changes have happened quite recent, since the last 200 years or so.
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@Britannic hayyomatt
"The nutritional value of Asian and European foods was different"
There are many ways of measuring standard of living. And sometime Europe did come on top, and other times it was the Asians (as mentioned in my earlier examples). My main point here would rather be to say that Asia did pretty well compared to Europe every century up until the 1800s. So I therefore think it is reasonable to think Asia could have challenged western domination of the world in the antiquity, in the middle ages, and in the 1500, 1600s and perhaps even up until the 1700s.
"The problem with China... Is that it's huge. China often wins in most categories when we compare to other countries"
There are richer regions and poorer regions in Europe just as there are richer and poorer regions in China.
Not all of Europe was as wealthy as Holland, or as poor as a village on the east european steppe. And China have a huge diversity too.
So that’s why I am comparing China with Europe here, instead of Comparing Shanghai with Albania or the Netherlands with the Gansu province.
However my point about play time still stands. Europeans were more free than other cultures. English people since the 1200s had rights, they had the right to live and be free. Similar customs existed in France, Italy and German states"
The rights of the individual was much a product of the enlightenment. Before then did the idea of the individual didn't even exist. It was simply unthinkable thing that you any own rights or was allowed to have any own beliefs.
Just as you will get killed in muslim clan societies today for being a muslim apostate or homosexual.
I think its quite clear that religion was not a private matter in the German reformation during the 1500s. This entire crisis could probably have been easily solved if people just had let people alone and let them follow what religion they wanted to for themselves.
But instead was your religion an issue for your family, and even for your entire village. Private life didn't simply exist. People would bully and harass each other, and the local government would harass people of a different faith, and protestants would smear saints in shit and urine, and things would later on escalate to a religious war, inquisitions and such.
And people were seen as subjects and serfs rather than citizens.
"But China, India and basically the rest of the world were very oppressive and single minded states."
I can agree upon that there was a difference. But we should overstate the differences either.
"Innovation was so prevalent in the Netherlands and England because individuals had a bigger say"
I think Europe had an advantage or China when it came to printing books because we use a small sum of standardized letters, while China uses pictograms which made printing books much more difficult.
So transferring knowledge was simpler in the west.
I also think that innovation was also benefited much by the division of labour and having a large market which made it more profitable to replace human labour with machinery. And if wages are high, then you have a higher incentive to use machines or robots instead.
Americas shortage of workers and large access to natural resources made it profitable to replace humans with machines, and wasting natural resources wasn't so much of a problem as in Europe. So it was perhaps no coincidence that mass production, standardized parts and such production techniques were invented in America since they are very efficient in using as little labour as possible, but sometimes quite wasteful in their use of resources.
Later on in the late 1800s would science & knowledge change face. The old medieval ways of innovation with trial and error, would get replaced by a more theoretical approach with much measurements and reading books. Because people had already discovered many scientific laws, and science had become so advanced that things had gone beyond simply trying out things with trial and error.
"A country's population is set, overpopulation is almost impossible in natural circumstances. The people "dumped" onto America... Where freemen, they were rich Capitalists that wanted money, land and a greater opportunity. They MIGRATED to America."
To some degree you are right. Many people surely wanted to go to America but they were too poor to afford to pay for a ticket on a ship. So ironically would one million Swedes immigrate to America only after the 1860s when economy in the country got an upswing and mass starvation finally had become a thing of the past.
But on the other hand to my point remain true. All the people who left Europe took pressure off their overpopulated countries, and when they left their jobs and went to America, then other people poor and unemployed could get a job. And when the population fell thanks to immigration, it also became easier for a country to feed its own population.
America benefited from getting their labour shortage solved, and Europe got rid of its oversupply of workers and its pressure on land and limited resources.
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Sweden and Russia was also large iron producers and made more than 90% of all iron in Europe in the 1700s. 80% of all export revenues for Sweden came from iron around the 1790s, so when England invented new ways of massproducing cheap steel with the industrial revolution Sweden took a heavy economic blow.
Before railroads and the industrial revolution, you made iron near the iron mines due to the high transportation costs. And coal also had to come from a local source because of the high transportation costs. The Swedish government made laws that forbade farmers from cutting down trees, so that there would be no shortage of wood to make coal. And with low prices of wood, you could have low prices of coal, which in turn could make Swedish iron and steel cheap and competative on the world markets.
But England invented new ways of using coal dug up from the ground instead to make their iron, and the good waterways and railroads made it possible to transport their iron and coal at low costs long distances... and that in turn made it possible for England to begin large scale steel production in huge industrial facilities.
Sweden didn't have that luxury. It rivers were frozen by ice half the year, and sawmills could not be used since they used water to power them - and the water was frozen. And Sweden was a poor country with a small population so it was not profitable for private entreprenours to build any railroads. So transportation had to be done by horses or by foot - which was expensive - and that prevented the transportation of large amounts of iron and coal needed to build the same large steel making plants like in England.
So even if Sweden, Finland and Russia were all covered by trees and had plenty of iron, those resources were useless until someone invented an idea on how to transport all those resources out to the coast at cheap cost, so that they could be loaded onto ships and sold to other countries.
Sweden had 4x times more forrest land than Norway in the early 1800s, but
Norway exported 4 times more timber than Sweden back then because they didn't have any frozen seas like Sweden.
And Finland had almost as much forrest as Sweden, but it could not export any timber at all because all of its forrests were sitting too far away from the coast.
So Sweden only became a rich country in 1870s, when the Swedish government decided to build the railroads. And that brought down the transportation costs so it became profitable to start exporting timber, and coal and iron could now be transported to huge steelworks, so huge amounts of steel could be mass produced at a low cost.
And when the sawmills began using steam engines instead of waterwheels, then frozen rivers would no longer halt production during the winter months.
So Sweden could now massproduce timber on a scale never seen before.
And the newly invented Martin-process made it for the first time possible to use iron ore containing phosphorus - so that the huge iron mine in Kiruna could be opened and start producing all the high quality iron that Hitler and others wanted for their tanks and guns.
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I don't think that robots will come as far as to replace humans the coming decades, but I guess that the infantry will rely more and more on sensors, drones and such. But I still also think that old weapons will continue to be useful in some areas of the frontline / or against low tech enemies.
And I also think that IT-security is a pretty safe bet, if I would buy stocks in area of the economy which I think will grow in the future. If you fail on cyber security, then your best weapons can be copied by the enemy, all your battleplans could be stolen, and your electronic weapons can stop functioning. Furthermore can the banking system stop working, the electric grid can be knocked out, and the transportation and healtcare sector will be hard hit as well.
So the importance of better IT-security cannot be understated in a world which is starting to doing everything digital nowadays.. everything from self-driving cars to shopping at the grocery store, and not to mention all the internet shopping.
On a more general level, I think that the ideal would be to let the country become self-suffiecent in food, energy and do some manufacturing before going to war. And then I think that information and co-ordination among infantry, attack helicopters, tanks, artillery, recon and other types of troops will become increasingly more important. And the individual solidier will get more and more firepower in his hands.
Some say that teams of snipers is the future, while the historical trend the last 200 years have rather been the opposite; and more about putting up as much lead in the air as possible to win battles. And ammunition consumtion and the cost of killing an enemy solidier have risen.
And I would say that I am impressed by weapons like TOS-1 Buratino, and I think they could be very handy in a world war when keeping losses low is having a low priority compared to victory. But the old conventional wars seems rare nowadays so there might be better ways of dealing with junk armies of the middle east than having a rocket artillery piece capable of flattening an entire town.
Drones is the western solution since it can deliever firepower without any risk to the lives of our own solidiers. But there is of course a risk that they can be hacked, and used against us. And having the police using them to fight terrorism, could lead to a slippery slope where they then are used to fight violant crime, and then minor crimes... and the police force becomes less interested in negotating and de-escalating situations and become trigger happy instead. And then will personal integrity be totally destroyed by drones, mass surveillance and data gathering. And we can get a 1984 society, like China today with their internet scorepoint system.
And this time around there would be no succesful escape attempts from the Gulags, since now there would be drones with heat seeking cameras to seak up fleeing prisoners. And there would be nowhere to escape, since every train ticket and purchase of food will be done electronically and could be traced. And passports contains biometric data and RFID-tags so that the government can track you with a radar.
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Logistics is about transporting fuel, ammunition, food, medicines, spareparts for vehicles, cigarettes, winter clothes and other things to the troops sitting in the frontline so they can keep on fighting.
If your troops cannot get those things then their ability to fight will fall.
Lack of food can make your troops starve to death or easily fall victim to diseases when they are undernourished.
Lack of winter clothes can lead to solidiers freezing to death or men having to amputate frozen legs. Lack of spareparts will make tanks useless if they cannot move when there are no tracks or parts to fix their engines, or when their gun is not working. Lack of medicines can increase mortality rates and human suffering. Lack of ammunition can turn even the most powerful tank and the best machine gun into useless pieces of junk. And the lack of fuel will make tanks into useless bunkers, and without fuel to your supply trucks you cannot transport food and ammunition and other things so that your combat effiecency will fall.
So as you see are logistics important things that needs to work if you are going to lead millions of men into war.
Even the best solidier or tank are useless without food, ammunition and fuel.
And if you can cut off your enemies ability to provide those things to his troops, then victory can become relativly easy and not so costly in human lives. This is why encirclements can be so catastrophic for armies. When all supplies are cut off, then hunger and ammunition shortages fastly appears. Because modern amries needs gigantic amounts of supplies. An American Division in World War II needed 800 tonnes of supplies per day. And a German division on average used 400 tonnes.
So if you have an American army of 20 Divisions then you would need 8000 tonnes of supplies per day. Think about the gigantic amounts of supplies that is.
When the German 6th Army was fighting at Stalingrad it needed 13 railway wagons of ammunition per day for all for machine guns, pistols, rifles and other sall arms. And on top of that you needed to also give that army food and fuel and other supplies - including ammunition for mortars, howitzers and cannons of all kinds of sizes.
Modern war needs gigantic amounts of planning and coordination to get all things at the right place, at the right amunt and at the right time.
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@RussianThunderrr "King Tiger is not a very good tank"
It was an excellent tank but it was too damn costly to build. You didn't as much bang for the buck. StuGIII gave much more value for your money, since it was a cheap machine that also did a lot of useful things on the battlefield unlike the King Tiger that was rarely ever seen on the battlefield thanks to its many mechanical failures.
"As for Stug... Well heve you heard of VK 30.02(DB)?"
Yes I have heard of it. But as I sees it, I would rather keep the Stugs and Ignore the VK project.
Germany needed to shut down production lines instead of open new, and thus create an even larger logistics burden. If they did that, then it would be easier to start building tanks in large numbers. Tanks without a turret are cheaper to build, they are less complex, they take less manhours to build, and when you save weight by not having a turret you can build a tank with more armour and a bigger gun instead.
So I rather pick StuG than VK, because you more easily can make StuGs in large numbers. And numbers is Germany's biggest problem at the moment.
StuG also got a reliable good chassi with excellent traverse speed, and it got optics superior to any German tank (except the panther). And you don't have to deal with costs related to opening a new production line and research, and kinderkrankheit problems that leaves German troops without tank support.
The VK is after all at best just an average tank with a good gun, and the allies can easily outproduce VK30D with their T-34/85, Comets and M4E8s. And when the allies come with their T-44, Centurions and Pershings then the VK will start becoming obsolete and the Germans needs to invent another tank to replace it with and have to start building Panther tanks anyways.
So I think it is better than to the chassis of old production lines and make them into StuGs or Jagdpanzer IV with the same powerful 75mm/L70 as the Panther tank - which is capable of knocking out any allied tank at very long distances.
And should the allies come with tanks too hard to kill even for the high-velocity panther gun, then the Germans could just start using Nashorn tank destroyers as a stop gap measure until they have found a good replacement for the old PanzerIV tank. The nashorn gun was capable of turning any big allied tank into a burning wreck from 3000 meters away, and it was also a cheap vehicle to make.
And when the German panzerIII and PanzerIV tanks and TDs would become outdated, then their chassis could simply just be converted into artillery pieces, Whirbelwinds, flammpanzers, and so on.
And then the war would hopefully have ended. The allies would probably have won even if Germany had played the cards on their hand in a better way. But it is also maybe possible that the D-day landing could have failed and that the Russians would run out of manpower and the war goes into a stalemate and peace would be signed on much more fabourable terms for the Germans than just unconditional surrender.
Maybe they for example could have kept East Prussia, Austria, Bohemia and German speaking areas in France and Denmark.. while giving up everything else they had conquered.
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@RussianThunderrr "There are few of different factors affected Tiger II reliability"
You know, all tanks got their flaws. I know that Russians never admits tis to be true about their own tanks, but it is true.
TigerII had its flaws like any other tank does. But fact remains that Tiger II was one of the most powerful tanks in world war 2 in terms of firepower and armour, and a 100.000 Tiger II tanks could have had a significant impact on the war.
"But going by just a battle performance, a lots of times"
But the point still remains that most tanks were not able of penetrating its frontal armour and the Tiger II could kill other tanks on longer ranges than vice versa.
"King Tiger performance was operation "Spring Awakening" the force of 600 tanks 45 of which was King Tigers, and no less then 200 Panther tanks attack bridgehead at Lake Balaton in Hungary"
Even the best tanks are shit when your leadership decides to attack with them in unsuitable terrain. Just as the offensives in Ardennes say very little about German tanks, does the battle of Caen, Market Garden, Seelow say little about allied tanks. With your way of reasoning one can then just as well say that IS2 was a terrible tank because it failed to take Romania in early 1944 despite crushing numerical superiority. https://youtu.be/7Clz27nghIg?t=2791
Furthermore was most Tiger II tanks lost to fuel shortages and the inability to recover damaged tanks before the allies took control over an area - which once again are things that should be blamed on the German army and not the tank itself.
Had Germany still had control over the skies and provided their Tiger II tanks with good and infantry artillery support they would have done pretty well.
"VK30(DB) would have the same turret as Panther"
If you just want a new tank with panther turret then why build an entirely new tank as well? Why not just build a panzer IV with angeled armour and give it the L70 panther gun?
Then you don't have to create a logistical burden of having yet another tank model in the German army. Instead you could gain from synergies like commonality among parts, when you use the same wheels, engines and chassis for all panzer IV variant - hummel, whirbelwind, nashorn, jpz4, pz4, pz4 ausf. k and so on.
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This pocket was just stupid to keep.
80% of the Soviet army was positioned in front of army group middle, so a capture of Moscow would simply be totally unrealistic. The campaign in the south to capture Stalingrad could only go as far as it did because the Germans faced very little resistance when the Russians had concentrated all their forces in the centre instead, and thus leaving the south nearly unprotected.
And the catastrophic battle of Kharkov in may 1942 led to the total destruction of the entire red army in Southern Russia - so for an entire month was the road towards Stalingrad completly undefended and open for the Germans. But the Germans could of course not know how great their victory was so they could not capitalize fully from their victory at Kharkov.
But even if Germany made much progress and nearly captured Stalingrad, I do consider it to have been totally unrealistic to think that Germany would have been strong enough to launch an offensive against Moscow in 1943.
There was simply too many Russian divisions there. And too many trenches, barricades, minefields, tank ditches and obstacles had been put in place since the Germans tried to capture the city in 1941 for Moscow to ever become a realistic target.
The German army had been severly weakened by all losses in 1941. And in 1942 it gambled to capture Stalingrad and southern Russia with the strong divisions that it had left. So after two bloody campaigns launching a big one against a strong well prepared, well dug in enemy and capture Moscow would simply be unrealistic. The Germans could not even capture Kursk, and it had to deal with several big counter-offensives in the end of the battle (like the one at Orjol).
So the best thing Germany could have done would be to empty the pocket as soon as possible and create a flat defensive line, dug in and create minefields and barbed wire so that big areas of land could be defended by small numbers of troops. And then Germany could send away some men in army group middle to fight in the south to help with the capture of Stalingrad.
And once Stalingrad and caucausus was in German hands, then Germany would just make a defensive war against Russia.
And hope that superior German firepower could compensate for the lack of manpower.
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When Russia gets even more powerful and have even more monopoly over the energy will it use it for even more energy blackmail and jack up prices even more so Russia can make itself richer on your expense. Russia will get richer while you get poorer.
But if Ukraine wins, and a marshall plan kickstart the Ukrainian economy, then the opposite will happen. Competition between Ukrainian and Russian gas, coal and gas will mean lower prices for you the consumer, so that you get more money over to buy other stuff and improve your own quality of life. And as people can afford to buy more tables, microwaves and movie tickets will also new jobs be created in western countries and unemployment will go down and GDP will go up along with tax revenues for governments.
This will be a win-win for everyone. Life will be better for us, and it will be better for Ukrainians as money is flowing into their country by foreigners buying their natural gas. And the only losers will be Russia which will be forced to sell their energy at a lower price and make less money from it.
Being economically dependent on the small democratic country Ukraine is also a safer option than being dependent on a large warmongering gangster state like Russia. Ukraine lay close to Europe, which means lower transportation costs for all the food, nuclear power, coal, iron, natural gas and other things it has to offer Europe.
And with cheaper raw materials for European industry is it possible to lower production costs for European products, so that the EU could get it easier to compete with Asia on world markets.
While the opposite of course will be true if we let Russian terrorists win.
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@righteousindecision2778 Well there are many things to talk about in the American way of production. But I guess I think division of labour is one such classic starting point.
And division of labour means that you divide up work and let people specialize in each separate tasks. And you see this thing in almost every society. People don't work as postman at the morning, and become a doctor on the middle of the day, and end the day by working as lawyer... and the next day work as a pilot and a school teacher.
Instead people specialize their skills in doing one type of job and become good at it, instead of being mediocre in everything. Another benifit of people specializing is that you don't have to waste time from going from one job to another.
And you can drive this division of labour even further at a workplace. Some guy can become a specialist at cut timber, and another person can turn that timber into tables, and third person can make the paint job.
And the point is that your team of experts togheter will work much more effiecently than if everyone on the job tried to do all kinds of work for himself and both cut the timber, assemble the parts and paint it.
And the more you can divide your job up into smaller tasks people can specialize in - the more effiency you get. And if you are only going to sell only one table, then it would be pointless to buy expensive machinery for your workers. But if you are going to sell many tens of thousands of tables, then you realize that cutting timber can be very time consuming without good tools like an electric saw.
And with better tools you get even more effiecent at making stuff. And you can make more tables in workday that you could do before. And you no longer need as many workers to work to produce the same amount tables as before, since the amount of tables produced per worker in a day have risen.
So what you always want to do is to seek out ways to divide work into smaller and smaller parts. And let people specialize in each separate easy task. And you give them tools and machines that are easy to handle even for a villiage idiot.
And then you position those machines in a sequential order inside a factory, and every guy along the assembly line adds his own little part to the construction of a car. And just like with Lego you add part after part until you finally get a car. And each worker produces his own little Lego brick to the car and nothing more or less.
And the benifits of this system is clear. You no longer need skilled labour to build cars and instead you can use cheap low skilled workers. And you no longer specialist knowledge to build cars, so the power the workers have against the capitalist is now broken.
And when the job of building a car have been so broken down into hundreds of small jobs, then you can also start using machines or robots to make them much of the parts and assemble them.
And with standardization you will always have components that fits with each other - like lego bits always fits with each other, and you don't have to tailor made every little goddamn thing. So you can just store screws, bolts and wheels in a depot and know that they will fit - which is nice, imagine if no ammunition could fit into your cannon so you always had to wait until a new shot was specifically made only for your gun.
Instead the military use some standardized sizes of the bullets they use in rifles, machine guns and cannons so solidiers easily can use the same ammunition for one pistol as for another pistol.
And that makes life easier and it makes it possible to cut down the cost of producing and storeing things. And you can also let other companies build all the parts for your firm, while all what you do is it put togheter all the pieces into a car, or a plane, ship, tank or what it might be.
The problem with German production was that it never really went over to Fordism and started to massproduce vehicles along fordist principles of using low skilled labour with specialized tools.
But instead German used craftsmen that kept on building tanks with overly complex designs. And standardization was not taken so seriously, and a panther composed of about 200.000 parts while a T-34 only had about 50.000.
And the proud German craftsmen kept their traditions of using the best high quality components for a tank, despite they costed more money money and took more time to make than other alternatives. The Russian tankmakers realized that it would be pointless to build engines that would last for 40 years, if their T-34 tanks they built were most likely soon a burning wreck, when the average life expectancy for a Russian tank was only 6 months.
So the Russians managed to drive down costs and building time of their tanks by removing all unecessary luxuries. But the Germans never did that, and as a result did they also not produce as many tanks as the allies.
One can of course speculate about the reasons why they never went over to fordism.
If it was because the lack of money in Weimar Germany that prevented
people from buying cars after the hyperinflation and the great depression, so that Germany never would build an automotive industry the same size as USAs?
Or was it other reasons, like stubborn craftsmen traditions, military traditionalism that wanted perfect tanks without backing on any quality requirements regardless of the wartime situation?
Or was it because German automotive industry was lazy and never forced by the nazis into any painful "structural rationalizations" that would force German companies to fire unnecessary workers and become better at making more cars per worker?
Personally I think Germany had problems with all these 3 things.
And it was only in the late war the tried to simplify their designs of their weapons. And the advanced MG34 got replaced with a more "Made in China" MG42. And the amount of components to make a Panther was reduced somewhat, just like the SdKfz 251 used a much simpler design at the end of the war.
But it was too little too late.
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@petershaver5006
That is actually not a bad idea. People who want to fight a classic good vs evil war should join the foreign legion. This war along with the war against ISIS are wars with two very clear alternatives: Good and evil.
So if you are about 25 years old and got military training and don't have a wife and kids... then I don't think its dumb to consider the option.
Not everyone can fight a war in the frontline. If you are for example an elderly person you might perhaps help with teaching the kids at school if you are a former teacher. Women without military training can cook food for the troops and produce weapons and ammunition for the troops. Men who are around their 40s could staff anti-aircraft guns that protect big cites and feed those guns with ammunion, or they can do other jobs like driving military trucks with supplies for the troops at the frontline, or guard camps with prisoners of war.
As a foreigner I want my country to help Ukraine. I want my tax money to go to help Ukraine pay its bills. And I want Swedish weapons to be sent to Ukraine to kill Russians.
If my country was the victim of a Russian illegal, unprovoced, unjustified war then of course I wish that the world community would act exactly in the same way for us.
We democracies hava a duty to sick togheter. A small democracy on its own might be weak, but we stand togheter are we strong, and indeed invincible.
We have 60% of the World GDP. We have better motivated troops than what Russia, China, North Korea, and Belarus have.
And our we are technologically more advanced. Our Russian foes are something like 40 years behind us.
For the last 25 years I have never felt proud over my country as it is a country in decay.. with deindustrialization, a decaying democracy and independence because of the EU.
But this week I feel proud after my country decided to sent Archer and 50 Combat vehicle 9040 to Ukraine.
And this just one of all other shipments of aid to Ukraine which include everything from helmets and vests, to C-rations, 155mm ammunition, tens of thousands of AT-4 launchers, and powerful anti-ship missiles and KSP-58.
And other countries have also sent Swedish made weapons to Ukraine as well - NLAWs , Excalibur and Bonus artillery are shells are probably the most famous examples. But also the Swedish modified BMP-1's that was has been mentioned earlier on this channel.
And the Carl-Gustaf that Canada sent, and PV-1110 that some Baltic country sent to Ukraine.
It makes me proud that my little country have strongly helped Ukraine so much to win this war. And I am of course proud that our excellent arms industry finally get a chance to prove foreign critics that our weapons are at least as good as those of other countries.. if not even better in many cases. Archer and CV90 are probably the best weapons of their type around the world. So is Gripen E.
NLAW has also proven itself to be excellent at its job. Swedish anti-tank weapons were designed during the cold war to kill Russian tanks if our country got invaded. Now is Russia invading a country, and Swedish anti-tank weapons have already been killing Russian tanks and vehicles by the thousands.
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Yea we should be so afraid of Russia and nuclear annihaltion that we give in to any blackmail they do. We are too weak to resist the Russian bear so what is the point to fight and see our men die in an unwinnable war? Better then to just give in to Putins demands. Let him take Georgia. Than Ukraine. Then Moldova. Then Kazaksthan.
And then can China take Taiwan with the same argument. And then northern Indiochina and India, and then islands in the pacific that are contested with Japan and the Phillipines. And then let China establish naval bases in Sri Lanka and Africa and expand its influence there and put troops in those places like Russia have in Transnistria and then destabilize those countries so that a pro-Chinese fascist regime can take power.
And now when the Communist bloc 2.0 have re-emerged should we be so fearful to honor our security guarantees that we do not dare to retaliate once a small country like Estonia has been overrun and occupied in less than 48 hours. Would we really want a global nuclear war over a tiny country with only 1.3 million?
The weak leadership from Biden is hesitant about seeing New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Chicago all getting nuked...
And Macron, Draghi and Schulz are more worried about not hurting Putins feelings and selling electronics and buying Russian gas than helping their allies in EU/Nato.
The rest of Europe realize that the big countries are useless allies and pull out from those useless shitty clubs that only benefits the big countries at the expense of the small - so they try to form their own military alliances on an ad-hoc basis, with very little trust and nuclear deterence backing them.
And Putin can eat up country by country in a piecemeal fashion as everyone is too afraid to fight back.
Everyone is arguing like you that it is better to be safe than sorry. So just giving up and not fighting back is what people do.
People give in to fear and blackmail. Despite the free world do have enough military muscles to crush evil regimes like a bug under a boot if they wanted to.
Idiots in the west will act like elephants who grew up with an iron chain around their foot, and which learned that it is impossible to run away and trying to escape and do whatever they wanted. So once the elephant gets bigger and stronger and you replace the chain with a tiny rope that it can easily break - it will still not even try to flee, because it have learned that it is pointless to try to run away when it got a thing around its food.
And people are equally superstitious, and paralyzed by the feeling of being powerless.
Why fight back against Russia? Its a juggernaut that crushed nazi-Germany, it did beat USA in the space race, and Canada in ice hockey, it have better tanks than the west and the superfast MIG25 jet, and super weapons like Armata, SU57, kornet, S400, and alligator attack helicopters.
And Chinas army is the largest in the world and they got super-duper missiles that have rendered all American aircraft carriers obsolete... so now can USA not dominate the air or sea anymore or transport troops to Asia to hold back the country with the largest GDP in the world and the 2nd largest population!
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The battle of Kursk turned into something it was never intended to be. Manstein just wanted a small offensive to straighten the frontline and encircle and destroy a number of Soviet troops.
But the operation was deleyed, and deleyed and deleyed, and Hitler wanted to have his super tanks there to ensure success. And meanwhile did the Russian make minefields, dig trenches, build tanks and concentrate more forces to that area so it would become a hard nut to crack.
And by then this battle was about to turn into something it was inteded to be: A large operation involving all troops available for the 1943 summer offensive. And it was the first days of July and the offensive hadn't even started yet. This slow warfare wasn't much like the old Blitzkriegs in the past with surprise attacks and speed. This was a battle that both sides prepared for for a long time.
So of course did many Generals abandon the idea of an offensive in that area, because it would likely be dearly bought victory at best.
Germany started the battle and on paper did they as usual did they inflict disproportionatly high losses on their opponents. And they did actully have some success at one side of the pincer, but the operation was anyways no longer kept in move. Why? Because Hitler wanted troops to be moved to defend Italy against an allied landing in Salerno.
So the Germans were probably likely to take take their objectives if they had wanted to. But the Kursk operation would have been useless anyways, since the Russians were beginning their huge offensives at Orjol and other places simultaniously. Which could pose a serious threat to the northern pincer of the Kursk operation, so my guess is that the Kursk operation would have been called off anyways regardless of what happened in Salerno, due to the risk that the northern wing of Kursk might be encircled.
So what would I have done? I guess that I wouldn't had attacked at all, but rather saved my forces for another day. The summer had been lost anways, so I could as well use the time to beat back the allies at Salerno and then in other places. And meanwhile could I try to keep my panzer divisions at full strength for the next summer offensive.
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As I said earlier, I think it was extremely unlikely that Germany would win the war by 1943 - about 1-3% percent or so. And neighter am I sorry that the nazi lost. I just think that there was still a small chance to win after Stalingrad. And by winning I mean that Germany could inflict so heavy losses on the allies that they would have to agree to Germany keeping all her core provinces including Austria, Alsace, Sudetenland the Danzig corridor and Danish Holstein.
Germany still possessed much military power as the large number of men involved in the Ardennes battle and Bagration shows. And the number of uboats was actully higher in early 1944 than what it was in early 1942. And Germany's military production was gearing up and reached its peak in 1944, when an impressive 80% of its GDP was directed to the war effort. And if the Heinkel 162 had been early on choosen for production instead of the complex two engined me262 or the me109k, then Germany would have a much better chance of also protecting their factories from being bombed.
Had also priority been given to air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles instead of to the V2 rockets, then the allied airforce would certainly bleed heavy losses.
And had Hitlers orders of static defence, fortified towns and "not a step back" been replaced with a more flexible defence, then the German troops would no be so likely to get trapped in encirlements, while it would be easier for the Germans to mass forces for massive counter attacks on the flanks that would smash the Russian troops as they have advanced forward so much that their lines have streched out thin and they have runned of supplies. Von Mainsteins counter-offensive it Kharkov in 1943 is a classic example on how the Russians could have been crushed.
The Russian army would bleed to death as they make one failed major offensive after another.
That never happened in real life, but it likely could have happened, since in the real world would the Russians would have runned of manpower faster than the Germans on the same path of aggressive offensives as they did from late 1943 til early 1944. And their liberation of Ukraine could relief some of their need for manpower. This is the conclucion Zetterling makes in his book "The Korsun pocket".
The Germans could then just wait for the Russians to make the mistakes and run out of manpower, and then the push to take southern Russia could be made. And then another defensive line could be put up with barbed wire and minefields that reduced the need for manpower to defend it. So men could be sent from the east and to the west.
The entire landing operation could also very well have ended in a disaster for the allies if the Germans had concentrated all their reinforcements to the Omaha beach (instead of Bayeux) and crushed the landings there. And then they could have moved all their troops to the next beach and crushed the D-day landing zones one by one from north to South.
Furthermore did the 7th Army defending Normandie only have 11 Divisions. While 18 Divisons were positioned in Pas the Calais during all the weeks that the battle for Normandy lasted because the Germans still thought that the main allied landing would come somewhere else even after D-Day had happened.
So there was much troops that could have been moved to Normandy and ended all hopes for an allied breakthrough. It would be impossible to support the allied beachead in Normany throughout the winter, and the allied planners had never anticipated that.
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People say they will be used as StuGs, or as point defence behind the frontline, or as indirect fire artillery. Or perhaps given to the Luhansk and Donetsk armies. But given the lack of dicipline among the leadership and the careless attitude towards losses would I suspect that they sooner or later are pushed into idiotic frontline attacks just like other tanks, just to get slaughtered.
And if you lack any other tanks, then maybe this is what you have to do.
Anyways, had I been a western country and been given a thousand T-55 tanks as a gift which I could not throw away, then I would just remove the turrets and use in a defensive line - perhaps to defend a coastline like that the fortifications on Crimea. And when the turret is removed I could rebuild the chassis of those tanks into recovery vehicles, mine clearers, engineering tanks with a bulldozer blade, flamethrowers, or putting a 155mm artillery piece on top of it and making it a self-propelled gun, or I could perhaps put a Gepard turret on top of it. And if the chassi is crappy it would not matter much since I dont think a point defence AA system would have to move around much. And being a bridgelayer is probably pretty boring when you don't lay bridges. And being an artillery piece does not require much movement either I guess.
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"You are talking from complete 20/20 hindsight."
No. Had I been a nazi in early 1942 then I would have adviced Hitler to skip Rzhev because it was not a priority for Germany - all it had was a piece of useless railroad. Southern Russia on the other hand had oil, black fertile farmland, industrial capacity, black sea ports, lend lease routes - which would benifit Germany greatly. And even without the oil, this would be a great price for Germany. And it would also be a disaster for Russia to lose it for the same reasons.
The Russian economy was at the brink of collapse in late 1942 and if Russia could not win at Stalingrad and take back Caucausus, then the economy would likely have collapsed just as in 1917. And with strangeled lend lease supplies, and newly created food and oil shortages after the loss of southern Russia it would be very hard for Russia to keep on fighting the war - even if America would increase its lend lease in Alaska and Archangelsk.
The war would definatly then change in caracter. There would be no liberation of Southern Russia or supplies from USA that could replace Russian workers... so Russia would therefore suffer from a manpower shortage. And this in turn would force Russia to change tactics and not let med just die in a wasteful manner.
The great offensives on multiple fronts in late 1943 where the Russians took much land in exchange for heavy manpower losses would never happen. Simply because the Russians could not afford to waste men in such a matter even in the short run.
Russia was a poor country, and it didn't have tractors or expensive industrial machines like in USA or Germany - So Russia therefore needed more workers to things by hand. Today it takes on average 4 Russian workers to produce the same amount of stuff as 1 American worker. So as you can see cannot the Russian economy spare workers the same way rich countries can. They cannot just buy a tractor to replace one farmer and then send him to the frontline, or buy a big machine that produces stuff instead of a worker.
The Russian economy needed its manpower. And the Russian military was also desperatly short in manpower. So in late 1942 there began a growing dilemma? Should the army get too little solidiers? or should the farms and industry get less workers, with the result of less weapons being produced?
So Stalingrad would probably have been a disaster for Russia even if Germany would not succeed getting much oil from southern Russia the coming years.
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@VT-mw2zb
"In order to get any more troops than they already had in 1942, the Germans would need to abandon the siege of Leningrad."
The Germans had a dozen Divisions in France they could have used on the eastern front instead.
"First of all, divisions of the AG Centre were already reduced in strength. It went from 9 battalions per division to 6"
Then those divisions could be sent to France to protect against an unlikely allied landing while the stronger formations would be sent to Russia.
"Why? Because the Soviet was fooled thanks to a deception plan called Operation Kremlin"
It was because of multiple factors. Stalin thought the main blow of the German offensive would target Moscow, just as it did in 1941, and most high military leaders tend to ignore economic factors of the war so therefore was Moscow wrongly seen as more important than Southern Russia. So therefore did the Russian side worry more about protecting Moscow than defending southern Russia.
But the main reason why 1942 started well for Germany was that Stalins massive winter offensive had attacked too deep, and over a broad front. And supplies and coordination ran out for the Russian offensive spearheads, and the Germans could isolate them and destroy them one by one. And the winter offensive that could have completly destroyed the ostheer and ended the war in 1942, instead turned into a disaster for the Russians with gigantic losses.
And then the bad news continued with the last big military disaster à la Soviet 1941 happened when Russia suffered a crushing defeat at Kharkov in May in 1942.
So the campaign in Southern Russia started better than what one realisticly could have expected beforehand. However, things could have gone even better for the Germans, and they could have exploited their success even more. Just as destroying the worlds largest airforce in the first days of the war in 1941 was just an incredibly lucky shot, but the Germans could of course have exploited this success even more. What if the battle of Britain would have never happened and Germany would have had more bombers? What would have happened if the Luftwaffe destroyed the entire Russian baltic fleet in a Pearl Harbour style attack?
This is one of those big "what if's".
A better start of case blue would in itself probably not change much. But in combination with other factors it could have changed the tide of war significantly, and end up with the capture of southern Russia - a disaster for the Russians. It would almost be like Frederick the Great losing Silesia - continuing the war without it would be hopeless.
*"The main issue with 1942, from the German perspective was their distance from their kick-off point, Voronezh to where they wanted to go was about 30% longer than the distance they covered in 1941. This was the plan when they were short on both men and fuel, compared to 1941*"
Germany was weaker than in 1941, but so were also the Russians. But in terms of firepower instead of manpower the balance had changed in favour for the Germans and to the disadvantage for the Russians (according the the book Hitler vs Stalin, by Mosier).
And this talkingpoint about distance is strange. Army group South had faced hard resistance in 1941 while army group north could capture the baltics in just a few weeks. So expecting south to move long distances like army group north was not so much to ask I think. The Germans gave this front priority and supplies and weather was better in the south than in the north.
And initally was the Russian resistance also very light on this front - but that thing could the Germans of course not know back then.
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"end of their social class"
I don't think this is true. Most officers had played the game clean. And Manstein and Guderian would get nice treatment by the allies after the war, even if you would apply a little higher standards upon them.
Most German officers also wrongly believed that they still had respect and admiration for their skill by their British counterparts in 1945 - so they became sad and surprised when they did not get a salute from allied officers as they surrendered. Most Britons was simply tired of the war. British cities had been bombed and many had died in the war, so the love for Germany was gone. And the news of German war crimes had tarnished the image of German officers as respectable professional gentlemen.
But the German officers did not know that back then. So most Germans therefore preferred to surrender in the west.
Only a handful few SS men wanted to keep on fighting the war, because they had painted themselves into a corner. If the Russians found out that they were members of the SS, then they would be tortured and executed instantly. The Russians knew that the SS had committed so many war crimes that the did not give any pardon.
And trying to flee as an SS man was not an option.
You could be killed as a deserter by the Germans if you were captured. And throwing away your SS uniform and pretending to be a civilian or Wehrmacht soldiers was not an option either - because every SS soldier had a tattoo on his arm to tell doctors which blood-group he had, in the case if he got injured in battle and needed a blood transfusion. So it would therefore be pretty easy for the Russians to found out what men were members of the SS, and which weren't.
So many SS men kept on fighting the war until the end in Berlin. And they massacred regular army soldiers, old men in volksturm and innocent civilians for "defeatism" if they did not show the same enthusiasm for the war as the SS.
So the German people began to hate the SS. Now it no longer just massacred foreigners, but now it had also begun to kill many hundreds of Germans from place to place as the German military retreated.
Some German commanders feared prosecution for war crimes, but they allowed their men to surrender because it was the right thing to do, and they did not want their men to die a pointless death. Otto Carius is one such example.
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The west have given away so much equipment to Ukraine that it needs to win now in order to not let earlier investment to have been in vain. Many countries have now given away some of the best weapons they have.. Caesar, PZH2000, Archer, HIMARS, Combat Vehicle 90, Bradley, Leopard2, Abrams, thunderstreak, NLAW, Javelin etc.
So far have Russia suffered gigantic losses and the west have not yet even lifted a finger trying to get its industrial military might at bear. And ammunition problems have so far been solvable by importing 155mm shells from South Korea. But there are lots of countries in Europe, America, and Austrialia that can make those if the war escalates so I see no problems in all this.
And sending away 50 Bradleys to Ukraine is no big deal as I sees it. I mean USA still got 6000 left so it can afford to send thousands more if it wants to. And the west also have lots of old weapons that are going to get phased out... F16 fighters and A10 warthog. Those planes are very old, but still much better than their russian counterparts.
So even if we give Ukraine just scraps and spares would it still probably be enough to beat Russia.
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"the Goodwill Wehrmacht is overrated"
I think the contrary is true. People expected Ukraine to fall within 3 days. Now have this war lasted for over a year and Russia have lost more men than USA had in 20 years of fighting in Vietnam.
"Their air force is practically non-existent"
And the Russian air force is nowhere to be seen as they are too afraid to penetrate Ukrainian airspace. Ukraine does however fill the air with drones that bombard Russian troops. And the remains of the Ukrainian air force fills the function of a fleet in being. Not bad for an air force that started this war with fewer planes than their enemy, less trained pilots and planes that were less modern than those of their enemy. The Ukrainian airforce have done well considering those circumstances. While the Russian air force have underperformed - and to paraphrase what Perun said: " it have been a waste of 15-20 years of military spending, as the russian airforce have proven itself to be almost utterly useless throughout this war."
"the majority of their pre-war tank reserves and other losses that they simply do not have the capability to recover from"
Ukraine says they have more tanks now than when they started the war. So many enemy tanks have been conquered that Ukraine have managed to compensate their own losses and even adding a few extra tanks to their inventory. And on top of that have they been given extra tanks from other countries such as Poland, Slovenia, Albania, Slovakia and Czechia.
To me it rather seems like the Russian tank force will never recover from this year.
Their best tanks are gone. Their tank crews have been sent up to Cosmos with their flying turrets. Sanctions are harming Russian tank production. And the thousands of tanks that exist as reserves on paper are heaps of rust that lacks modern upgrades, corruption and maintance have destroyed them. People have stolen metal from gun sights. The coating around electric cables have vanished after a half a century since the tank was built. And even without rust, have the armor quality decayed a lot since the tanks were built because of wear and tear that cause metal fatigue and because of ageing.
And if the Russian army of 2022 was piss-poor when it came to basic tank tactics and combined arms warfare - then will the Russian army of 2023 be even more crappy as men with even less experience and even crappier machines and crappier support troops will take over.
Ukraine will start the next year better prepared than the last one. It now have all the anti-tank weapons that it needs from the start. Troops have gained training in Europe. Fighting morale is high after the victories last autumn. The have learned what their crappy opponent are upto. Russia cannot launch any succesful strike against Kyiv, because there only exist one road towards it - and Russia tried that last year and it failed. It failed despite they had experienced troops, more modern tanks, lots of artillery, lots of cruise missiles, attack helicopters and aircrafts to support it.
This year are the enemy prepared and knows what direction Russia will take. And the badly trained Russian infantry has to attack a prepared enemy with lots of anti-tank weapons. And they get no cruise missiles, helicopters or aircrafts to support them. And most of Russias SPGs have been lost so there is no way momentum can be kept high in any offensive. Russia still have lots of APCs, but not so much tanks. So the attack towards Kyiv has to be done without tank support for the infantry. So as I see it are all their offensive plans doomed to fail.
Furthermore are all the logistical issues from last years not solved - but on the contrary have they become worse by the lack of trucks.
I feel sorry for Ukraine that Russia is dumb enough to continue to press on in a war that has already been lost so badly.
But on the other hand do I feel much joy to see that Russia is throwing more and more salt into their own wounds and increase their own pain. Eastern Europe will feel relief to see the Russian military utterly destroy itself for decades to come. And that Russia is undergoing a de-industrialization as only about 15 out of over 60 Russian car manufacturers now remains, and that the country have undergone a massive braindrain.
This war is also a demographic disaster for Russia with severe long term consequences.
Sometimes I begin to wonder if mr Putin hates Russians more than I do.
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@warrenokuma7264 But money is not relevant as it can be created in unlimited amounts. What is more relevant is the price in terms of workers and workhours needed to build one tank, or how much raw materials was used to build it.
The problem with averages is that they often does not reflect reality, or what is normal.
Say that you have 4 girls that all weight 50 kilos each, and then you have a fat guy that weights 400 kilos. So if you add up the total weight of them all you get a total of 600 kilos, and then you divide those with 5 persons, and then you get an average weight per person that is 120 kilos.
So is the normal weight in this group 120 kilos? or should 50 kilos more represent the typical normal value?
So if you add up production from different tank factories you could get very different values of productivity. Some use unskilled labour and even slave labour, while others have specialized tools and trained workers.
And then you could not just say that you can scale up production of a certain tank without the productivity going up or down. Maybe productivity will go up as economies of scale now makes it possible to transition to massproduction technologies and factories now can now be use at its full capacity?
Or maybe productivity will just fall, as there are not enough skilled workers to build all extra Panther tanks, so slave labour, immigrants, women and children has to be used instead - which leads to much lower effiency of production.
And production might as well also become more hampered by bottlenecks when you scale up production - like what should you do when there are not enough copper to start building 3000 Ferdinand panzers?
It is an interesting subject Bernhard comes up with here. And I don't think mainstream economic theory have solved this problem. My opinion might be unpopular, but I don't care.
I agree with Bernhard. Technology does not work like in video games, you don't know the price of a new technology, how good it will be, how long it will take to research and what spin-off effects you get.
And when it comes to producing tanks, you cannot just expect everything to happen just over a day. New production technologies and ways of organizing work takes time to learn. Learning workers how to make a new tank model takes time. And tanks gets more powerful on the battlefield and cheaper to produce, when constructors sees new ways of making those tanks, and remove the cheek on the panther turret that act as a shot-trap, or fix the hatch on the Tiger tank so that tank crews don't have to get the hatch landing on their heads.
Useless components are removed, and the production time to make a tank could be cut down to a minimum.
So the tank gets its performance peak the years down the line.
But it is hard to say how good a tank will be then. Maybe it could be as succesful as the old work horse Panzer IV and be a good tank throughout world war II. But it cold also just be like the Panzer III that never really gut upgunned and became the great tank it was until 1942, and by then it was started to get outdated.. so this tank never really reached its full potential during its time of service.
Looking at snapshots of averages in a single year I think misses the bigger picture of things. Since industrial effiency takes many years to create.
Even if spies from Moçambique succesfully manage to steal blueprints from BMW on how to build the latest car model in exact detail. They would still not be able to start massproduce cars in any time soon since they lack organizational skills, trained workers, engineers and experts that know how to apply all solutions in the blueprint and so on.
And making a new car plant and supply it with energy and living quarters for workers, financiers, suppliers and so fourth will also be another effort in itself.
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@warrenokuma7264 A country that can print its own money can never run out of money. Greece can run out of money, because it cannot make its own money, because only the European central bank can make Euros and not the Greek government. USA however can never run out of dollars because it can create as much dollars as it wants to. The only limit to how much money a country can create is inflation.
And a government got two tools to fight inflation in peace time. It can increase taxes so that money that have been pumped out to the economy by the government now gets taken back by it. And it can increase the amount of stuff produced in the country - because prices double when twice as much money chases the same limited amount of stuff, but if you double the amount of stuff, then you have no price increases.
In a wartime economy it is difficult to increase civilian production. But prices can be kept under controls by taxes, price controls and rationing. When people cannot buy unlimited amounts of beer and cigarettes because of rationing, then they are forced to save their money because there is nothing they can consume.
So all newly created money becomes savings for the people.
One persons debt becomes another persons asset. The government goes into debt to buy tanks, planes and uboats while the people sees their assets increase.
And the national debt is never a problem since it is just owned by its own citizens, and should never and can never be paid off anyways. All paying off the national debt means is that the government takes money from the people by taxes and gives the money back to the same people.
And then the money gets destroyed. Since money is the same thing as debt (for a further explanation you can see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA ).
So the government can create unlimited amounts of money. And inflation is never a problem. The ideal way to rule a country in peace time would be print as much money as possible and use the money for productive investments in better infrastructure, energy grids and spending on science and research and create jobs so that unemployment goes down to zero.
Then your economy runs on full capacity, and it would be pointless to print any more money, because all extra amounts of money you print will not result in extra amounts of stuff produced so prices will only go up and inflation will only rise as a result.
But as long as you have unused resources you can print up as much money you want. And other countries will have no problem with loaning money to you, since your economy is growing so fast that paying off old debts gets easier and easier when your country gets richer. Australia the last decades is a perfect example of this, since they have borrowed more and more money the last decades but the debt as a share of GDP have still been falling because the economy has been growing so fast.
So borrowing money is not dangerous. Especially not from your own people, since your country neighter gets richer and poorer by doing so. The only interesting question when it comes to borrowing money from other countries is if that money is used for INVESTMENTS in building factories and improving infrastructure and the economy.... or if that money is used on CONSUMPTION of useless shit like flatscreen TVs, military weapons and other useless shit that does not improve the economy in the long run.
And if you waste money on useless shit and don't repay debts, then foreigners will lose trust in you and would rather do buisness with other countries - and that will decrease the demand for your country's currency and it will fall in value, and importing stuff from other countries will get more expensive and you start get to see price inflation on all the oil and bananas you import from abroad.
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Well buying tanks and blowing up bombs is not good for the longterm economic development like spending money on building hydroelectric powerplants, roads, bridges, education, research and such.
So of course you get inflation. So in a sense you are right that budgets matter. But they do not matter as much as people think, and nor is inflation as bad as people think. And nor does an increase in money supply automatically result in high prices.
So of all the constraints a country have in war, money is probably the least of them. And keeping inflation low is not seen as the most important thing if a country fight for its life in a war about life and death. Would you whine about inflation, if ISIS would try to take over your neighbourhood? I don't think so.
A country would print as much money as it needs to win the war.
Anyways the money supply increased much more than the rate of inflation in the Kaisers Germany in world war 1, and in Soviet Russia during ww2, thanks to those countries effective systems of rationing and price controls. Which show that money printing does not lead to an equal amount of inflation.
The financial crisis in America is another example, since president Bush spent more money than all other presidents in US history did combined and yet the country didn't get any hyperinflation. And then president Obama did the same thing and also spent more money than all presidents in America 200 year old history, including George W Bush. But still no hyperinflation happened despite 13 trillion dollars had been pumped into the US banking system from the US government. As a comparison one could say that the inflationadjusted cost for World war 2 was 4.6 trillion dollars.. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREOUxo6Qdc ) just so you get a grip on how much money we are talking about. A trillion dollars is a HUGE sum of money. If you spend one dollar per second since the day Jesus was born until today, you would still not have spend enough money to come up to a trillion dollars.
Anyways let's go on, in the case of America you mentioned, did the inflation wipe out much of the national debt occured during the new deal and World War II.
The Great depression had wiped out all peoples savings, so the war and all the rationing forced people to save money when they couldn't buy stuff. And 12 million men served in uniform, and the other Americans worked to produce that uniforms and all else the war effort needed, and the country basicly had reached 0% unemployment. So everyone had a wage, and everyone had been forced to save money during the war. And inflation had wiped out much of the old debts.
So the country was ready for a post-war economic boom.
And when the war was over and people were tired of rationing and not being allowed to consume what they wanted, so they all rushed to the stores to buy stuff. And all the civilian demand for goods that had been kept down during the war could now go up.
So when the war ended was the US economy in great shape.
Despite the country had mobilized 12 million men, and built more military aircrafts than the rest of the world combined and created the mightyiest navy in history.
Creating money is as we concluded not the same thing as inflation. If I create a billion Swedish SEK and put them in a bag and dig a hole in the ground and throw the bag into the hole and cover it in mud, will inflation then occur? Of course not.
Only money that is in circulation in society pushes up prices when people compete with each other for the limited amounts of stuff sitting on the shelves of stores.
If the government prints trillions of money and people only put their money on their savings account on their bank instead of spending it on buying stuff, then you will not see any higher prices.
And if people use their money to pay off old bankloans you will even see deflation happen, since as I said earlier, money is debt - and when you pay of your debt, you will destroy the debt and in the same time also destroy the money.
So you get deflation.
Other reasons why prices don't go up have I already mentioned. Taxes takes money out of circulation from the economy, so when you take more money out of the economy by taxes than you print money and put into, then you will get deflation. And deflation is very bad for the economy, and companies can not sell their goods at a full price and debts gets harder to pay off.
While you get inflation when you do the opposite and create more money than you take back in taxes - and that is a good thing for the private sector, since people now can get more money without Peter having to rob Paul of his money as the only way of getting richer himself. But instead could people now get richer without anyone else having to get poorer.
And finally does also economic growth prevent money printing from pushing up prices. Because if the amount of money chasing the same amount stuff both double, then you will not see much inflation.
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I think they are not as excellent as their propaganda claims. But they are good. Strong motivation, creativity, experience and superior command structure gives them large advantages over their enemy. They are also of course doing well because the Russians suck - their army is corrupt, badly motivated, badly diciplined, its badly equipped, their command structure suck, they suck at combined arms warfare, they are using unencrypted communication, their tactics were depevoloped for outdated weapon systems that easily gets eaten up by cheap modern western weapons such as manpads.
Furthermore have conscriptions added further advantages to the Ukrainians. An army that takes out 80% of the best men out of a countrys male population will have an advantage over a country that takes out 20% of the worst.
A professional army usually gets men from areas with high unemployment where men cannot find another job and go to the military - not because they want to, but because they cannot get an income any other way. So in that way you get men who join the army for the wrong reasons. They are not there for any higher cause like patriotism, defending the free world or such. Nope. They are there only to get paid. Desperate men who often are ethinic minorities that cannot even speak the language of the country they serve - like the Spanish speakers in the US army.
The Ukrainian military consists of software engineers, film directors, teachers and ordinary people in general. Men who are there to defend their homeland. Smart men who bring their unique civilian skills and add them to their military. For the propaganda war, for flying drones or for doing the cyber warfare against the Russians.
The Russian military by contrast consists largely of prison convicts, village idiots who literarly do not even know how to tie their shoes, ethnic minorities, homeless Moscowites, kidnapped migrant guestworkers, forcefully conscripted Ukrainians in Donbass and Luhansk who are forced to fight against their countrymen or getting killed on the spot by the Russian occupants.
The Russian soldiers do not wanna be there.
And even the small spoils that remains of Putin's contractors and more trained experienced soldiers are not that great soldiers either..
The Russian military training largely consists of bullying by officers and comrades, and beatings. Soldiers are often raped by their "comrades". And corruption is widespread and the officers steals equipment which they sell and put the profits in their own pockets.
So the soldiers do of course as a consequence not care about their comrades that much. The years of misery have brutalized the men... so when a war happens they easily starts to commit warcrimes.
Soldiers that are raping and looting and abusing civilians and spend time to find food to steal are not effective soldiers as they spend less time at the frontline dealing with the enemy. And if half the men are drunk or away to gangrape some women, then of course will the half of the men be missing in the frontline and the combat effectivness of the unit will be hampered.
So the Russian military does not really have a professional army.
Its more like an undiciplined horde of raiding rapers and looters which are ill-diciplined, and all men are fighting for themselves and not as much as a team.
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The Russian junk lost the wars in 1967, and in Iraq in 1991.
Personally I have more respect for Saddam Husseins military in 1991 than the military of the Russian federation in 2022. Saddam had advanced SAM systems, and not just from Russia, but also from western countries as well. His military was large. And his T-72 tanks were less outdated back then, than what they are today 30 years later.
Saddams army did furthermore have much combat experience. And the Americans were fighting an enemy on the other side of the planet.
The Russian army on the other hand cannot even fight inside a neighbouring country without their logistical system falling apart the first month of the war 🙄
So no I do not have any respect for the Russia military. Why should I? Their performance have been piss poor and embarrassing - with other words, well in line with Russias historical tradition of enormous losses and a slow tempo of advance.
Soon a year has passed, and Russia have lost twice as much men as USA did in 20 years of fighting in Vietnam.
And more Russian tanks have been lost than what Britain, France and Germany have in their arsenals combined.
This war has put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of Russias enormous invincible military strength.
Their historical trackrecord says otherwise with all defeats, catastrophic disproportionally higher losses than their enemies and humiliations since year 1900 - russo-japanese war, first world war, polish-bolshevik war, the winter war, the continuation war in 1944, the war with nazi-germany, afghanistan, the first chechen war.
Russia have a garbage military. And its economy is smaller than Spains. I think it is clear that this is not a super power we are talking about. Rather a 3rd world country with nukes, like Pakistan or North Korea.
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@gerfand It was a strong military on paper. An army of hundreds of thousands. Large number of tanks that was consider relativly modern and a large air force and air defence with both western and east bloc weapons.
It was generally speaking considered at not just one of the strongest militarys in arabia, but also in the world back then.
And its troops had also been battlehardened after a decade long war with Iran.
It was however a badly motivated and badly organized foe that could do little against western weapons and better training and organisation of the west.
And the same is true for the crappy Russian army.
Russia failed to conquer the poorest country in europe, and ended up getting humiliated by Finland in the winter war in 1939.
And now in 2022 Russia invades Ukraine and ends up being humiliated and losing to the poorest country in Europe again.
The Russians suck at war. And have done so for centuries. It should try to stick to another hobby they are better at. I don't know.. maybe playing hockey, making "funny" vodka videos for youtube and such.
To me Russia just look to me like its botox leader Putin - a dwarf with just a phasad.
And if the T-72 tank was outdated in 1991, then it must be considered even more outdated now when Russia uses it in 2022.
The russian military lacks nightvision and bullet proof vests. It now even uses world war 2 rifles and helmets, T-62 tanks in Ukraine. And it is forced to import tanks from Belarus and ammunition from North Korea... countries which aren't exactly known for quality weapons so to say 😂😂
But you still claim the Russian military to be great compared to Nato? 😂😂
I say that all aircrafts in the Russian airforce are crap compared to Rafale, Gripen E, Eurofighter, F22, and F35. Heck even old F15 Silent Eagle, F16 Viper are considerably better than the best Russian planes.
Especially considering that the Russian pilots only have about 200 hours of flight training per year - which is not even enough to be good at take of and landing... so no wonder Russian jets constantly crash into Russian apartment buildings 😂😂
And the war on the economic front will be disasterous for Russia as it relies heavily on western components. From everything from smart bombs to high precision components for its tanks.
And without high precision industrial robots with 5 arms that can cut metal into a fractions of a millimeters precision can no Russian advanced weapons be made.
https://youtu.be/RnIvhlKT7SY
No wonder that Russian tank production have runned into problems... and Armata production has been cancelled. And T-80 and T-72 production had been lowered as well. And instead have Russia decided to ramp up production of the old low-texh T-62 tank instead 😂😂
Medvedev even took a trip visiting a tank factory to motivate the factory workers by threatening them with jail time unless they worked hard 😂😂
I think things cannot become more typically Russian than that - ruthless, opressive, barbaric, dictatorial,
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@TheLumberjack1987
Russia got oil, gas, coal, uranium, gold, titanium, fertilizer, and food stuffs. So it will always have things to sell to other countries and get foreign currency in exchange for the stuff they give away. So they will always have foreign currency reserves. However, being blocked from western capital markets and having difficulties with importing western components will severly handicap Russias ability to compete with the west - both on the battlefield and competition with western companies on world markets.
One day will their government no longer be able to pumping up the value of their currency artificially by using its own currency reserves. One day will they run out of all their dollars and Euros they had stored up from before the war.
And when that happens will they no longer be able to use dollars and Euros to buy Russian rubles and thus artificially pumping up the value of their own currency. And when that happens will the ruble lose its value against all other currencies. And foreign imports will become more expensive.
And if a hyperinflation will happen, then I think it will not because of money printing. Rather do I think it will be more because the worldwide demand for rubles will fall because of all the sanctions (people no longer makes any trading with Russia and therefore they don't need any rubles), and then will the law of "supply and demand" put down the value of the ruble.
Another classical defintion of inflation is "when too much money chases too few goods". So if industrial production falls because of western sanctions, then will there be very little goods left to chase for all that ruskie money.
'
So if hyperinflation happens, then I think it would be for those two reasons - falling global demand for rubles, and decline in Russian output of stuff produced.
And that could trigger a general loss of confidence in their currency, which could make that currency to fall in value even more like a rock in water. And then can no longer a suitcase of rubles buy a loaf of bread.
I feel like it is unlikely that things would go that far, but I can of course be wrong.
The Russian leaderships stupidity throughout this war made me think that it would not be beyond them.
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@Dreachon As I said I think the term is vague, dumb and useless.
Both a M-1 Abrams on 73 tonnes and a Russian T-80 on 40 tonnes are MBTs according to most people despite they are very different tanks intended to be used in very different ways. People like to call Hetzer and the S-tank for tank destroyers, but to others they are called tanks - the S-tank was intended to be used as a tank by the Swedish army (whatever that means) and Hetzer got pressed into a tank role the last years of the war when there was not enough real tanks to fill all Germanys needs.
As I sees it did the Panther fulfill all the data requirments people have have on a MBT. And it was also used both to fight heavy tanks, medium tanks and to deal with infantry. Its wide tracks gave it the ability to use all kinds of terrain which gave it more flexiblity than other tanks including the lighter panzer IV which more easily got stuck in snow and mud. The only real disadvantage it had compared to them in terms of mobility was its weight which could prevent it from using many bridges.
Anyways, I think the concept of one tank doing all tasks on a battlefield is incorrect. If that was true then we would not see the development of AMX13, Bulldog, or Sheridan I guess. And when abrams weights over 70 tonnes I don't think one can say that heavy tanks have left the battlefield either.
It is however true that medium tanks have taken over much of the roles that other types of tanks previously hold. But I guess that some of it have to do with budget constraints, priorities and logistics. Maybe developing a new heavy tank was not as much a priority as during the war.
And the need for turretless tanks (like SU100, Jagdpanther) have totally disapeared after the war. But I guess that have to do with the preference for building tanks instead of trying to build powerful turretless tanks whos big advantage lies in mass production, short production time, low costs and powerful guns.
I do however think this type of tank could make a comeback if a major war with China or Russia was started and something like a modern ISU-152 monster would be needed to take out the heavily protected Armata tanks until the west could come up with a compareable tank of their own.
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The Russian Tsars were wasting lives equally ruthless as Stalin. Ordering "enemy at the gates" styles of attacks in world war 1. And soldiers were wasted in large amounts in the pointless Crimean war the same way as they are today.
Ever since Russia became a great power during the Great Northern War have Russia wasted lives in the most pointless and stupid of ways. Can someone explain to me how the hell its even physically possible to lose during the age of muskets and bayonets when you have a 6 to 1 advantage in manpower, and manage to get 1500 of your own men killed and only manage to kill 40 enemies? (like Russia did in the battle in Saločiai in 1703.)
The Russian military have always sucked and been incompetent and the rulers of Russia have been cruel and tyrannical.
And sure this tactic did often pay off. Russia could defeat Swedes, Persians, Prussians, Finns, Nazis, Chechens, and Georgians with endless human wave assaults and destroy the opponent by attrition and win despite having a terrible kill ratio. However Russia today with its low birthrates can no longer expect to win with such tactics. Ever since the industrial revolution has the country been lagging behind technologically after the rest of Europe. In the Crimean war for example could not all russian troops be properly armed. And many was forced to wear muskets from the mid and early 1700s when they were fighting against France and Britains modern weapons.
The Russian military was of course technologically backwards also long before then, but the technolocial gap was less serious back in the early 1700s. The Russian and the Swedish armies were the last European armies to employ pikemen, and both used heavy outdated muskets. But despite that was the Swedish army still consider the best in Europe, as it have superb tactics built around those old weapons and having a heavy musket was considered an advantage in bayonet fighting as you were less likely to have your musket stuck inside the ribs in some enemies body - which would render it unusable if that happened.
I think birthrates was an important factor behind the tactics European powers employed in the world wars. In world war 1 did Russia have the largest army in the world, and not only that, it also had a gigantic manpower reserve of 26 million men.
No other country in the world could ever hope to defeat such a big army on its own. Not even Germany which also had a large army and the 2nd largest manpower reserve in the world numbering 6 million.
But fortunatly for Germany, was Russia a 3rd world country with no industrial base so it could not produce much weapons and ammunition, so Russia was unable to transform 26 million men into soldiers. The allies hoped that they could sail through the black sea and handover tonnes of French and British rifles and ammunition. But the failure to cross Turkish waters and the failed battle at Galliopoli put an end to such dreams.
I world war 2 was the lend lease help more succesful. And Russia could afford to lose over 20 million lives and still be able to defeat Germany. Much of the high losses was due to bad leadership of course. But Russia could afford to pay that price for victory, and Stalin was ruthless enough to try.
Hitler was also a bloodthirsty dictator, but he knew that he did not have as many people as Russia to waste in a power. So he could not afford to be equally reckless as the Russians if he wanted to win. But on the other hand was Germany fighting a war against the clock, and time was not on Germanys side so risk taking and acceptance of losses was therefore higher in the German army than in the western allied armies. Germany also had a large population and high birthrates in the late 1800s and early 1900s so it had more men that it could afford to waste in a war than say France.
And after catastrophically high losses France suffered in 1914, was the consensus in France that the country never again wanna go through the same thing ever again. So the Maginot line and digging in and keeping losses at a minimum by well defended fortified positions therefore made sense.
USA did have much industrial might backing its military so it could afford to beat its enemies with firepower, and in a war of attrition did America have the upper hand so it did not feel any hurry. Nor did it fight outnumbered like the Germans who had to hurry defeating one enemy, so it could quickly turn to fighting another one before it would be stuck in war at all fronts and lose the iniative to the enemy, and the enemy would choose the location for all the future battles.
America did however fight a world war, and an existential struggle during the world wars so the tolarance for human losses were much higher than it was in more limited wars that came after it such as the Korean war and Vietnam.
And since those wars were not about life and death, were the publics acceptance for human losses much lower. But on the other hand could America compensate for this to some degree with technological superiority and massive firepower.
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""State budget" Is actually something that was literally invented during the 18th Century"
Fair enough. But fact still remains that most countries/states or whatever we should call them, were mostly focused on warfare back in the days. The state was a military state. And military spending was the main purpose of having a government.
So was total war in that sense a new thing invented by the French? not really.
If one looks at for example the industrial revoultion in Germany (or Prussia to be more precise) one could see that their manufacturing sector was largely based around military industry such as textiles, ironworks and cannon foundries. And Prussia was far from alone. Sweden also prioritized the iron and copper mines for both military and economic reasons. And it had also copied the Navigation acts that Cromwell in England had introcuded (which was a law that said that goods could only be transported on ships with 25% foreigners in the crew or less), so the maritime policies were both protectionist and helping the military needs of a nation.
Since the need for transport ships increased, and as the merchant navy grew, more ships could be converted into military warships in times of war. And more experienced sailors stood at the disposal of the navy. And the civilian shipbuilding industry could be used for making warships.
So in a way, was most countries kind of military societies.
"Also conscription was something practised not super uncommonly by minor powers, Florence did it too for example, when people (and I) talk of "Modern State" and "Total War" they are talking about the Power of the State to coerce people into doing it's willing, even Frederick II's Prussia couldn't achieve the power of the French State during the revolution and the Empire. (To this, the higher calling of Nationalism was crucial.)"
France was the most populated and rich country in Europe, so duh, of course no other country could compete with it in terms of military strenght. Would Poland be able to win a war against China today? nope. And it doesn't matter how effective they would be using their resources, because they would never be able to field an army comparable to the Chinease.
But what we are talking about here is innovations. And the French conscription was in my opinion nothing revolutionary. Other countries like Prussia had it too before the French did.
"To this, the higher calling of Nationalism was crucial"
It is true that solidiers will probably remain more loyal when they are fighting for something they love, rather than being coerced into something. Just like conscripts in western armies were less likely to surrender than Russians during world war 2.
But in the end I would say that conscription is the same thing as coercion to a certain degree. And the loyality of the troops could take many other forms than simply nationalism. Fredericks solidiers might have been fighting out of love and loyalty for their monarch. Some might had religious reasons to fight for their protestant king against catholic Austrians. Some might have fought for their comrades in their comrades in the regiment.
And Frederick and many other monarchs liked to crack down upon the opressive noblemen, which might have given him love from the poorer classes. So I don't think that all monarchys was the same.
If you had a country ruled by opressive noblemen, then of course the average solidier couldn't care less about fighting bravely to protect it.
The French of course had their nationalism and their "freedom, equality and brotherhood". So it might have seen like an more appealing alternative to the opressive serfdom regimes in those days.
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"Total war is not a government developing all of it's resources towards a military goal, that is rather common in history. Total war is a COUNTRY developing all of it's resources towards a military goal, every citizen, every artisan."
There is not much difference in my opinion. The military state was pretty much the norm, with most of the taxes going to the military.
And as far as I know would not a single regime in history fit into the latter definition if it would be strictly followed. Not even nazi-Germany would spend more than 80% of its GDP on winning the war, while poorer farming economies would have been much less able to reach anyware near that high number due to the low productivity in agriculture and industry.
There is always dilemmas to be done should a man go into the army, or should he make food for the army?
Should the limited supply of nitrates be used for explosives or for fertilizer to feed the army and workers?
The closest example I could think of reaching this criteria would be Paraguay which lost 90% of its male population in a war. But since its not 100% I guess that not even that extreme example would count.
"The power to coerce people, to obtain legitimacy, and rally a country around a single goal. Prussia was actually in the process of developing this kind of Power, but it REALLY only obtained it through the struggles of the Napoleonic Wars."
I don't see why Napoleon was an innovator in this field. He built large armies but so did the Austrians, Prussians, Russians and Ottomans. Even the greedy corrupt and hated Mughal government of the 1600s could mobilize armies of hundreds of thousands of men with fire arms and war elephants. And China also had a huge army.
And when it comes to legitmacy, I would say that a King only responsible to God would have much higher status than a non-noble simple italian in France who only made a succesful career thanks to the political caos. No one would rival the crown of Frederick or CharlesXII. But Napoleon had many rivals and backstabbers.
There was much civilian reforms and collection of data under Napoleon. But on the other hand were Gustavus Adolphus and Frederick the Great also way ahead of their time when it came to building modern effiecent buraucracies.
And the industrial revolution and nationalism were just in their early stages in the early 1800s, and would have to wait until the late 1800s before they could bloom. But nationalism also existed before Napoleon as well, and many letters have been preserved of Swedish solidiers in the 1600s and early 1700s talking about their worries about their fatherland - a hardly uncommon feeling among other European countries.
And a french style mass army were considered a wonderful idea by the democratic nationalist movement in Germany which wanted to transition to a huge Landwher army. But the Conservatives were skeptical, not only were they not unskeptical towards democracy and pan-Germanism, but they were also opposed to the idea of an army of badly trained idealistic German students for other reasons. And the Prussian military disliked the idea since they thought that it would be a very ineffective force on the battlefield and take high losses.
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"Modern State, Check, Nationalism, Check ... Administrative Efficiency is also another pre-requisite to conduct total war, but you absolutely need Nationalism, and France was the first country to weaponize Nationalism."
The motto "Pro gloria et Patria" were written on Prussian military flags also before the Napoleon age. Why? Because nationalism was weaponized even before the Napoleon wars.
And what defines a modern state with effiecent administration is a subjective opinion. And one could argue that Napoleon created a modern state with his law code (code Napoleon) that is still used in many countries (in an updated form). But on the other hand could one say that Frederick's government was more revolutionary and modern in many other ways - he went very far in freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He created the modern bureaucracy which were upheld as the ideal by Max Weber and it was also admired by non-Germans. And the Prussian education system would out-live Frederick the great and it would be copied by America, Sweden, Japan and other countries, and one can say that it was a pre-modern system not much different from the one Finland have - which is considered the to have best education system in the world today.
"On German example, by rallying to a common goal, it is not meant to mean that 80%+ of a countries economic activity is military production (Such a country would probably starve). But that all economic activity is geared toward the war, peasants eat merely what is absolutely necessary and send the rest to the army, rations are instituted, shops are closed, scientific research is all geared toward war, every aspect of civilian life is engulfed by War."
And once again we are then seeing that the governments of the pre-Napoleon times were military states.
Why did Sweden suffer from terrible famines in the late 1600s that was so severe that it would kill large parts of the Swedish population including a third of the population in Finland?
Professors in economic history like Lars Magnusson, argues that this was because the Swedish government had taxed so hard throughout the 1600s to pay for all wars that people had no money left for investments in agriculture. Every economic surplus no matter how small had been confiscated by the government. So when a bad harvest struck there was no resource reserves which could be tapped.
So if turning all the resources towards the war effort is the definition of a total war. Then Sweden of the 1600s would certainly qualify. The 1600s was a violent terrible century and I would guess that most other countries had the same problems.
"Is less persuasive than, telling the same man, that he is the inheritor of a glorious imaginary history, part of an imaginary group of people, that are intrinsically different than other groups, and that that group needs his service... But again, the French Revolution was the very first time this idea was used to conduct something like Total War."
Patriotism perhaps played a larger role in the Napoleon wars than in most earlier wars. But the differences with other ages should not be exaggerated either. Nationalism had existed before the French revolution. And nor did people stop fighting for other reasons (like God or serving the emperor of Habsburg) with the arrival of Napoleonic nationalism.
Furthermore was Nationalism was still far from a finished product during the Napoleon age. For example only a few percent of the Italians spoke pure Italian when the country was unified in 1861. And General Lee identityfied himself more with his own home province Virginia than his own country USA.
And it probably reached its peak in the first world war, and the decades before and after it. It was not until the the 1860s and 1870s Germany and Italy was created. And it was not until this time that most countries began using their current national anthems. And child labour was not abolished until the late 19th century and replaced with public education that would teach kids to be proud of the glorious past of their country and learn them all stories of benevolent kings of the past. And the race to colonizing the world took off with a speed like never before as North America, Asia and Africa fell under western rule.
And it was in time period that people had consumed so much nationalism by litterature, music, flag waving, military parades and propaganda that they got drunk and crazy and felt joy about joining the first world war - a totally unnecessary war, which could have been avoided.
But neighter Russia or Germany could accept demobilizing and seem weak in 1914, because that would hurt the national prestige too much, so a war with millions of dead instead became the result.
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"I actually have no idea why you mention Napoleon specifically. I include Imperial France because to a large extent it continued the policies implemented during the Republic. It was the Republicans that "first surrendered go madness".
I call it all the Napoleon age simply for the sake of simplicity. I know that the Napoleon wan't just there to take over same day the French revolution happened and that many other men ruled France before he grabbed power.
"I think you have the misconception that you need to be rich to institute Total War. You dont. The USSR pursued total, by abandoning the cosmopolitanism of Marxism and embracing Nationalism."
A poor country can never mobilize its economy for war to the same extent as a rich. That's a fact. If you have many tractors on the farms and machines in the factories you send more men away to the frontline. That is simple to get.
So a poor country that is waging war and trying as much it can to win the war, will still not be very effective in turning its resources towards fighting the war.
Tsarist Russian in the first world war is an example of this, just as Sweden during the 1600s. Both those regimes were trying to fight a total and it ended up with huge costs for the home front.
And since Sweden and other countries could wage a total war before the 1800s, then that concept is very old indeed. The 1600s was a brutal age with 30 years war and the deluge in Poland. the English Civil War, the Fronde, the English Civil war and so on. Sweden 66 years in war that century against Russians, Danes, Poles, Austrians, Brandenburgers, Spain, Bavaria, Norway and probably much more places. And the French list are probably not any shorter since Sweden and France were allies.
So its not strange that not only economies, but entire societies of this time was built around the needs of the military.
"France emerged after the Congress of Vienna as powerful as before the Revolution... It was Nationalism as an idea that become enemy"
France wasn't slaughtered because revanchism and destroying the balance of power in Europe would probably just have created more problems than it would solve for the victors. Metternich was a true consvervative and in his dreams France would become and old feudal monarchy again.
The old nobility and kings and such didn't like the new popular nationalist ideas that much, because they created problems. Slavic nationalism created problems in Prussia and Austria. And peoples demands for a unififed Germany would mean that the German states would have to unify under one monarch. But neighter the mighty Prussia or the mighty Austria would accept to revoke their claims to the leadership of this new empire. Another problem with the nationalist movement was that it was democratic, while the Conservative junkers wanted to keep the old order. The nationalists were also disturbing the public order and beahaving badly and intolerant towards minorities - which they thought should be forced to assimilate. While the Conservatives were more tolerant.
And much of this inner struggles were kept alive after world war 1. The German officer corps were mcuh Conservative and prefered the old monarchy over the democratic Weimar Republic. While nationalists were whiny about the bruden of the Versaille treaty. And then came Hitler and merged the worst the worst parts of those movements - the contempt for democracy he got from the junkers, and the intolerance towards minorities he got from the nationalists....
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@j k
"Doctrine? UKs was a full mechanised force with infantry support. German tanks were mostly breakthrough but USSR didn't have infantry support and were doctrinaly not efficient during the reearmiment."
No. Most German tanks were NOT breaktrough tanks. Germany only had very few Panzer IV tanks in 1940, and even fewer in 1939 while most of the tanks in the panzer divisions were crappy light PanzerII tanks.
And even after the fall of France and all the leftover tanks the French had that the Germans could use, the Germans still choosed to use mostly old panzerII tanks when they invaded Russia in 1941.
And in late 1942 did the Tiger enter service, but only 1300 were built compared to 6000 Panther medium tanks.
Otherwise I think you are somewhat correct in the other things that you said. Germany had much to learn from the Russians about tank design for winning wars. It is pointless to make high quality components that will have a much longer lifespan than the average lifespan of a tank... I mean why use expensive building material and waste hours on building a super engine that will last for 30 years, if the tank is 90% likely to being destroyed within the coming two years?
The Germans were over-ambitious, and the result was that tanks took a long time to build and they were expensive and difficult to manufacture and needed skilled workers. And therefore very few tanks were built.
And since Germany built so few tanks of their own, they had to steal tanks from other nations. Like the Marder tanks that used Czech or French tank chassis and stolen Russian 76mm anti-tank guns.
And when Germany used so many different tanks at the same time, then of course logistics became a nightmare for those who had the job to fix spareparts and repair damaged vehicles. And of course didn't things get any better when Germany was fighting over long distances in Russia, where the roads were bad and machines breaked down constantly.
I mean, the other logistical problems were already as bad as they could get. How would standardization of spareparts be possible if Germany uses stolen military trucks from France, England, Netherlands and Belgium along with all their own trucks of different types: Opel, Ford, MAN, Hanomag, Magirus, Büssig-Nag, Hansa-Llyoyd Goliath, Borgward, Phänomen, Henchel, Krupp etc.
And think of all the logistical hell it would be to transport all the right type of ammunition for all rifles, pistols, anti aircraft-guns, mortars and howitzers that the Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Spaniards, and Slovakian armies needed.
I think that the Axis made things unnecessarily hard for themselves by not trying to standardize parts, and reducing the complexity of their tank designs, and by not using more low quality components when there was no need for something top notch stuff.
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@Paciat Panzer IV was getting inferior to the allied tanks in the end of the war, and the panther had a more powerful gun that allowed it to deal with monsters like IS2 from a safe distance, while panzerIV could not - with its weaker gun and armour. The other allied tanks was overall better, had sloped armour, thicker armour and were more modern while pz4 was a tank made in the mid 1930s. And 17 tanks used by the 2nd world country Syria does not change that fact.
Put yourself in the Germans shoes. The panzer IV still had a chance against m4 and t34, but what about the next generation of allied tanks coming down the pipeline?
"You dont need mountains of spare parts unless your tanks are in many different units"
I exaggerated a bit just to drive home the point of what I meant ;-)
But fact remains that you don't want to have big stocks of supplies, when you are going to switch production models often. And Germany did just that, as many of their tanks quickly became obsolete. They started the war with pz1 as their main tank, and it quickly got replaced by pzII. The Germans had intended to one day replace their pzII with pz3, but panzer3 could not be upgunned so they had to let pz4 become the main workhorse of the German army instead. And later in the war was pz4 becoming a bit obsolete and the panther was brought forward to replace it.
And I think the situation was unsubstainable. Quickly phasing out old tanks and focus all production and all spare part production on the modern tanks only had been the sensible thing to do. But Germany could not go down that route since they did not have enough Panther tanks yet to get rid of all Pz4 and pz3.
And even the old shitty pz38 and and pz2 had to be kept (atleast in their modified TD or SPG form) because Germany was so desperatly short of tanks. And old German tanks were dumped on other axis countries.
So of course would the logistics continue to be a mess no matter what the Germans had done.
They could of course have gone with making more spare parts instead as you suggest, but that on the other hand would also have meant fewer modern tanks.
I think the Germans had painted themselves into a corner by 1942, and from there onwards were they stuck in a messy situation they could not get out of. Speer tried to simplify weapon designs to allow mass production and easier logistics - but in 1944 that was too little too late.
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@Paciat Panther was a step-ahead of the enemy in tank development. So when the enemy comes out with the T-44 tank you got something to meet it on an equal footing. The panzer IV unit would however be crushed.
"As for the stock of supply, you do want to have a large one since that equipment goes to secondary duties"
Everything is about priorities, since you cannot both have the cake and eat it too.
The best thing would have been if the Germans had done as the Americans and built their own M4 Sherman and used the chassi for tanks, tds, spgs, flame throwers, mine-clearing, bridge laying, recovery, command, etc.
Then the Germans could have used the same spare parts for all of their tanks, and the logistical footprint would have been minimal.
But the Germans never did that. They had their pz1,pz2, pz35, pz38, pz3, pz4,pz5, Tiger, King Tiger, Elephant, plus all their exotic variants of those tanks. And on top of that did they also press in captured foreign tanks "beutepanzers" into service and used French and Czech tanks with Russian guns for Marder tds.
So the German logistical system was a mess, and spareparts were needed for all kinds of different tanks instead of using the same types of spare parts for all tanks - like the M4.
What they needed was fewer tank models. But on the other hand did they also want to keep up with the technological race with their enemies, because no one else in the Axis would be able to help them out if their best tank became obsolete.
Fighting the war with Panzer I, Panzerjäger I, and Sturmpanzer I Bison simply wouldn't work in the long run.
There is a reason why the old Mk.IV tank from the first world war isn't still in active service. Sometimes you have to let go of old shit.
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This Russian documentary says that the Swedish army was the Greatest in Europe
https://youtu.be/NGYLOYd9Pt8?t=19m52s
And Voltaire are describing Charles as a bright, brave, idealist and a great military leader and said that he had no flaws either than being too brave for his own good and too generous which led him to waste money on giving away expensive gifts to others and make the state coffers empty. He was described as the almost the perfect ideal monarch.
https://archive.org/details/voltaireshistory00voltuoft
And I think both those foreign views are wrong, while Swedish historian rarely exaggerate abot King Charles nowadays. In the past it was common with rightwing nationalists describing him as a young hero King who gave his life for his nation. And pathetic leftwingers (like Ernst Brunner) tries to make the case that he was as bad as Hitler.
However, most modern Swedish historians are somewhat fair regarding Charles. He is seen as a simple human. A young boy who became king over a mighty empire - which is a job which would be a heavy burden on most peoples shoulders in times of war against a mighty alliance that threatens the existance of this Kingdom. This young teenager did as best as he could to do the job, and he stood with a sword in his hand and fought along side his own men and led them in battle and shared their risk of dying.
So he was brave. But he was hardly any perfect monarch like Voltaire claims. And while I think that the Swedish army was the best in Europe in terms of quality, training and tactics, I still wouldn't call it the greatest in Europe like the self-glorifying Russian documentaries do.
Austria, France, Russia, the Ottoman empire and maybe even England could field armies with 100-200.000 men.
But Sweden didn't have the manpower for that. The main army that invaded Russia consisted of only 40.000 men, and even if it was among the best troops in Europe, it is still not a force near as strong as an army of 100.000 men.
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I hate the "climate argument" since it stinks enviromental determinism. And David S Landes is just as guilty as Jared Diamond in this when he tries to explain away all other factors with this...
He says Europe had the best climate, and USA the second best. Europe never had any hurricanes. It wasn't so hot that it was exhausting to go outside like in tropical countries in India, Arabia or Africa where it was increadibly exhausting to work an hour outside in the sun. And the cold winters effectivly killed off many diseases, that otherwise flourish so much in tropical climates like malaria in Africa.
Europe also have a relativly steady flow of rainfall, while in the Agra region of India, for example, the rainfall exceeds the current
needs of agriculture for only two months in the year, and the excess held in the soil in those wet months dries up in only three weeks.
And about rivers in Africa Landes writes this: "The Volta drains over 100,000 square kilometers in West Africa—half
the area of Great Britain—but when low, averages at its mouth a meager
flow of only 28 cubic meters per second, as against 3,500-9,800 at the peak. Drought in the Volta basin comes at the hottest and windiest time of year, and loss of water to evaporation is discouragingly high."
And about rainfall did Landes write this:
"Water is another problem. Tropical areas generally average enough rainfall, but the timing is often irregular and unpredictable, the downpours anything but gentle. The drops are large; the rate of fall torrential. The averages mean nothing when one goes from one extreme to the other, from one year or season or one day to the next. In northern Nigeria, 90 percent of all rain falls in storms of over 25 mm. per hour; that makes half the average monthly rainfall at Kew Gardens, outside London. Java has heavier pours: a quarter of the annual rainfall comes down at 60 mm. per hour.
In such climes, cultivation does not compete easily with jungle and rain forest"
And Landes argue that unfree labour and slavery was more common in hot climates because it is hard to get any free person that is willing to do the work. So who do you pick for picking cotton or harvesting sugar when it is 40°C?
-You of course let a lave do the job, because that is a person who cannot say no.
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@ВячеславСкопюк I see China, North America and India as roughly equal to Europe when it comes to natural resources. Unless you see the world as I and Jared Diamond do and see domesticated animals and plants as a “resource”.
And how do even value a resource? Industrial and technological progress always changes and one precious resource can be totally worthless the next day.
Salt was precious resource in the past needed for preserving food and essential for fielding large armies. But today this resource abundant and cheap - so cheap that it is even used on icy highways.
Incense was the most valuable commodity in antiquity in terms of value of the trade in a particular commodity. But today there is no longer much need for it.
During the bronze age was copper and tin extremely important strategic resources which Ancient Egypt and Sumeria saw as vital national interests, the same way as USA today think their oil supply needs to be secure at all costs. The bronze age ended however, and the iron age and iron age superseded it.
And in 1677 it was perhaps seen as the Netherlands made a good deal with England when they exchanged a valuable island in the pacific in exchange for New York. But today the Banda islands and the global nutmeg trade is no longer much valuable to the global economy. New York is a precious hub in the global economy, while the island Run is a place most people never heard of.
Well what I guess what I am trying to say here is that innovation can overcome much of the resource scarcity. So I am more interested in institutions and good governance and innovation than what I am in resources.
Only backwards shithole countries rely on exports of natural resources, while modern economies relies on making high-tech products that no one else have the knowledge how to manufacture. And thus you can charge other countries high prices for your products and make high profits. Natural resources on the other hand only gives you a shitty terms of trade.
There is more competition, and why should I as a foreigner wanna pay any extra to get coal from your Germany when I might as well import coal cheaper from USA, Russia, Australia, UK or China?
Another problem with relying on only selling natural resources instead of manufacturing products is that you can run out of your resources. What should Saudiarabia do when there is no oil left in the ground? And what should countries do when they have cut down all trees and brought all fish up from their waters? Then they have nothing more to sell, and they will have to starve to death.
Another danger is that innovation makes natural resources worthless. What would happen with Saudiarabia if a new better energy source gets invented?
Western countries have now invented food substitutes for sugar and vanilla, and those products have replaced some of our use for those products so the demand for sugar and vanilla has fallen along with the market price - which have harmed many poor countries in Africa that have nothing else to sell.
And likewise have the invention of fiber cables decreased the need for copper worldwide, and big countries dig up old telephones wires and dump that copper on the world market which depresses the price of copper and harm copper exporting countries.
So new technologies have the potential of destroying the entire economy of a country - like what happened to the countries in Central America that relied on selling paint made from insects (cochineal). In the past this was a precious resource. But when a British chemist named Perkins got the job of experimenting and finding out any use for coal tar (which was a waste product that England produced too much of and wanted to get rid of) he found out that this material could be used for making synthetic dye.
And this is quite typical of the chemical industry - what is a waste product one day, often becomes a resource another. Perkins became a millionaire and England’s chemical industry had now been born. But for many American countries was this invention a disaster to their economy.
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But have this calculation taken into consideration if improved production methods have changed the price of the car? What about the prices of raw materials, maybe the prices was different in war time Germany than in peace time in the 1960s?
Prices change for other reasons than inflation you know. And maybe thats why it is so damn hard to calculate what things costed in the past.
The price of bread, gold, iron, silver, copper, fish, corn, horses have always gone up and down in price throughout history. And inflation is about the general average price level.
And prices could change for all kinds of reasons, wartime shortages, more effiecent production methods, increased demand, lack of competition, technological progress that makes some products outdated (ie typewriters and analog cameras) that falls in price while modern products is more valuable.
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I think countries did not have much of choice. You cannot just change your doctrine in the middle of a war or just a few years before it. Because then you need to produce millions of new rifles. Your men needs to be trained to handle a new weapon and new tactics.
Germany could not provide all their men with a sturmgewehr even if it had wanted to. And also MP-40 was a weapon that was in short supply and same goes for MG-34. But Germany did have a plenty of Mauser 98k and MG-42 which were not bad weapons, but they were things that had many flaws and it could be argued that the M1 Garand that the Americans had were better a rifle than 98k. But it was also a new design unlike the German mauser 98k, which had been in use already from the mid 1800's as a hunting rifle.
So I think one can say that the US infantry had better equipment than the Germans. Better uniforms, better rations plus more luxuries such as cookies, chewing gum, coca-cola, Nestle chocolate bars, better healthcare (penicillin), and better rifles, more ammo and more vehicles, radios and artillery and air power support.
Germany did on the other hand have more combat experience (atleast during the first half of the war). And Germany had tried out and perfected their military doctrines in two world wars, and in the long tradition of the Prussian army.
So German tactics and training were top notch.
Germany could often defeat stronger opponents thanks to their skill fulled leadership and excellent doctrines. Things like Auftragstaktik, kampfgruppen, and stosstruppen tactics gave Germany the upper hand with speedy decision-making and more flexibility of the battlefield. Thanks to this was the German army was the fastest on the battlefield, despite it was less motorized than the British and American armies.
On a tactical level could the German army show brilliance until the end of the war. But it made many strategic blunders and lost many armies. And the enemies were more plentiful and often better equipped so German losses did of course pile up throughout the war. And Germany lost many of their highly skilled NCOs - which were the backbone in the German army. And without their experience and good leadership, it became more difficult to upheld the same level of talented fighting skill on the battlefield.
And the Americans and Russians had learned to improve their armies the hard way in the middle of the war. And less noob mistakes were done by them during the last years of the war.
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No George, this was not the strategy that the German used.
The idea behind a flexible defence in depth was to let the enemy overextent its supply lines during an advance, while your own troops are shortening it. And then you launch a great counterpunch and encircle and easily destroy your undersupplied enemy. This happened at Kharkov both in 1942 and in 1943.
But Hitler didn't like the idea because he was a man of the first world war, and his beliefs was that every man should be in the frontline instead. And all retreats should be forbidden. Not a step back would be allowed.
1943 started well for the Red Army: after the victory at Stalingrad, it had crossed two major rivers and driven 500 miles into the vast open spaces of the southern Soviet Union in a very short time and had become overstretched.
And the Germans had just evacuated the Caucausus with Army Group A, and the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies (which Hitler didn't wanna evacuate at first until Manstein convinced him, and had Hitlers initial decision been kept would probably had been left in the Caucausus and destroyed).
And few people assumed that the German army had any strenght left after the disaster at Stalingrad. And the Russian had pushed forward in the middle of february to try encircle and destroy what was left of Army group South, by coming from the north and pushing towards the black Sea.
And contrary to what you claim did the Germans have any mobile defence. On the contrary, Hitler strongly opposed the idea of retreating from the Donbass region - which Von Manstein wanted, in order to shorten his frontline and thereby get more men available for his counter-offensive in the north towards Kharkov.
Von Rundstedt had lost his job after outraging Hitler by suggesting the same thing a year earlier.
Hitler and Manstein argued against each other for 5 hours, and Hitler said that it was absolutly vital for the war effort to defend the area for the Ukrainian coal mines and the diplomatic relations with Turkey.
Manstein knew very little of the economic aspects of the war, but he responded that Hitlers choice was now to lose the Ukrainian coal mines with or without Army group Don.
And surprisingly did that argument finally convince Hitler to allow a retreat. And Manstein moved back and created a new frontline behind Mius river, and used the rest of his forces to launch a counter-offensive in the north around Kharkov. The overextended Russians were completly taken by surprised and the got outflanked encircled and destroyed.
And this battle gives a vital lesson of the importance of being economical with your forces. If you try to be strong everyware you will also be weak everyware, as Sun Tzu said. And it was Mansteins retreat and shortening of the frontline that gave him enough forces available for his succesful counterattack, even when the situation was dire.
And Germany could never hope to win a defensive war with Hitlers tactic of letting all troops sit at the frontline along the entire Russian front. Because the Russians were numerically superior and could counter the German all along the frontline and still have enough troops over to concentrate for offensives in certain areas - where the German defensives would probably the weakest.
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Fortifications was not useless. The Siegfried line did a good job of defending Germany against a large scale French attack during the invasion of Poland. And Patton and his superior forces failed to take Metz for months, despite their opposition was made up by some volksturm in old fortications from the 1800s.
And the unimpressive fortifications of the Mannerheim line served Finland very well during their wars against the Soviet union. And the many defensive lines in Italy prevented the allies from taking the country before the war ended.. and the Italian campaign was a failure for the allies in that sense that it didn't make the allied landings in France easier.
Instead the contrary was true, the allies had to commit disproportionally large amounts of troops to the fighting in Italy so less resources were available for the campaign in France.
So are fortifications a bad idea? no.
They are not that useful in themselves, but only an idiot would use fortications and minefields in that way.
No minefields, barbedwires, dragoon teeths, anti-tank mines, boobytraps, trenches and bunkers are best when they are used togheter with defending troops.
And they can tie up disproportionatly large enemy forces for a long time and thereby giving the defenders time to organize a defence or a counterattack. And meanwhile will the prepared defensive positions keep the own losses low, while they can inflict disproportionally high losses on the enemy.
Just ask the German machine gunner Heinrich Severloh, on Omaha beach. He killed 2000 Americans on D-day.
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If you think that statistics is the same thing as reality, then you are frankly not very smart.
Young men are more often victims to street violance than women and elderly. Why?
Because women and elderly knows that they are not as capable of defending themselves so they rather stay
at home and don't take any risks of getting hurt. So if eveyone then stayd home, then crime statistics would show low numbers, but would that mean that crime is not a problem? Of course not. Crime is so serious that people would stay home because they are afraid to go out.
So if people don't go out and make suicidal attacks against barbed wire and machine guns, that doesn't
mean that they are increadibly effective weapons on a first world war battlefield.
On the contrary. They were the driving force on how tactics were formed at this time, and all war-winning strategies had to adapt to this fact if there would be any hope of getting any success.
First world war was not a war mainly about artillery duels. It was a war when armies desperatly tried to find ways to silence enemy machine guns and pass through barbed wire... and solutions of all kinds were tested to fix this problem, like bomarding an area for an entire week with a million artillery shells.
"The way they got around the lack of communication was by massively pre-planning their artillery bombardments,
and by using extensive pre-registered defensive fire plans that could be initiated by the infantry simply firing a group of flares."
Armies tried these solutions, and they almost never worked.
Sometimes they failed because the enemy was sitting behind the front line or deep underneath the ground,
and the infantry would therefore not take any serious losses and could easily repulse any infantry attacks after the bombardment had started. You could of course keep on firing with your artillery once your own infantry had started attacking, but that would also lead to more losses among your own men as your artillery would accidentaly hit your own men.
Furthermore was timing of a bombarment very difficult to get right, as you don't know all the factors in the fog of war about the future weather, the enemy strength and such. So if your men attack too fast they get crushed by their own artillery, and if they cannot keep up with the time schedule then the artillery would be uneffective as well.
And in the early war years did Generals have to learn those lessons above the hard way. And gigantic battles with hundreds of thousands of men lost also failed for other reasons. Like the lack of High-explosives to destroy the barbed wirse in no mans land. And barbed wire was a huge problem. It is not just something you can fix with a little scissor. It was something nearly impossible to get rid of. And entire armies could stuck in front of it an not get through, while enemy machine guns ripped people apart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQ-otfHZx8
And even if your attack was succesful, then your biggest still lie ahead. How would you repulse an enemy counter attack?
In the first world war was a counter-attack the most powerful force on the battlefield. More powerful than defence or assualt. And the enemy was not stupid. He would see that you was about the breakthough at one part of the frontline, so he would concentrate more forces to the area.
So once your men had punched through the last line of defence, then he would swiftly launch a counter-attack before your men had a chance to rest and organize or dig yourself into the ground and get reinforcements.
He would bombard you with arty and then attack you. And your own artillery would be too far away behind to be of any help. And nor would you have any way of communicating and directing your artillery fire from such far ranges. And moving artillery up through the no-mans-land moonland scape was difficult and time consuming, and it would not be able to keep up with the attacking infantry.
So once the offensive had been done, there was really not much plans what to do next.
So the enemy always had all the good cards at his hands. And it was these counter-offensives that made the first world this war of largly static frontlines that it is known for.
Because every progress usally was destroyed as fast as it had been created.
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I think German thinking also have been poisoned by liberalism and anti-militarism.
It sees power and military force as something inheritibly bad. But rerality could not be further from the truth.
Power is in itself not evil. Power is the ability to do things, things which could either be good or bad. Just like a knife can be used for killing people, or saving peoples lives when it is in the hands of skilled surgeon. Cars can kill people in traffic accidents, but they can also be used as ambulances to save lives. Everything depends on how they are used. And the same goes with power, and military force.
Germany is scared of holding so much power in its hands... because it did not end up well when Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler had a powerful force in their hands.
But as I see it can the western would just choose to give up all its economic and military power if it wanted to. That would however not create peace and a better world. If we abdicate our leadership role and hand over the position as the worlds most powerful country to for example China and Russia, then they will certainly create a more evil and opressive world.
That is how they would use their power. They would use it to redraw borders and force people to become Russians or Chinese or being put inside concentration camps to die like Uighurs and Ukrainians.
The only thing stopping those evil regimes are western military and economical power and soft power.
Evil people in this world will not give up their power just because we do that.
So what is the least bad option, should we have the power, or should evil dictatorships have it instead?
I think that democracies have more self-restraint to use its power more responsibly, while dictators happily abuse their powers whenever they think they can get away with it.
Furthermore do I not think violance in self-defence is wrong.
There are evil people in this world. And just because you leave them alone, does not mean that they will leave you alone.
Jesus fed the hungry and cured diseases and preached love and never harmed anyone, but he ended up being nailed to a cross anyways. Using self-defence to protect oneself from unprovoced aggression is not wrong. Nor is it wrong to use violance to kill a crazy person that are killing innocent people left and right in a mass shooting.
Often times can the person not be talked into stop doing what he is doing, and then is force needed to protect innocent from being killed. And if the choice is between all good people dying nailed to a cross, or to use violance in self-defence to prevent evil people from taking over the world, then I pick the latter option.
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I think it is the duty of economic professors to be useful to society and talk about things that matter to the public instead of sitting locked inside their buildings and just drawing lines on a papper and doing maths. Personally I think that macroeconomics should be fun, and economics should be rather focused on problem-solving and giving people a general idea on how the world works so you as a citizen can make enlightened decisions and defend your own interests...anyways, I am getting off topic here
, so lets go back.
Economics of war is not a popular topic, maybe because it is a no-mans-land that no one wants to go into. This subject is too economic for historians, and too much based around history for economists.
But I don't think we should give up. I think all aspects should be covered so an attempt to a general understand of the war can be gained.
"Somehow economy science was able to study GDPs and other indicators through decades and centuries and to compare them between different states, despite "funny monies"
To pharaphrase Max Keiser, I would say that economics is not a hard science like physics, but more of a soft-science like psychology without any hard clearcut answers. The economy is based around humans, and humans are unpredictable things unlike atoms in a bottle.
Most numbers in economics are just arbritrary. How do you count inflation? How do you count unemployment? How do you count GDP? How do you measure poverty?
I mean some economists say you should include housing rents and energy into your measurement of inflation while other say you should not. Unemployment statistics also have lots of flaws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
And how do you measure poverty? when does someone count as poor? when they live on 1 dollar per day or less? or 2? or 5?
GDP comparisons between countries does never get perfect because of uncertainties surrounding exchange rates and purchasing power parities. And countries with private healthcare and school systems can seem to have higher GDP than countries, when those services provided for by the government and not counted into the GDP by some people. While others tries to do a guess work of their value to GDP - which is arbritrar as I said.
So to conclude do I think all numbers needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and not be taken to literarly to be the truth. And any economist that does think economics is a hard science is an idiot with hybris.
So does that mean that numbers are all useless? Not at all. They can often give you rough estimates about things. Like that USAs GDP is roughly 20-25% of the world economy, and that the income per head for the average American is about 20 times higher than an African, or that the standard of living in Africa today is about the same level as Europe in the 1700s and perhaps a little better. Just think about it, even poor people in rich countries have access to better healthcare than Roman emperors did in the past. When King Charles XII of Sweden nearly died from a cold in the late 1690s his doctor told him to piss in cup and put an egg in his urine and then eat the egg, and that was supposed to cure him from his disease. If that was the best healthcare a mighty King of Swedish empire could get when the country was at its hight of power, then
I definatly say that healthcare today for poor people today is much better.
So to conclude, do I think that GDP is good for rough estimates for things. Like comparing the size of the German economy with that of USA is like comparing the size of Jupiter with Saturn. And comparing the size of Swedens economy with Polands is like comparing the size of Mars and our planet and see that they are roughly similiar in size, eventhough the average pole is poorer than the average Swede.
And when comparing USA with Ghana, is like comparing the size of Jupiter with that of Pluto.
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@alexnderrrthewoke4479
"beating French legionaries all over the world"
I think google translate must have played a joke on you :P
"Ukraine is desperate for weapons and cache of munitions"
And so is Russia. There is a stalemate and a war of attrition has started. Can a sanctioned 3rd world country (Russia) win such a war against all the biggest economies in the world at the same time? - USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, South Korea, Australia etc?
Nope.
Russia is running out of smart bombs and cannot easily build new ones because of the sanctions. It cannot repair tanks because of the sanctions.
Some sources say it is start running out of dumb ammo as well.
The Russian army call upon 50 year old beer belly dudes to serve in Ukraine - that is how desperate the manpower shortages are. You have begun to use T-62 tanks there - which are tanks which were considered outdated already back in the 1980s.
To me it seems like Russia is losing this war of attritition even before it has began.
Ukraine now gets MLRS and Leopard2 tanks - so time is rolling in their favor.
My advice to you is to pull out of this war while you can. You can lose this war with another 1000 destroyed Russian tanks or you can lose the war with no more Russian losses.
The choice is yours.
I used to think you Russians at least had common sense, unlike fanatical ISIS warriors and suicidal Japanese world war II soldiers.
But I am starting to have my doubts when you prolong this war and your unavoidable defeat.
You only cause suffering to yourself and doing yourself a big disservice.
Why are you even still in Ukraine? Is it because of pride? Well then I only got bad news for you.
You are going to lose the war anyways. I think you should just cut your losses and go home. Then you can start repairing the mess you created.
And why do you need more land? You already got 11 time zones of it. And even more of it will become useable thanks to global warming which will benefit Russia.
You are the largest country on the planet. You can lay your imperialism to rest.
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Russia will not have a happy economic future after this war regardless how it ends. Its santioned. The military needs to be completly rebuilt - which is not cheap. Its foreign assets are stolen and used for war reparations. The country will never fully recover from the past brain drain. The country have lost 200 thousand young men, and twice that number if you include men who have been severly injured and lost arms, legs eyes and so on.
And hundreds of thousands of men will become alcoholics traumatized by their war experiences and having PTSD and having problems with their work and their marriage. And along with alcoholism and drug problems comes criminality. Birthrates will also go south - not just by all deaths, and all injuries, and russians moving abroad in the braindrain,... but also because of all men who have to spend their years in the frontline instead of making kids.
Many men will never experience fatherhood, and many women will never get married because there are too few men left.
So Russia will continue to battle with falling birtrates and an ageing population.
Furthermore can Russia no longer keep much of its manufacturing base alive because it cannot export to western markets anymore, and russian consumers are too poor after the war. And foreign friends like India are less interested in buying russian military equipment after it have proven itself to be outdated worthless garbage. It was that in the six day war and in the wars in Iraq 1991 and 2003. But the Russians said that the Iraqi losses were terrible just because they had the old T-72M model of the tank, and if they had the better Russian version of T-72 then they would have fared much better.
Well the war in Ukraine did poke a hole in that myth, as even the most Russian versions of all their weapons are easily blown to pieces by western weapons.
And even if India have locked themselves in to Russian equipment thanks to a "sunk cost". Might they still wanna reconsider moving away from a dependency on Russia. Partly because the country is a weak loser and not valuable as a geo-strategic ally anymore. And partly because Russia now cannot import western components so it can build many advanced weapons anymore.
Russia have lost most of its car makers. Its airliners are facing hard times as their stolen western aircrafts are running out of spareparts - and after that do they no longer have any planes that they can fly passangers with from one part of Russia to another.
China and India is taking advantage of Russia and its cheap oil that generates only a marginal profit for russia.
And that is all that Russia can get from a resource that makes up over half of russias GDP. And just like with the economic problems Russia had in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, will Russia once again be extremely short on cash - and especially foreign cash.
Russia can try to sell more of its best high tech weapons to countries like China and India.
But just like China did reverse engineer and steal all technologies in how to make SU27 fighter jets, will they once again steal technologies from Russia and reverse engineer everything and steal every technology until there is nothing less to steal. And then will China eventually become more skillful and knowledgable than Russia in every field of technology and being able to build better things themselves, and then no longer feel any need to buy anything russian in the future.
And what can Russia do about it?
- Nothing.
- Oh well you can try to go to war with China of course with your badly battered army against a country with a 10 times larger population and the worlds 2nd largest economy. But I doubt you will win that war.
And with the economic problems will Russia more and more fall behind the rest of the world. China is building its own stealth fighters. And other countries are making their 6th generation fighters. But Russia is unable to even produce a 5th generation fighter. India have lost patience and have pulled out from their funding of that failed SU57 project. And nor are they interested in any T-14 Armata tanks.
And I cannot blame them. Had an American F22 used a F15 engine and put bolts and rivets on its wings then I would not call it a stealth fighter, and for the same reason do I not think that SU57 is a good stealth plane as its radar signature and generated heat is a joke for a stealth plane.
And the T-14 Armata tank lacks turret armor and can be penetrated there by just about anything, and it completly relies on cameras for the crew to see anything outside so if the tank gets its cameras knocked out by artillery fire it will become blind and useless on the battlefield. And its engine is old and weak, which is why its top speed is lower than Abrams and Challanger despite being 20 tonnes lighter.
Russia is falling behind the rest of the world technologically and its negative birthrate does further contribute to making this country very poor for decades to come.
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I think the German assesment was largely correct except the underestimation of the fighting morale of the Japanease troops.
Japan did not have the industrial capacity needed for a big war against modern military powers, and it is surprising that the country actully could do as well as it did the first months after pearl harbour with its many surprise attacks and amphibous landings.
The enemy was unprepared, and badly supplied with manpower and modern weapons while Japan had its battle-hardened military and element of surprise to throw at their allied enemies. But they would eventually run out of luck, as they were doomed to do sooner or later... and luckily for America did Japan lose their best card at their hand only a few months after the war started when Japan lost their many carriers at Midway in 1942. And after that the war was doomed to end badly for Japan ever after.
The only other 2 strong cards Japan had at their hand, one was the large concentration of force it already had in the pacific, while America still was chocked after the declaration of war from the Axis and was trying to gear up its military/government and industry for war. But that advantage was soon lost as well in late 1942 when Japan lost hundreds of aircrafts and transport ships in the battle for Guadacanal, which severly restricted their ability fo move troops and control the skies for the rest of the war.
And the last major trump card was the super-battleships that was lost in 1944 in the Leyte gulf battle.
In the end was Japan doomed to fail no matter what they did. It did not have any large population or industrial base that could come anyware near their enemies. It did manage to steal recource rich areas, but it did lack the transport ships for transporting it to Japan. And the technological gap between Japan and USA was huge, and the Japanease army was also pretty easy to crush for the Russians in 1945, even after the red army had been fighting bloody battles in Europe for years.
Japans resources was too small and fighting a land war in China and the pacific, while also getting involved in their air-sea battles was really too much for a poor backwards country. And the country would probably had been crushed much earlier if the war in Europe didn't get the much higher priority for the allies.
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Your post was boring, off-topic, and uninteresting so I decided to block you. I don't know if you are a troll, or simply a lamestream thinker incapable of seeing things from outside your own dogma. Anyways, this just feel like a waste of time arguing with someone who is like that.
"Ships are useless without seamen to sail them, mate."
I am not going to argue against someone who posts empety clichés - Fuck you idiot.
"There aren't any brilliant flanking maneuvers that can be carried out with poorly-equipped ships and there aren't any hills to defend. The history of fleet engagements is rather devoid of upsets. The smaller fleet may win, but the inexperienced fleet never does."
Yes, if we do like you do and choose to ignore the evidence of the contrary. I just mentioned the battle of Svensksund 1790 where the Swedes won an amazing victory against a superior force thanks to a schoolbook example of an double envelopment.
If Cannae is the ideal of an double envelopment which all strategists at land warfare tries to emulate, then Svensksund is the ideal for admirals at sea.
"France had not actually defeated an English battlefleet in generations. The Chesapeake was a tactical draw that enabled a victory on land, nothing more."
Once again, we can reach your conclusion if we do like you and close our eyes to the facts that proves the opposite. Fucktard.
Bantry Bay, 1689
Beachy Head, 1690
Lagos, 1693
St. John, 1696
The Lizard, 1707
Minorca, 1756
Sadras, 1782
Providien, 1782
First Algeciras, 1801
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Don't worry, the Russian military have been the same for centuries. It simply cannot help itself.
Its problems are so many and so overwhelming that only a small portion of them can be fixed within a decade in peace time. But Russia is not in peace time. Its best troops are dead since half a year ago, and you will need years before you can replace them. Much of Russias best equipment had been destroyed - and that Soviet made junk is something that Russia neither has the ability to produce and there are no one who knows how to build those advanced weapons anymore.
And then on top of that are they struggeling with all the sanctions....
Their top down military doctrine has been idiotic and led to massive losses and defeats every war they have fought. But transitioning over to Auftragstaktik is so far fetched from traditional russian military thinking that a transition can never be easily done soon - and especially not in the middle of a war.
The major flaws in the Russian military are so many that you cannot name them all.
Their crappy logistics, their lack of coordination, their lack of personal iniative, the corruption, the crappy planning, the lack of professionalism, the lack of sequenceing , the mismatch of equipment and doctrine of the old Soviet military which could focused on winning over its enemy by quantity while Russia today is a country with severe demographic problems with falling birthrates...
You have Putin who interferes in military operations by for example telling his tanks to rush towards Kyiv without infantry support in the beginning of this war - and the result became ambushes and catastrophic tank losses.
You have soldiers who spends more time trying to find food and fuel by looting because of the crappy logistics in the Russian army, than they are spending time on preparing for battle. So this makes this unprofessional army ineffective in combat, and it destroy the good relation it wished it had with the civilian population which was supposed to see the Russian military as liberators.
And stealing mobile phones not only makes an army hated - it have also allowed the Ukrainians to track down the same stolen phones and listen to Russian soldiers phone calls back home. And this allows them to hear about fighting morale among the Russian military and society, what the conditions are like, where the Russian troops are positioned, what the plans are and so on...
And then are the russian military also relying on western tech like civlian GPS:es in their aircrafts.
And the idea of forcing Ukrainians to become Russians by taking away their Ukrainian passports and force them to use Rubles and a Russian passport instead is about to backfire. Now you got a large russian speaking Ukrainian population that is very hostile towards russia which now have a russian passport and which can blend in perfectly with the russian population everywhere in Russia and can make sabotage behind enemy lines against military, political and industrial targets.
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@williamzk9083 Nope. The Ferdinand tank had the best kill ratio and that was an incredibly crappy machine with excessive weight, an unreliable underpowered engine, horrible gun traverse, ineffiecent use of armor with lack of sloping, an overcomplicated design that made it difficult to repair and to build those tanks.
StuG3 was on paper an unremarkable vehicle. It did not have the best gun, best armor, best mobility or best optics.
It was a vehicle that cheap and easy to mass produce and allowed germany to fill up the frontline with armored vehicles as you could get 3 stugs for the same cost as 2 tanks. And this vehicle also turned out to have a kill ratio 3 to 1. Which was good but perhaps not good enough for winning the war given that allied tank prouduction was so enormous that the germans would have needed a kill ratio more like 10 to 1 to win.
The StuG also became more and more underpowered as the war progressed. Had the war rolled on for another 1-2 years, then I believe that StuG would been unable to penetrate ISU152, IS3, and have much difficulties with Centurion, Pershing, T44 and such.
I think was mostly liked because it was a vehicle that could easily get mass produced and it had a good gun and frontal armor by say 1942
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@Fang70
But after having seen hundreds of videos with drone strikes its undeniable that drones have inflicted heavy tank losses. And Ukraines own losses have also been heavy due to drones, all archer artillery have been damaged due to drone strikes.
And that both sides use cope cages can be a symptom of drones being a bigger threat than in previous wars. Hamas destruction of an Israeli Merkava could also indicate that a new threat dimension have entered into the battlefield even for the very safety minded israelis.
The effectivness of top attacks has been known since World war 2. But when Sweden created the first top attack missile known as BILL56 did a new family of top attack missiles get born out of the same idea - such as the Swedish NLAW and the American Javelin.
Sweden also started the development of smart artillery rounds like BONUS and Excalibur that with the combination of drone artillery observation have wrecked devestation on Russian tank forces.
It is also a well known fact that the Soviet tanks have a weakspot in the top hull armor in the area around the turret. The armor there is very thin, and just under the thin skin lay the large auto-loader full with explosives. So one RPG hit there from a FPV drone could make the ammunition explode and send the turret up into space and leave the tank as a burning wreck with no survivors.
So it is common to see Ukrainian drones target this area just in front of the turret or behind it.
In the past was artillery not very accurate. There was no special precision ammunition, drone observed artillery and high quality guns capable of hitting targets so far away. Especially not moving targets. So tanks had a bit of safety in their mobility in the past. But not so much today as precision artillery have become a much more dangerous threat.
FPV drones are also capable of hunting moving targets in a way that artillery never have been able to. And a cheap drone of 400 dollars is capable of destroying a tank by hitting the weakspot near the turret for example. Its said that the Ukrainian drones have little over a 50% hit rate. I guess that some drones hit and makes no damage, or just blow a track off so another drone easily can kill a vehicle.
But still is this a very cost effective way of fighting a war. And one does not put ones own soldiers at risk of direct enemy fire.
So I think the drone threat needs more consideration now. There are even disgusting videos one can watch how individual soldiers are hunted by fast drones that rams their victims with a RPG grenade.
Even I have to feel sympathy for Ivan in that situation. War has become a dystopian nightmare with killer robots that can outcompete us humans in every way. That russian soldier I saw blew up had no chance to defend himself or run away - because the drones are much faster, nearly impossible to hit, impossible for a human to see in the dark, and now they are so cheap that they no longer just attack vehicles or troop concentrations but also individual soldiers.
And the future will probably become even more horrible as AI, better sensors, and lowered costs for mass production will make those weapons cheaper and even more effective than today.
The very fact that the Ukrainians have been able to hold the line this winter shows that drones are a powerful weapon. Holding the line would not have been possible when Ukraine was only able to fire 1000-2000 artillery rounds per day against a foe that fires 10.000 and have twice as many troops and much more armor.
FPV drones have been an artillery substitute. Perhaps a bit like Stuka bombers and artillery partially could replace each other during world war 2.
Of course can they not completely replace each other, as they both have strengths and weaknesses compared to each other. Drones are like I said more effective at hunting moving targets. But artillery is more reliable to use on rainy and windy days. And there is probably a reason why Ukraine desperatly begs the west for more artillery ammunition, and not only for more drones.
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@nobodyherepal3292 I am impressed by the German army in World war 1. Think about it. The Austro-Hungrian army was a depleted force after the first 5 months of the war, as it had lost 2/3 of its men by then including all its elite infantry such as the Kaiserjäger. It only took 3 big battles with Russia (which were lost) and a failed invasion of Serbia to cut off the wings of this army for the rest of the war.
The Ottoman empire joined the war a few months later, and everyone expected it to greatly boost the front against Russia by walking up to Ukraine and stand up arms to arms with the Germans and Austrians on the southern flank on the eastern front. But they too were a great dissapointment, just like the Austrians. Instead did Enver Pasha think it was a great idea to walk up the Armenian mountains - which was excellent defensive terrain and difficult to pass logistics wise. 200.000 men froze to death in the winter on top of the cold mountains or got killed by enemy fire.
So by 1915 Germany basically had to fight an entire world war almost completly on its own. But yet it was able to defeat Serbia, and Romania, and Russia. It was at the brink of crushing France in 1914, but was forced to move forces to the east to protect Germany because Austro-Hungria failed to protect the eastern flank as promised.
And then it nearly destroyed the French army again in 1917, as the French had just done the catastrophic Nivelle offensive with enormous losses, and the entire French army started to mutiny and refused to fight. The officers responded with executions of leaders of the revolt, but nothing helped to stop it. Strangely did Germany never get any intelligence reports of the bad state of the morale of the French army - because had it known how bad it was, then it would likely had launched a final big offensive against it to break the camels back.
But in the end would the situation calm down in the French army, after the officers had to give in and promise their men to never again do any offensive operations and stay on the defensive for the rest of the war.
The German army also managed to occupy most of Belgium during the war, and the Belgian army never had the numbers to stand up to the German military in this war on its own.
And the British army was basically wiped out in 1914. And in the battle of Somme it suffered perhaps the worst day in British military history. Tanks won some terrain, but German auftragstaktik and stosstroppen managed to beat back the attack and take back all lost terrain, plus some more land.
Also Italy was beaten back by the Germans in this war.
So almost by its own had Germany managed to defeat all of Europe. One can speculate about the reasons for this
if it was because they were early to learn the usefulness of uniforms with colors that blended in with the enviroment.
Or if it was their heavy emphasis on engineer troops and teaching all its conscripts to often use the spade to dig in.
Or if it was their wisdom to retreat in 1914 and build their defensive line on the best terrain on hill tops and such so they could look down on the allied lines and have an overview of the battlefield and see what their enemies were up to and not having to bother as much about rain flooding their trenches - which was a much more common problem for the allies. Its defence it dept with 3 defensive lines (compared to to two for the French and British) was also harder for an enemy to penetrate and saved lives for the defender.
Or maybe the German success was because of the german industry, and its advanced chemical industry in particular was very innovative. And that the clock was not ticking in Germany's favor if the war turned into a war of attrition so that Germany was forced to innovate new war winning weapons fast to gain victory. So it was an early user of poison gas, flamethrowers, zeppelins and uboats and other morally objectionable weapons. And it also started to experiment with new types of tactics like the stosstroppen. And those men did also bring much firepower to the frontline. And already as early as 1914 did Bavarian units start to use that concept. And the German wisdom of using mortars gave them a devestating superiority in firepower. And BEF was trashed and its chief John French had a nervous breakdown. And the French army suffered enormous unsubstainable losses. The Germans were fighting heavily outnumbered against 3 Europeans armies at once, plus lots colonial troops... and yet were they winning and their own losses were relativly mild by comparison.
So germany did on its own beat Serbia, Russia, Romania, Belgium, Italy, France and Britain plus their colonies before all 4 years of attrition and the arrival of American troops finally wore it down.
And I would say that superior artillery fire power and stosstropp tactics were probably the biggest reasons for this.
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"combat casualties, what causes them (small arms, artillery etc"
In the war on the eastern front did artillery cause 45% of the casualties, 35% was done by heavy infantry weapons (mortars, machine guns), light infantry weapons 10% airpower 5% and tanks/armour 5%.
"percentage killed, wounded or captured, the average death rate for a combat soldier"
I guess that depends on what type of unit you are talking about. Losses among infantry might for example be higher than those for artillery so that divisions become more unbalanced as the war progress.
"The impression one gets from film and TV, even from the more realistic films and series like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, is seemingly constant death, men falling left,right and centre, which simply isn't true"
Some battles are more bloody than others.
More Swedes died in the battle of Lund in 1676 than Americans in Normandy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lund
2000 Americans died there, while both the Germans and the Russians suffered losses of 10.000 each every day during the battle of Stalingrad.
My guess based on nothing but gut feeling would say that 20% losses would be a rough average for most big hard battles. But I am sure there could also exist extreme cases when the losses could reach 80%.
For example did Paraguay lose 70% of its population in its war 1864-70, and basicly all its male population was dead when the war was over.
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@jorehir Every economist seems to have their own opinion on this topic. David Landes thinks that Europe always was more prosperous than Asia. While Sinophiles like Kenneth Pommeranz claims that Europe did not get ahead of Asia until the 1800's. Personally I belong to the crowd of economists like Johan Söderberg who claims Asia was more advanced during the middle ages, and then around the 1600's were Europe and Asia on an equal footing, and then did Europe outperform Asia.
I think part of Europes strengths was its ability to import foreign technologies and put them to use - like the compass, gun powder, the printing press, paper, foreign crops, etc.
But not everything was about the rise of the western world either. Other parts of the world did also decline a bit. Densely populated countries like Egypt was much harder hit by the bubonic plague than Europe on average. The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems in Persia and Mesopotamia and thereby caused so much damage that those places could never recover for centuries. And the world metropol, centre of learning and trade center of the silk road - Bagdad was also completely destroyed by the Mongols who slaughtered about a million people there.
But the muslim rulers also had other problems which caused the end of the islamic golden age. Less conquests led to less plunder and profits. And as non-muslims converted to islam was rulers forced to raise taxes on the muslim population to fill the budget holes. Badly maintained terraces meant lower agricultural output, as top soil was blown away with the wind and the ground accumulated salt.
Then many farmers switched over to livestock instead - which were an even worse thing for the ecologically sensitive ground in North Africa and the Middle East. And without irrigation did farmlands quickly turn into deserts or wildgrown tropical wetlands - unlike Europe. And unlike Europe was there no other alternative uses for lands when it had been wasted and turned into desert. And MENA countries have always suffered from a shortage of wood. This gave Europeans an advantage as they had more and cheaper wood so they could lower their production costs of making glass, iron/steel/metal, and building ships, windmills, and terraces etc.
European goods became cheaper, while muslim goods became more expensive due to timber shortages, and got outcompeted. By the 1600's had the Ottoman manufacturing industry that made glass and textiles started to become out competed in the Mediterranean and unable to keep up its lucrative trade with Italy and South Eastern Europe. And the trade in the Indian ocean was severely disrupted by the Portuguese who tried to blockade the Ocean and create a trade monopoly in it. And this, along with the great distances to America did also pose obstacles for muslim colonization.
And when Europeans had found the sea way to India and China did also the volume of trade along the silk road fall - and that meant less trade and less taxes to government coffers.
So the muslim governments faced a shortage for tax money from all directions while their small manufacturing base was declining. And products which earlier had been popular - such as spices, fell out of favor and fell in price and became less profitable to sell as European costumers shifted over their interests to products like sugar, coffee and tobacco.
The Ottomans had been outplayed economically. But they did however remain a great military power throughout the 1600's until their expansion stopped.
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@REgamesplayer "Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen!" - is the motto of the German army.
And it means that armies should be spread out and walk independently from each other. And "vereint schlagen" means that armies should only come together at the last possible moment and combine their forces and strike against a common target.
Helmut von Moltke who said those words this use this recipe for victory when he won a crushing victory against Austria at Königgrätz in 1866. His three Prussian armies did all walk on their own paths so they would not overburden their supply lines. And then did he push against the Austrian army at Königgrätz from 3 different directions - north, north-west, and west - and the overwhelming force in combination with better weaponry and other factors did create a hopeless situation for the Austrian army that day.
Spreading out troops have always been military wisdom. In the pre-industrial age was it easier to feed an army by spreading it out corps over different areas on the map, instead of having the entire army sitting on the same spot on the map and eating up all food in an area in just a single day.
Having armies starving to death and then fall victim to diseases would be disastrous. The catholic forces learned this the hard way in their invasion of northern Germany during the 30-years war. Northern Germany had already been plundered and destroyed previous years of the war when the Catholics started their invasion. And after just a few months had the superior force been so badly decimated that its numbers no longer outnumbered the Swedes, but instead did the Swedes now had the upper hand and was able to defeat the catholic army and drive it back home, and turn around the situation completely and snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.
The only problem with spreading out forces is of course that they can be defeated in piecemeal by the enemy.
It is always desirable to use concentration of force before launching an offensive against the enemy. Moltke knew this at Königgrätz, and that is also the reason why he did let his 3 armies always stay near enough to each other so one of them could support another, if the enemy would suddenly choose to attack any of his armies.
I modern warfare does supply lines still matter. Only the 6th army used 13 railway wagons of small arms ammunition per day during the battle for Stalingrand. And then would the army also need to get supplies like fuel, food, artillery shells ammunition, etc.
And then the amount of supplies needed quickly grow so large that you need railways to get them, since there are no other realistic way to give the army what it needs otherwise. But the railroads do of course also got limits to how much troops it can support at a certain location, before the transport system becomes overburdened.
So it is therefore a good idea to spread out forces a bit so that each unit more easily can be supplied.
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@REgamesplayer I do not believe in the idea of "punching through the enemy lines". Frontal attacks are costly. Outmaneuver and encircle the enemy and starving an enemy army to death with few losses of your own seems like a more ideal solution to me.
It is however good that you agree with me that railroads, canals are the veins that provides army with the lifeblood that it needs to survive. And if you cut this vein of, then the blood supply gets lost and the army gets strangled to death.
I think normal peoples perception and military experts views on modern warfare differs very much when it comes to logistics. Average Joe do think that roads and railroads don't matter since armies got airplanes, helicopters and halftracks that can cross difficult terrain.
But experts however know that even the best equipped modern armies are just as dependent on roads and supply lines as in past centuries. It is not possible to air transport a tank army with 70 tonnes Abrams or Leopard2 tanks. The transport capacity of planes are very tiny, and helicopters can often only carry half a ton of supplies. So it is simply not possible to supply a huge army from the air alone. Just a single American infantry Division did needed 800 tonnes per day during world war II. And in modern warfare are ammunition expenditure at even much higher levels than that. So it is therefore hard to supply just a single Division from the air today. And supplying an entire army would probably be both impractical and impossible for nearly all military's in the world. So cutting off an armies supply lines are therefore still today a very hard blow towards its ability to fight.
Without ammunition do guns stay silent. Without fuel do vehicles become immobilized and useless. Without food do soldiers starve, no matter how tough elite warriors they may be.
The combustion engine have made armies less reliant on railroads and locomotives. You can load supplies on trucks that hand them over to your troops instead. However, this do have its limits.
Trucks ability to cross difficult terrain is limited, and therefore cannot tanks and soldiers get supplies that they need if they choose to sit in difficult terrain.
And the capacity to move supplies by trucks are limited compared to railroads. Which in turn means that you can only supply a limited concentration of force in an area.
War is still mostly a 2 Dimensional warfare game. It is still not possible to move armies in the air by the 3rd dimension. Air planes can carry too little weight, and they are vulnerable to enemy fire, and even modern airplanes are not good at handling bad weather, night flying, winter, sandstorms, tropical climate, landing zones with rocks and trees etc etc.
Paratroops and air mobile helicopter units can be useful for closing encirclements of enemy armies, do raids and capture bridges and such. But they are worthless when they are alone going face to face against enemy armies. They do simply lack heavy equipment and are too short on supplies to be effective.
Without tanks and heavy artillery do they lack a hard punch.
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@REgamesplayer
"First, you assume that there are unprotected gaps which wasn't the case in last century. Secondly, you assume that enemy will allow you to maneuver around him without taking critical logistical areas. Good luck trying to outmaneuver army size formation of a million men with handful of tanks and men."
D-Day ended as a success despite a tiny number of potentially suitable landing zones for the invasion of fortress Europe. Operation Bagration was a success despite Germany had lots of fortified positions - A hundred German divisions was crushed, despite Germany rushed its armor reserves to the area.
A third example would be Fall blau which also began as a huge success. Stalin was left totally unprepared that Germany had reinforced its southern front so much that Army group south had become the most powerful force Germany had in 1942.
Stalin had expected that Hitler would try to take Moscow in 1942, and therefore saw German Army Group Centre as the most dangerous threat to Russia. Stalin did therefore position 80% of the red army at the centre.
But Hitler did completely surprise him by instead launching a huge summer campaign in Southern Russia instead. So great was the surprise that after the victory at Kharkov in May 1942 did the road towards Stalingrad lay completely open for the Germans. All of southern Russia laid undefended. Most of the Red army was sitting in front of Moscow, and the few men which were supposed to protect southern Russia had been captured following the catastrophically failed Kharkov offensive.
The Germans never learned the extent of their total victory, so they failed to capitalize on it to a full extent.
So the point here is quite clear. You can group millions of men and still achieve surprise attacks.
And it is not strange. You cannot be strong everywhere - as Sun Tzu would affirm.
"Combustion engine had made armies more reliant on infrastructure than before."
Armies have a higher flexibility and tactical mobility than before. However, the huge consumption of supplies - and ammunition in particular, have led to stronger dependency on infrastructure points. Having thousands of winter uniforms do no good if they just sit in a supply depot thousands of miles behind the front line while soldiers are freezing to death outside Moscow.
The flow of supplies to the front - aka logistics - is often times the toughest job that the strategist have.
USA dropped 260 million cluster bombs over Laos. Just think about the huge logistical organization it would take to transport all those explosives from USA to Vietnam, and then to the airports, and then to get those bombs onto planes that fly them to the areas where they need to be dropped. Think of all the millions of gallons of fuel that is needed for all this to happen, and all vehicles that are needed for transporting all that fuel. And all men needed for all those transports with trucks and planes, and all mechanics and so on.
Much planning is clearly needed for such a huge project of dropping all bombs over Vietnam. And all other military campaigns are also just equality reliant on well working logistics.
"Look into Russian paratroopers"
FYI. Don't waste my time.
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@REgamesplayer
My examples of Bagration, D-day, and Case Blue are all successes achieved. Nor do you deny that they are successes. And that does prove my point: You can achieve surprise attacks with huge forces despite huge amounts of force concentrations and logistical built up which in theory should be easily spotted by the enemy, and then should those attacks easily be countered by the enemy and then crushed.
Well, the defenders in all those cases all failed to foresee a huge enemy attack. And counter-measures were only put in place only at a very late stage.
Nor have the element of surprise been eliminated from importance in modern warfare.
It is possible to achieve huge initial success even against enemies with superior strength. Case Blue and the Ardennes offensive did not end with failure on the first day, with German troops failing to punch a hole in the enemy defenses and just banging their horn against the wall until it became bloody.
Nope.
Instead did the Germans win large initial successes. But according to this Lindemann, should this not be the case.
"That is false. Armies before could live off the land."
The combustion engine allowed armies to be less bound by the railroads. But new problems then came with the motorization of armed forces.
Feeding armies is probably easier than ever. Food can be stored longer than ever before. It taste better, so troops therefore eat all the calories they need. And the food can be more easily transported than ever.
And healthcare is also better than ever.
But logistics related to firepower and fuel have become more difficult, as army requirements are huge nowadays.
"Funny fact, this reliance came right back down in 21'st century warfare. It became feasible again like with armies in a past did, supply your army once and forget about logistics and you could theoretically win entire war with just what you packed."
Modern weapon systems do demand much more supplies. But supply lines have always played an important rule in war. Alexander the Great understood the need for having naval routes open for supplying his large army.
And the logistics came to play a key role in the defeat of the Swedish army in 1709, just as logistical problems caused Napoleons Russian campaign to fail.
"You said that we fight in 2D environment and that deployed paratroopers can't do much after being deployed"
I said that their fighting ability is very limited. But they can however be an useful tool to help to encircle enemy formations so they can be destroyed.
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@bzztbzztboy Now you did a really good post :)
And I apologize for being rude previously, I have so many online debates keep on going right now that I easily confuse people with each other.
"Diamond's research methodology that's being thrown into question- the way he cherry picks data, takes biased primary accounts wholesale, ascribes native mistakes to technological and cultural differences while failing to bring up those of the conquerors, and overall fails to bring nuanced readings of cultural and political situations to the table"
Most history books contains many of the same flaws as this one. How many history books doesn't say that the Aztecs used cacao beans as money? How many "serious" history books just repeat what other history books says without fact checking if money was really invented in the Kingdom of Lydia or if Herodotos the inventor of this claim just made this shit up from his ass? etc, etc.....
I wish Jared Diamond could have been a bit more concerned to get his facts right. But I think he presents some interesting theories why Euro-Asia would get a good head start compared to the rest of the world, and that was really the point of this book.
And a few errors here and there doesn't invalidates his entire book.
"Just because the points which he raised appear plausible and explained doesn't mean they hold up under close scrutiny"
There are many books about this topic on "why the west would come to dominate the world, while the others didn't".
I have read Samuel Bernstein, David Landes, Kenneth Pommeranz, Xinru Liu, Ha-Joon Chang and others so Jared Diamond is only one among many authors perspective I have used and compared with other "historians" or whatever we should call them.
All of those authors have their own strenghts and weaknesses in their analysis of the world.
Their perspectives are like tools in a toolbox. Some of them are good at one thing and bad at another thing. And thats why you don't wanna throw away the screwdriver, the saw, the spanner and the drill and only keep the hammer for everything. Because a hammer is not very useful for all types of jobs.
And likewise would I say that Jared Diamond could give this perspective about plants and domesticated animals that no other of the gentlemen I have mentioned put forward.
And I think this is an important piece in the puzzle to understand why the west would conquer the world.
"Did you read any of the arguments presented in the links? I'm curious to see what you think of them."
I think they are the typical nagging you always hear about a typical history book. People complain just as much about Oswald Spengler about how he did get a few facts wrong here and there, instead of presenting relevant criticism about the main point he makes in his book.
"I'm not too sure what you mean by "this bullshit issue"
I mean that even if Diamond was wrong about some tiny fact, it still not change much in the bigger picture of things.
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"massive casualties"
No one have denied this. The leaked documents do however talk about less than 30.000 killed Ukrainians. Compare that to Russia that have lost about 200.000 men killed by now. The amount of wounded Ukrainian soldiers is probably around 60.000. While I would guess Russias wounded are numbering about 400.000- 600.000.
"air defences down"
Ukraine is getting more and more of it while Russia is running out of cruise missiles and forced to converting anti-ship missiles and air-defence missiles into ground attack mode to make up for the shortfall.
"And ammunition for artillery running out - artillery having been a deciding factor in this factor."
Ukraine is given 1 million artillery shells by the EU. And the other allies will provide large amounts as well so they will not run out if. But Russia on the other hand is running out of their Soviet stocks. And the Soviet union is not producting any more for them. They now restort to using decades old ammunition from North Korea. And Wagner is complaining about ammunition shortage and artillery shells that are too rusty to be used.
And Russian gun barrels have fired so much that their gun barrels are exhausted and have become inaccurate. And now they have been used to much that they needs to be changed or they will risk exploding and killing the ground crew.
So in desperation are the Russians beginning to use tanks as artillery due to the shortage of gun barrels. But the old 100mm ammunition for the T-55 tanks will not last forever either, and tanks gun barrels have a shorter life than artillery guns. So Russia is running out of rope it seems.
To make matter worse have Russia lost much of its counter-battery radars, and losses have been so heavy that Ukrainian artillery no longer bothers to move around and can sit in the same spot for weeks now without getting destroyed.
Indeed Russias artillery suck now. No fire coordination is done any more. Either because Russia lacks skilled gun crews, or because they like artillery observers, or drones... all because of all those reasons. So the old inaccurate WW2 guns that Russia uses with their non-precision ammunition, and their mobiki crews, and lack of fire observers do unsurprisingly produce meager results. It more seems like they just bomb a GPS location and do not care to follow up their shots so they come closer to the enemy positions anymore.
And on the other side you have an enemy with the most modern artillery systems in the world, and high precision ammunition and skilled artillery crews, and fire is coordinated with drones and counter-battery radars.
"Let's hope the conflict ends soon and the borders are redrawn."
I hope it ends soon, and that the end be very painful for Russia. The best thing would be if Ukraine invades Transnistria and take it back and that Russia is forced to hand back Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea plus all other land they have stolen the last decades such as land in Georgia.
And then should the country pay for Ukraines reconstruction, and compensation for all aircrafts it have stolen from western countries. And all war criminals should be punished. And all land within 100km from the Ukrainian border will be declared a demilitarized zone and be guarded by a peace keeping force from countries all over the world.
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@neurofiedyamato8763 "Depending on what machinery you are using, the various refining process of the required resources, all change the energy demand to make something."
I still think energy is the best measurement for production effiecency. It tells you how much input you have to give relative to the output you get. And if you use energy wasting machines, then your production effiecency will be lower.
I guess you haven't heard of "Jevons paradox" that shows that energy consumption in an economy increases when more energy effiecent machines are start being used.
This energy measurement per unit produced will also show you the true economic strenght of country. USA had their oil fields in World war II and could afford to waste lots of energy in their production process, why Germany couldn't after it had depleted its pre-war energy reserves.
EROEI (energy-returned-on-energy-invested) is really the measurement on the health of the world economy. It costs energy to produce energy, like when you drill a hole into the ground or use a diesel pump to get oil up from the ground. And EROEI is a measurement of how much energy you will have left to spend.
In the early 1900 you could get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil you wasted to drive a diesel pump to get that hundred barrels out of the ground.
So the EROEI value is therefore 100:1.
But if you try to make etanol from wood like the Germans, then your EROEI would at best only be around 5:1.
So Germany had to waste money and manpower to produce energy than the allies, and still they couldn't produce more energy than the oil fields in Texas.
And all resources Germany had to divert to make coal into oil, also meant that Germany had less men, money and coal they could spend on making military weapons.
Everything becomes possible when you have unlimited amounts of free energy.
But when you resources are scarce, then you have to plan every move you make so you don't waste energy, and manufacturing costs of everything rises since energy used for almost everything nowadays. The world economy would probably fall into a crash as soon as the EROEI value falls below 15:1, when the big oil fields pumps up less and less oil and needs more and more energy to pump up and refine from sand and rocks and impurities.
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Rocket artillery only got one strength. And that is that it instantly can deliver one massive wave of fire power.
That doesn't sound much.
But I think this is a tremendous advantage over all other forms of artillery. A surprise attack can blow up hundreds of men in just a few seconds. 80 big rockets hits the ground with a gigantic force. With normal artillery you will hear and see the first cannon shots fall into the ground around you, and you realize that you now fast have to move into cover so you don't killed. And once you get into cover, then the chance of getting killed becomes extremely small. So it is usually only the first shots that are effective. In world war 1 could they fire day and night for a week, and drop over a million artillery shells on the enemy. But the loss of lives was still minimal.
So best effect of artillery fire comes with the first few shots before the enemy can jump into a ditch and take protection from all incoming fire. When the enemy is standing upright with no protection at all and don't know what awaits him.
And rocket artillery do just that. It drops hell of a lot of explosives on top of the enemy before he have a chance to take cover. Trying to running away in the middle of a huge barrage would be suicidal. The explosions and blast waves are gigantic and stones, trees and shrapnel are flying around. People, horses and vehicles are being blown up left and right in just a few intensive seconds. And the survivors would be deeply shocked after they have witness, they might be deaf after all explosions and completely disoriented.
I would be very hard for a Russian troop to keep on pushing with their massive human wave assault after a slaughter from a nebelwerfer battery.
And the same psychological effect of fear was felt by German troops against the Russian Katjusha rockets.
Both sides considered their own rocket artillery to be inferior to that of the enemy. The German artillery had better precision thanks to the rotation that their rockets did while they were flying in the air. And the rockets contained more shrapnel than the Russian rockets which gave a better chance of hitting a soldier.
The katyusha rockets were fin-stabilized (instead of spin-stabilizied) and they contained less shrapnel, but the pieces of shrapnel they contained was larger than that of the nebelwerfer - so while it was less likely that it hit something, it usually did more damage when it finally struck into something.
And the German soldiers probably felt that their arty was inferior because the Russians usually had more artillery massed at their disposal and could therefore make bigger barrages than the Germans. The German rocket artillery was better than the Russian, but it was also more complex, while the Russian rockets were simpler to make (and probably also cheaper I would guess).
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