I’m surprised no-one has yet mentioned the harsh Russian winter as a factor. How many Germans died of exposure, as opposed to Soviet gunfire? If the Russians were even a little better at tolerating the cold, they’d have an edge in the attrition.
If you’re going to make a super-soldier, I’d skip all the crap about invulnerability to bullets and such, and just try to increase tolerance to extremes of weather.
Of course, you can do this just through training and selection.
I genetically modified mecha would still have the problems with sinking into the ground. And besides, unless they find an angel to munch on, the power cord is a big vunerability.
Well, ummmm, what if the mecha were made with ultralight antigrav plasteel? And protoculture fuel cells for power?
That last post was mine.
I’m sorry, but protoculture cannot be used as a power source. Not until the translator hacks who grafted together those three Anime serieses that were totally unrelated to one another can agree on what protoculture is in the first place. 
The splicing didn’t bother me as much as the seriously lousy english dubbing, I can’t believe any guy would go for a girl with a voice as whiny as the one they gave Minmei. Anyhow, while a 16 meter tall mech would never be practical a 3 meter or smaller mech could be small and quick enough to survive given suitable stealth and sensor capabilities
Back to the main OP
From what I know the acctual “doing” is quite easy. There are already medical devices that can be mounted onto a hip bone to monitor and deliver a constant dose of medications. The real problems are both durability and morality. The chemicals are all there to make a super soldier. Things like EPO,ephedrine and Steroids to improve physical preformance,pain killers and stimulants to monitor activity cycles and reactions to injurys, and antidotes to most chemical weapons to make bulky gear less necessary. The problem is implementation. My mom had a box attatched to her hip when she got a bad infection after she was home recovering from surgery. It delivered a constant dose of antibiotic, but she always had to be carefull not to bump it or knock it into things. The doctor told her to treat it like it was a chicken egg. Something that fragile wouldnt be good to use in a wartime situation , but any other method of delivering “enhancement” drugs into a soldier would produce too much of a fluctuation in preformance causing the system to be horribly inefficient.
Then there is the moral side of things. The idea of “should we” instead of “can we”. I dont think that this kind of thing is needed, but I dont think it should be ruled out either. From an objective standpoint , a soldier that can fight longer and is physicaly tougher than the enemy is a better soldier. A soldier who can be shot several times before succumbing to the pain and trauma of it is a better asset than the soldier who crumples up in agony after being shot once. If we assume for the sake of debate that every soldier shot will die from his wounds , then a 7 to 1 ratio of bullets to soldier is objectively a better thing than a 1 to 1 ratio. Especialy if the soldier can still fight after being shot. Something allong the lines of how a person on PCP can jump out of a 20th floor window and then get up and walk 5 blocks before their body realizes that it is dead.
I think if this type of thing is implemented that it should be on a purely elective basis. The soldier should have all of the risks explained to them and if they still want to do it, then they should be allowed to sighn up, but make it kind of like joining the seals.
Listen, it doesn’t matter how many drugs you pump into somebody, once you get shot you are no longer going to be an effective soldier. You’re either dead, or you need to be evacuated. No combination of drugs can make someone resistant to bullets. Someone might still walk around a few minutes if they are high on PCP, but how exactly are they going to be able to obey orders? And what do you do when your soldiers crash? It is much much much much more efficient to make someone more effective at putting bullets into the enemy than it is to make them more effective at taking bullets. Or not even bullets, teach them to use a laser spotter and you can drop bombs on the other guy without them even knowing where you are.
[Patton]
You don’t win a war by dying for your country, you win a war by making the other dumb son of a bitch die for HIS country.
[/Patton]
That is absolutely false. You’re actually suggesting there wasn’t ANY battle, anywhere in the entire Eastern war, where the Germans suffered more casualities? Not a single engagement?
Actually, the Russians had more equipment primarily because they had a better system for building and supplying the equipment to their forces. Germany’s military industrial and supply system was terribly inefficient by comparison, thanks to its lack of a civilian cabinet and lack of military planners, using a byzantine system whereby all major decisions went through Hitler and various military organizations bought and contracted for what they could. The Soviets by 1943 were producing vastly superior quantities of equipment and supplies and getting them to the troops in a far more timely fashion. Germany at any one time usually had half its tanks out of commission for a lack of replacement parts. i’m not talking about just destroyed equipment; Germany simply did a relatively poor job of keeping their own equipment supplied and working. The classic anecdote is that the Germans used DOZENS of different kinds of motorcycles (why??) while the Soviets seems to get by with just two types of main battle tank. As the old saying goes, an amateur discusses tactics, but a professional discusses logistics.
The Soviets unquestionably DID fight the war better than the Germans did; that’s why they won. They outwitted Germany at Stalingrad and outwitted them again at Kursk, and it wasn’t just a matter of Hitler being stupid; the Soviets were better at gathering intelligence and they applied the hard lessons they had learned in 1941/42. They developed superior weapons, tactics, and strategies. They improved virtually every technical and organizational aspect of military force from 1941 to 1945. Had the Soviets continued used mass-charge-of-peasants tactics they would have lost.
This may be true when playing “Close Combat” but in real life the Russians had weaponry and equipment every bit as good as the Germans. In real life, ARTILLERY kills more soldiers than machine guns, anyway (Artillery is the #1 killer of soldiers in modern full-scale combat) and I’d take Soviet artillery over German machine guns. Your cute machine gun teams were being blown apart by Soviet artillery from 1943 on.
Modern warfare is the art of combined arms. The Soviets became masters of combined arms. While the Germans failed to maintain a sufficient number of tanks, trucks, and artillery peices in the field, the Soviets were mechanizing the entire army and producing more and more guns and tanks. While the Luftwaffe was bleeding to death, the Soviet Air Force was getting better by the week. While Germany’s intelligence capbilities never improved, the Soviet’s intelligence capabilities got better by orders of magnitude. All the machine guns in Germany will do you no good against an army capable of deploying a combined arms effort against you.
You’re preoccupied with the notion of “ooh, they had better machine guns,” but the Russians had better transportation capabilities, a better supply chain, more replaceable and repairable parts, better tanks, better EVERYTHING else. You can babble all day about how amazing a Tiger tank was, but Tigers had a propensity for burning their engines out, and the Wehrmacht lacked spare engines. An undependable tank without a working engine is a worthless peice of kit. And how do you measure the rather enormous difference between an army that uses trucks (like the Red Army) and an army that uses horses (like the Wehrmacht?) Sorry, but an army without effective motorized transport is NOT a capable modern army, no matter how cool you think the MG42 was.
By 1944, the Soviet army was vastly superior to the German army in terms of quality; I can’t think of any reasonable argument to the contrary. The Red Army was fully motorized where the Germans were not, which is a difference of enormous import. Soviet weaponry was every bit as good as German weaponry. Soviet formations were FAR better supplied. Soviet soldiers were battle-tested and well trained. Soviet weapons platforms were very bit the equal of Germans, from tanks to guns to aircraft. Soviet intelligence and EW capabilities were vastly superior. The Soviet army was a better army, and given equal numbers would probably have won the war anyway, albiet slower.
It should be noted that the whole German war plan relied on a quick morale victory. Like in France. Once the German army destroyed large parts of the French army, and put the rest in a terrible position, they surrendered, even though they were capable of fighting to the last man.
If Russia had followed the same pattern, they would’ve surrendered 6-10 weeks into the war, when most of their army was encircled and destroyed, and the rest of the army wasn’t in a great position (but better than the French).
Instead of folding, they decided that they were going to fight to the last man. Once that decision was made, Germany was screwed, short of drastic changes in their military structure.
Stalin was extremely close to surrendering, however, during the first few months of the war. The Germans inflicted an extremely powerful blow, and it could’ve gone either way.
I believe I did not suggest it. I stated it outright. I might be incorrect, and, sad to say, cannot find a cite, yet that was my understanding.
I didn’t ever state they used such tactics, nor that they won or lost by them. Merely that they were willing to throw lives away to make the Germans pay.
By 1944, I’d say the Italian army was in better shape. I’ve read some first-hand accounts by german soldiers. By '44 they were living in Hell itself, and they knew it.
But the Germans started the war with that.
(Referring to motorized transport.)
Uh… no, they did not. This may come as a surprise to you, but THROUGHOUT the war, the Wehrmacht relied on horses to pull supply wagons. The Panzer divisions may have been motorized, but the great majority of the German army had to hook horses up to carts and guns to pull their equipment. A typical Wehrmacht infrantry divison’s order of battle had 4000-5000 horses for pulling supply and gun wagons; the force for Operation Barbarossa fielded 750,000 horses. The army that conquered France in 1940 and invaded Russia in 1941 was primarily a horse-drawn army. At no point in the war was the Wehrmacht fully mechanized or anything close to it. German horse casualities for the entire war numbered in the millions.
Hey, it works for me!
~Steve Rogers, aka “Captain America”
I believe this if you can give me a cite for it. I’ve never heard any other reference to the Wehrmacht using horses.
As a cite, I can name pretty much any decent book about the war; allcomprehensive histories of WWII discuss this matter. Here are some accessible ones, plus a work specifically about Wehrmacht horses:
DiNardo, Richard: Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II - Greenwood Press, New York, 1991
Overy, Richard: Why The Allies Won - WW Norton, 1997.
Keegan, John: The Second World War - available in any bookstore.
I can provide you with more specific references on this matter once I’m not posting from work. I can’t believe you’ve never heard a reference to this; it’s mentioned in most any book on WWII you’ll ever read.
Try doing a Google on “Operation Barbarossa Horses.” You’ll get a thousand hits, 500 of which will make specific reference to the horse-drawn nature of the Wehrmacht. The Germans were even using cavalry divisions on the Eastern Front.
Whoa. That blows my mind. No wonder they lost. 
Yeah, I heard about that as well. I also heard many of their vehicles and equipment were a little over-sophisticated; in an effort to make them better they were excessively complex and so hard to maintain and repair. The Americans and Russians seemed to more closely adhere to the KISS rule (Keep It Simple…Stupid) to field large numbers of more easily maintanable/fixable machines.
I like the exoskeleton idea as well, for a small-scale concept. Some people were whining about increased profile, but if that were such an issue we’d see armies with soldiers as small as they could get…an exoskeleton that was ergonomic and compact wouldn’t radically increase profile, and it were built with protection in mind could survive getting shot at. Just because we don’t have it now doesn’t mean its impossible- and just because it doesn’t look effective on paper doesn’t mean it might become a decisive tool in the future on the battlefield.
In our history, we’ve had radical changes and improvements to battlefield weaponry- guns, tanks, and aircraft are three significant examples I can think of which changed the way wars were fought. Whose to say we won’t see another new radical innovation in our lifetime?
There have been a lot of wet blankets through history. People who thought heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Or breaking the sound barrier was impossible. Whose to say we won’t see some sort of innovation soon?
Perhaps if such basic things “blow your mind”, you should do a bit more reading before you try to authoratively declare things about such a subject (such as “The Germans never took more casualties in a battle.”).
Also, it should be noted that the Russian army was primarily horse drawn for a large portion of the war. While the effectiveness of American lend-lease weapons systems to the Russians can be debated, the effect of the influx of American trucks in the Soviet army had a clear effect. The Soviets drove to Berlin on American trucks.
Trucks, and pretty much every other conceivable type of equipment and raw material you could possibly name.
Go ahead, name it; the U.S. gave some of it to the USSR. Typewriters? Hamburgers? Manganese? Pencils? Boots? Yup… everything. The amount given is staggering.