I’ve long thought that retaliation for starting a war should begin by assassinating the aggressor leaders. The fact that’s Simply Not Done is, IMO, a holdover form the days where dying is for peons and watching from safety is for Kings. In our more democratic era the violence should be brought as far up the food chain as possible; not held at as far down as possible.
Having said that, I’ll point out that civil life in the USA or Europe will be very difficult if the enemy has successfully shut down the electricity, phones, and internet despite causing no other damage to the homeland. Within a handful of days there will be mass unrest in the cities and towns because there is no food.
That may not be the hell of the Russian Front. But it will also involve a lot of people who aren’t even remotely equipped for the battle they find themselves immersed in. As we’ve discussed unto death in various threads, the death toll from a comprehensive multi-month collapse of modern tech on a national scale will be in the many tens of millions. Dwarfing all losses of both troops and civilians of both sides in WWII.
Okay, that makes sense. Despite the fact that they both took place in Iraq, I always hear 1991 called the “Gulf War” and its sequel is always the “Iraq War”. I should know my experience isn’t always universal.
Which is why any major army would seek to avoid such a conflict. Modern battlefield technology is such that if you can see it on the battlefield, there is probably some system loitering around waiting to kill it with impunity. Any battle involving massed formations of tanks, armored vehicles, infantry, and aircraft would be just as destructive and indecisive for both armies as the Battle of the Somme in WWI.
IMHO, that’s why pretty much every war since Korea has been these grinding “low intensity” wars of attrition, even though they often involved relatively modern and highly mechanized militaries.
I imagine modern warfare is more similar to the “Future War” in the Terminator films than WWII. Small units, snipers, IEDs, booby-traps, mines, hiding in the rubble of cities or intermingled with the population to avoid being detected and engaged with by advanced combat systems that can kill from afar with impunity.
I’m not so sure. You might end up with nations being driven to pre-industrial levels of technology and destabilized to the point of becoming failed states. Nations don’t stop fighting just because you turn their lights off either. And militaries tend to have their systems hardened against those sort of attacks.
If you can’t figure out a way to either destroy an enemy’s ability or desire to wage war, you can’t win.
“Trillions” would be on the order of the entire defense budget of the USA.
I tried to explain where the range came from, and the more conservative £1.7 billion number was sourced from a historian. If you go to the site I linked to, you’ll see the “trillions” estimate was assuming modern labor rates for construction, but the people who built those castles were little better than slaves, and so worked very cheap.
The point is, a castle built in the middle ages had the same sort of economic impact on the country as an aircraft carrier or battleship would today. Perhaps more so, considering the taxes that paid for the castle (along with a couple of crusades worth of men, ships and supplies, plus a few other castles) drove the wealthy of the time to revolt.
While the actual numbers may be small, both before and after adjusting for inflation, the financial impact of a medieval war was comparable to a modern war, at least within the ~order of magnitude’s worth of accuracy we can achieve with this sort of comparison. And that’s not counting casualties, whose value I won’t attempt to estimate.
My original point, which can now be borne out by statistics, is that a modern nation, using state of the art war machinery, can wage and win a war with negligible combat casualties. In the 1940s, personnel were at much greater risk of battlefield exposure to enemy fire.
This is largely due to the fact that troops no longer need to accompany the ordinance into the theater of operations. Weaponry can be deployed remotely, with no loss of life if the attack is repelled. However, this is not applicable to any forces that then occupy the vanquished nation, who are then still exposed to resistance.
Well… we’ve seen some of how it might play out with more equal sides as recently as 1973 in the Yom Kippur War.
But the fact remains that we haven’t really seen two roughly equal modern militaries go at it since then; the Gulf War and Iraq invasion were pretty asymmetrical, even though the Iraqis tried to give it a go.
Most of what we’ve seen has been deliberately asymmetrical warfare by a small force s. a large one; Russian vs. Afghans, US vs. Afghans, US vs. Viet Cong, US vs. Iraqis, etc…
The other thing is that I suspect people overestimate the number and capabilities of a lot of these systems; just because we have the capability to do some things, doesn’t necessarily mean that those systems are pointing the right way at the right time, or isn’t already engaged somewhere else, etc…
The Iran-Iraq war provides a similar example. IIRC, both Iraq and Iran had relatively modern and well-equipped militaries. Within the first year or two, entire armored divisions and the majority of each air force was destroyed.
From there, most of the war was fought by poorly equipped conscript and volunteer infantry. The subsequent grinding battle of attrition is often compared to WWI, complete with trench warfare and chemical weapons. Although after a quick read through wiki it seems more like the less mechanized theaters of WWII, with a fair amount of infantry formation maneuvers supported by the few remaining heavy weapons and aircraft.
It’s also worth mentioning that Kuwait and Iraq before Hussein fell are just about ideal theaters to play to the US’ strengths. We had time to position our stuff before opening hostilities at a time and place of our choosing. We had friendly bases in sanctuary countries nearby so USAF didn’t have far to commute to/from the war. We had near ideal flying weather with no foliage for the enemy to hide under or behind. We had room to spread out our armor and terrain they could quickly drive across. With again no foliage, rain, snow, etc., to obscure their view. The place was close to the equator, giving all our satellite assets a good view. And it was close enough to blue water that the Navy could position their carrier and other ships in close.
Saying nothing of the enemy himself, these are all features of the next war we may not be so lucky to have on our side. Fighting over possession of Finland would be very different from fighting over possession of Kuwait.
The problem in the Iran-Iraq war was that all of Iran’s military equipment was American but by that point we no longer would sell them replacement parts/bombs. So they totally destroyed Iraq until they ran out of ammo.
I don’t think an apples-to-apples comparison is possible. WWII was a war between more-or-less equal powers, while most of our recent wars have been highly asymmetrical. So obviously WWII is going to look very different from the recent wars. But a war between great powers today (say, any two of the US, Russia, or China) isn’t going to look like WWII, either, because it’s going to go nuclear.
It’s not inconceivable that a WWII armored unit had more and better commo than will a WWIII armored unit. The problem is the WWIII unit is much more dependent on the commo and will become much less tactically effective without it.
Right. That was of course part of the calculus of the great powers for the prior 70 years. If anyone attempted to conquer through a conventional World War, and if the the initial wild run was spent without a decisive victory and it began to look like we’re going into the grinder… *“the Envelope, please…” *
Including the systems that would relay the content of the aforementioned envelope.
This is completely wrong. Our troops were driving around in trucks, guarding checkpoints, searching houses, conducting patrols on foot. You think we occupied Iraq with a bunch of drones piloted from Kansas and robot machine guns targeted by guys in Iowa?
Sure, the guys driving the airplanes weren’t facing much in the way of anti-air defenses. In those cases you have standoff weapons where you pound the location and there’s absolutely no way for the poor bastards at the target to respond. But we still had thousands of our soldiers killed, and more than that coming home missing various important body parts.
The fact that lots of civilians died in Iraq doesn’t mean our guys were just dropping standoff weapons at everything that moved. A lot of the dead civilians were targeted by the resistance to the occupation. Whose side do you think all those suicide bombers who blew themselves up at marketplaces or drove car bombs into police stations were on?
I suspect that what we’d see would be that initial spasm of extremely intense combat, and as the ammo stocks and high-tech weapon systems are depleted, a much less intense operational tempo with a lot of infantry combat.
Eventually the fighting nations would have a choice- either continue building fewer high-tech items like tanks, airplanes, etc… or more lower-tech ones faster. I don’t know the math on that… does getting 5 M-60 style tanks trump one M1, if the enemy has very few tanks as well?
Agree with your first paragraph. As to the second …
You presuppose that we can build obsolete M60s faster than we can build M1s. Probably not. We have factories and logistics chains set up now to make M1s. Albeit at a low rate. All we have for the M60 is some moldy paper blueprints. And probably only half of those.
For sure we can crank out more M16s (or M4s minus the fancy gewgaws) and 5.56 ammo quickly. And ramp production of both with a fairly short lead time.
Arguably we’d do better to slap together hastily up-armored civilian trucks and to attach dumb bombs to things like this Cessna 208 Caravan - Wikipedia than try to restart production of actual military hardware of any former era.
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
Agree with your first paragraph. As to the second …
You presuppose that we can build obsolete M60s faster than we can build M1s. Probably not. We have factories and logistics chains set up now to make M1s. Albeit at a low rate. All we have for the M60 is some moldy paper blueprints. And probably only half of those.
For sure we can crank out more M16s (or M4s minus the fancy gewgaws) and 5.56 ammo quickly. And ramp production of both with a fairly short lead time.
Arguably we’d do better to slap together hastily up-armored civilian trucks and to attach dumb bombs to things like this Cessna 208 Caravan - Wikipedia than try to restart production of actual military hardware of any former era.
[/QUOTE]
Well, there is one complicating factor, in WW1 the combatants defense production facilities were untouched and poured out war material. In WW2, initially attacks were not sufficiently accurate and heavy enough to eliminate them when they were in range and for some combatants distance meant they were immune (North America, the East USSR, the British Empire, Japan before the Marianas fell) and could continue to produced unperturbed.
In modern war? No so much. It’ll be like Japan once LeMay was let loose in spring '45.
It is said near the end of the Cold War the US SIOP plan assigned multiple warheads to individual cement factories. No doubt the Russians today even with the vastly reduced arsenals known exactly where and what to hit.
If we assume nuclear strikes to the opposing homeland then yes, the whole materiel production edifice collapses over the course of a short afternoon. Any discussion of full-bore conventional warfare involving any nuclear power is inherently very artificial. But that was the question the OP asked.
I’m definitely showing my US-centrism here, but my implicit (unexamined in fact) assumption was/is that the contending major powers are engaging on the high seas and in some third country’s territory. Not on their own. Which has the same effect as the early stages of WWII that you mentioned: materiel production continues more or less unabated net of the transitional flail from peacetime to wartime priorities and rates.
There is also the complicating factor that modern day Industrial production is very heavily cross national with components being sourced from many places…, WW2 era nations tried to make everything inhouse. An attack on the US might be out, but bomb the ever loving shit out of some poor third country which provides critical components and raw materials to US Industry can have the same effects.
Maybe it’d make more sense to design cheap and easier-to-produce variants of the M1? Something where any rate-limiting parts or assemblies are replaced. E.g. if Honeywell can’t make turbine engines fast enough, perhaps it could instead use a commercially-available diesel engine (though I realize that’s far from a trivial design change).
This is sort of like the Soviet design philosophy of making first-rate MBTs for their own front-line units (e.g. the T64), while simultaneously making a cheap second-rate MBT for reserve units and export (e.g. the T-72). I even see from a quick glance at Wiki that the T-72 was originally designed as a “mobilization model”, which could be manufactured at high rates if needed.
Germany also switched to cheaper and simpler variants of their tanks towards the end of WW2. One of the more extreme examples is the Pz. IV J, which replaced the electric turret motor of previous models with a hand crank, and face-hardened armor with rolled-homogeneous armor, etc.