Suppose you had access to modern tech at today’s prices during World War 2. None of the other sides have this. What is the smallest capital outlay to guarantee a complete World War 2 victory?
Choose any side. How does this compare to the actual wartime expenditures for that side?
That is an impossibly complicated question. Any war can be won essentially for free these days using nukes. They are already built, filled up, and ready to go with support staff in place. We could wipe out Germany in just a few hours. That isn’t really what you are asking though is it?
eaisier for the german side to imagine. for britain, 100 b-52 bombers can knock out most of their crucial infrastructure (factories, power plants, bridges, air bases in a few months. 8 nuclear-powered attack subs working in shifts supported by long-range strike aircraft will do the trick for bottling up their atlantic lifeline. roughly the same amount of weapons and firepower directed at iraq during desert storm will do it.
then to russia. i don’t think you need so much more b-52s to knock out their plants behind the urals and their oil refineries in southern russia. britain was much more industrialized than the soviet union then (for a given area) but it’s a lot of area to cover for ground forces. tactical air strikes on their western cities by 500 strike aircraft will produce nearly the same results as three german army groups totaling 3 million men. give the russians desert storm x 3.
britain and russia will sue for peace in less than a year.
you’ll notice i’m not so much a fan of smart weapons. smarts against that many tactical targets will bankrupt you, it think. rather, it paves the way for more conventional forces to go in (fewer casualties at risk.)
In case, I was to subtle in my first post, war isn’t all about weapons technology. We already reached the ultimate of those and it didn’t get us anywhere. Forget about WWII. How much money would it take for the U.S. to win a war against a rather primitive nation like Afghanistan alone? That is about $418 billion and counting but the results are indeterminate because no one knows what a win looks like yet. That is a matter for government and diplomacy, not military technology. The same is true for Iraq any other country we could face today.
nice way to put it. my interpretation was (from germany’s POV) to destroy britain’s and russia’s capacity to go to war. that’ll win it for hitler.
Ok, fair enough. Let me clarify. Pick any nation involved in the conflict. At the time this nation initially joins the war, you have a 1 time chance to shop.
During this time, you can sell any military asset this nation owns for its WW2 price. Say you sell a Sherman tank for $33,500 US dollars (in 1940 dollars). You can now buy $33,500 worth of 2011 “stuff” (in 2011 dollars). You can buy either military hardware or regular stuff like cell phones, although those won’t work in the 1940s if you don’t buy the towers or relays. You can also buy a car for $33,500, but that’s probably not a good use of funds.
You now have fewer WW2 assets and some 2011 assets. Your nation will not advance technologically from this point on, so the US would probably lose if nothing is bought. This means you can’t use your 2011 knowledge of cell phones to build a cell phone towers using WW2 materials later. You need to completely win WW2 and history diverges from this point, so any fore-knowledge of events is not dependable or useful.
As the war progresses, you can buy new WW2 assets at WW2 prices at the rate that nation originally bought new military assets. No new 2011 assets are allowed, if they are destroyed, they are lost forever. No copying or reverse engineering the 2011 tech.
Nukes are allowed, but they are rather expensive because of inflation. A computer loaded with encryption breaking software probably gives you more bang for your buck.
If you’re not adjusting for inflation, this might be a not so great proposition. A Sherman would cost more than 33k to make today.
An M1 Abrams costs about 6 million for instance. Thats ~200 Shermans with your conversion system, and while the M1 might wipe out any opposing tank, as infantry support and the like, thats not a good trade off as it cant be everywhere at once.
Over the war, there were about 20k shermans made by the US for the US, so thats about 100 M1’s. As a straight swap its not looking fantastic, if you’re trying to save significant money by having less, its looking a bit grim.
Theres also the issue of intelligence - smart weapons have to know exactly what to hit.
Nukes will probably be your best bang for your buck inflationwise as half a dozen will be enough to bring nations to their knees. You’d need that kind of knockout effect I suspect.
I suspect a few historical databases and PC’s to do cryptography would be your best bang for your buck overall. Knowing exactly which factories need flattening to do the worst and the general issues in WW2 and future weapon directions might be worth more than any miracle weapon system as such.
Otara
What about a disinformation campaign?
Kill Hitler and the Japanese emperor with two cruise missiles, then replace them with CGI actors and issue false orders for everyone to surrender. A historical military database or two plus an offline copy of Wikipedia probably gets you much of the intelligence you’d need…
Total cost: A few million plus training?
ETA: The Tomahawk might need some sort of localized positioning system… if GPS is out of the question, maybe custom airdropped ground stations or a hovering plane? Or maybe dead reckoning would be precise enough?
I was wondering a very similar thing today. The US spent over two months bombing Iwo Jima and didn’t get much out of it. I wonder how quick or effective modern anti-bunker bombs would be there. On the other hand, if you had modern equipment, I doubt any strategy would require taking Iwo Jima to win the war.
Re: cryptography, and the presumed same-day deciphering. The trouble with that is it becomes pretty obvious to the other side that their codes have been compromised. There was already enough bother with Ultra that some intelligence wasn’t acted on, and other operations had to have elaborate misdirection applied. I’m no expert, but if Germany had begun using, dunno, 16-rotor machines, would that get the Allies stuck back in the 1940s situation?
Enigma was mathematically cracked. The bottle-neck was computing power to find the keys. A modern bottom-of-the-line desktop computer has more power than a 1970s Cray supercomputer. 16 rotor enigma can be cracked in fractions of a second with a desktop computer.
I’m intrigued by this solution. Although CGI actors are noticeably non-human in movies, I wonder if low-resolution, grainy 1940’s footage could be done convincingly.
Although if you only copy that one YouTube video, the Germans will be wondering who Sandra Bullock is and why the Fuhrer is broken up about her divorce. But you really just need to be able to generate convincing audio and video on the fly. It’s true that the right computers could do this on the cheap.
As for taking out the real Hitler, you can’t use GPS without buying the GPS satellites and even the plane-based or ground tower system costs a lot of money. You don’t have access to Seal Team Six (you can buy capital assets, but not human resources). You can’t pinpoint Hitler’s position for a cruise missile strike. Predator drones are out unless you have GPS. But maybe you don’t even need to do that.
I think our best bet is to buy some cheap desktop publishing computer and printer to forge documents of surrender, then broadcast a computer generated radio surrender message to field generals and hand them their forged surrender orders.
Would it be possible for one nation to coordinate an overnight, simultaneous global operation of false surrender on a WW2 scale?
You’d have to encode the messages correctly, which is a somewhat different matter than breaking the code of an existing message. Yes, we know about Enigma, but to correctly encode a message, you have to know what the settings are for the day you’re sending out the message. And the Japanese didn’t use Enigma, so you’d have to construct coded messages with their systems (the Japanese Army and Navy had two totally different encryption systems).
At any rate, even if you could do this, it’d probably only cause some temporary confusion and not conclusively end the war.
Pretty much what Shagnasty said. The limiting factor on wars nowadays is the ability of the other side to retaliate. The OP describes a scenario where one side has access to a full nuclear arsenal and the other side doesn’t. World War II would be over in twenty-four hours.
I don’t think you could force the war to end for cheap using modern weapons and not using the existing military forces. If you bomb any of the WW2 powers back to the Afghanistan age, you will still have this “Afghanistan” on your hands. Why should they surrender if you don’t feel like actually fighting them on the ground?
OTOH if you want to get any given side to win the war easily by giving them some modern weapons bought on a limited budget, then that’s not hard. A very finite number of modern jet fighters could have destroyed carrier based air force of either side in the Pacific, leaving the other side to just submarine presence. But then modern technology for submarine detection would pick them out easily as well, a principle that also applies to German submarines in the Atlantic.
In Europe to win for the Germans you would focus on buying airplanes and missiles for sinking American supply ships whereas to win for the Russians it might make more sense to use helicopters with anti-tank missiles. Given the limited German tank production, once you kill what they have you can then just chew up through the rest of the force using Grant vs Lee type methods.