Today vs WWII military power

In My Humble Opinion
21

Modern day forces would crush their WWII opponents without exception. I’d say the combat branch where they’d be closest would be the poor bloody infantry. I think it’s entirely likely that a battle hardened WWII infantry unit would put up a hell of a fight vs. a modern-day US infantry unit, all else being equal.

What Dunnigan was trying to say in his book is that it’s relative; 2011 US vs. 2011 Germany could be accurately modeled using the WWII modeling system, since it’s still essentially the same war of armor, infantry, artillery and air support.

I don’t recall “How to Make War” having ways to really compare WWII units vs. modern-day ones, but it did work for Desert Storm (my copy was older than that; it finally fell apart about 6 years ago).

22

Those tubes would take up a large footprint of space. How many B-52 or Bone strikes would it take to negate that much arty.

Declan

23

Noone seems to be mentioning chemical weapons?

Otara

24

As for air bombardment of fixed positions, the WWII force has slow bombers dropping dumb bombs from altitude with very little accuracy.

The 2011 force has;

Cluster bombs to take out every target in a large area
guided bombs to hit smaller targets.
AC-130 gunships.

Of course, the 2081* force will have high energy lasers and rail guns.
(* Hell, probably the 2021 force)

25

Yes, but can any of them kill zombies?

26

All these countries did this in the early 1940s?:dubious:

Here’s the thing: Our missiles have much better range than their missiles do. Assuming the other side developed nukes, developed early ballistic missiles (which were too small to carry the nukes of the day anyways, so they’d be stuck with planes trains and ships to get the nuke to its target), and then deployed the nuke, we would still have the capability to more or less erase whatever responsible country from existence with impunity. Put your finger on a map, and we’ll carve your fingerprint in the face of the Earth.

Someone mentioned chemical warfare, something that the combatants of the time period did definitely have the capability for, if evidently not the general inclination towards. Assuming we get enough heads up that whichever other country is planning to use such weapons, our chemical warfare gear is much better than anything they had back then. Wearing full head-to-toe modern chem warfare protection, you can wear body armor, run around, shoot, type on a computer, use a telephone (if you don’t mind shouting a lot), and operate a motor vehicle. Oh, and you can drink from a canteen with the right adapter on the cap. Hydration is important you know. :smiley:

Also, consider that artillery in the 40’s was far inferior to modern artillery. The modern stuff is much more accurate, and generally much more mobile. As I understand it, many modern artillery platforms are very capable at “Shoot and Scoot” tactics, where they lob off a volley, pack up, and be somewhere else before the enemy can figure out where they are firing from. Also, modern radar systems can figure out where the enemy is firing from before the first shells have landed. Which also means that the guys with that radar system are much less likely to be taken by suprise, being given a precious few moments of warning to get under cover.

The artillery advantage carries over into naval weaponry. Even if an an enemy warship somehow manged to get the jump on a modern warship without missiles coming into play, the modern ships have much faster firing guns and would be able to put an impressive amount of accurate fire down range. They’d probably be in trouble if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves in a gun duel with something like a battleship though, given that modern warships tend not to be armored. The general preferred naval strategy would be a very violent game of “keep away” involving anti-ship missiles and radar.

27

Agree that remote sensing and data-sharing would overall be the biggest modern advantage.

One other important advantage of modern nuclear subs I did not see mentioned is their speed. They are louder and easier to locate (and deafer and blinder) when they run at speed, but a hunting ship or sub has to be slow in order to listen, and against WWII opponents, a nuclear sub will able to outrun anything moving slowly enough to hear it.

Incidentally, there actually has been one combat encounter between a WWII surface ship and a nuclear submarine.

28

Oh, and to follow on another post: If the other side switches to insurgency style tactics, with IEDs and ambushes and such, they could be a very large problem, but much of that would depend on where the fight was taking place. I find it doubtful if the Waffen SS would have much luck trying to blend in with the populace of the Dutch countryside while waging their insurgency against the Allies.

29

I know this is a zombie, but it seems to be well reanimated now, so …

Nobody seems to have pointed this out yet:

Once the 2011-armed US decided to enter hostilities in WWII, we could simultaneously terminate the sitting governments of all the Axis powers in about 30 minutes from decision to termination. With total certainty & zero risk. Tokyo, Rome, & Berlin could all be incinerated by Minuteman ICBMs and the war peters out later that afternoon. If any field commander decides to keep going, incinerate him & his naval fleet / Army Corps too. They’ll get the message quickly enough.

And they’d have no more defense or counter to this than they’d have to the genuine wrath of a genuine God, were there such a thing. It would be no different than you or I taking on an ant-hill.
Separate topic:
Yes, as described by others above, all our modern conventional forces are vastly superior on a unit for unit basis. But mass has a quality all its own, and a lot of modern military porn consumers just don’t understand how tiny our modern military is compared to WWII forces. Kill ratios of 30 or 50 to 1 are nice, but you can only be in one place at a time, and whereever else you aren’t the enemy has a 100% free hand.

So don’t be so quick to assume the US forces, based in the US, could overwhelm *all *the panzers in France without a fuss.

30

For a fictional examination of 21st century technology versus the best of WW2 technology, there is the anime series Zipang, in which a Japanese Self Defence Force destroyer “Mirai” turns up at the Battle of Midway. It outguns anything else in the Pacific, including the battleship “Yamato”, but the captain of the “Mirai” tries not to change the course of history by avoiding fighting either the Imperial Japanese Navy of the United States Navy. Of course, it’s hard, especially finding supplies and fuel, and there are fights with both Japanese and American military, but “Mirai”'s main problem is being outnumbered, with no allies to turn to.

31

As bump points out, I thik Dunnigan’s point is being wildly misunderstood.

His point was not that there was any sort of equivalence between 2011 and 1944 armies. There isn’t; the former would annihilate the latter. His point was that combat could be modelled in the same way, which is a very different concept - essentially, that if you are simulating a war, the variables of the simulation of a war in 2011 work essentially the same as the variables of simulating a war in 1944.

In general I believe Dunnigan is right, assuming you limit the simulation to conventional arms. However, there’s a few areas which give one pause:

  1. Scale and lethality. Armies in 2011 are much smaller and vastly more lethal than armies in 1944. Lethality is a critical issue in simulating war; the percentage of casualties taken by an armed forces in combat is, for obvious reasons, really important.

In a war between modern armed forces lethality would be astoundingly high by World War II standards. The German conquest of Poland in 1939, which took five or six weeks, was considered an amazing victory; had the Warsaw Pact and NATO gone to war in 1988 I think most would have been shocked if the war had lasted any longer than that one way or the other. The lifespan of a tank was measured in days. The range, accuracy and battlefield depth of weapons today is comparatively astonishing. Airplanes in 1944 fought as visual ranges; airplanes in 2011 fight miles away and there is little chance of escape from the man with the better radar.

Consequently, you will chew though your available forces in 2011 much faster than you did in 1944, assuming there is relative equivalence between the two sides. If there isn’t relative equivalence the war’s over in a week or less. In that regard a simulation designed to properly handle 1944 casualty rates doesn’t work for 2011.

  1. Battlefield intelligence today is much different from 1944. Electronic warfare in WWII was comparatively primitive.

  2. The scale of armies today is SMALL. People often don’t realize this but even big armies today are modest compared to what countries were fielding pre-1945, in part because weapons systems have become unbelievably expensive.

In 1941, a Supermarine Spitfire cost a Commonwealth air force about half a million dollars in 2011 terms (about twelve to fourteenthousand 1941 pounds.) Production was huge, over 20,000 fighters, and that was just one of a number of British fighters. So the Commonwealh spent about ten billion dollars on Spitfires.

Today, the cost of a fighter is two orders of magnitude higher. Canada plans to buy 65 F-35 Lighting IIs… at a program cost of (depending who you believe) anywhere from $16 billion to $30 billion. So Canada, hardly a superpower, is proposing to spend more money to buy 65 fighters than the entire Commonwealth spend to buy 20,000 fighters. And that’s considered normal now. The USA spent about as much buying 165 F-22 Raptors as it spent on its entire fighter force in World War II.

So one thing that isn’t equivalent between fighting a simulated 1944 and 2011 war is you just won’t have as much stuff. World War II games tend to assume really alrge VOLUMES of stuff. You can’t have that in 2011; nobody could possibly afford it.

32

So?

If North Korea had 1940s tech and we were bombing them, and they still developed nukes then you’d have a point.

33

I’m surprised I missed this thread back in 2004–I guess I hang out in GQ more than IMHO.

Anyway, to expound upon Mr. Moto’s post, modern submarines would decimate the fleets of enemy ships, limited only by the number of torpedoes they could carry on a given mission (about 25 tube-launched weapons for most modern subs).

WWII subs feared enemy destroyers and their depth charges. A WWII destroyer (or any other WWII-era ship for that matter) wouldn’t get anywhere near a modern submarine, which has a much greater range and speed than they have, plus the advantage of stealth. The first indication that an enemy ship had that a submarine was even present would be the large explosion.

Interestingly, though, modern submarines lack a basic piece of weaponry that the WWII subs had: the deck gun. Deck guns are a useful weapon for attacking defenseless enemy merchant vessels that aren’t worth the expense of a modern multimillion-dollar guided torpedo.

34

I’ll just point out that a German Type XXI might have a chance: against enemy subs its torps were too slow, but it was pretty stealthy; note that modern diesel boats like the Russian Kilo are evolutionary descendants of it.

35

I believe the quote is ‘Quantity has a quality of its own.’ Possibly said by Stalin, but I’m not sure. AIUI, the argument was that German tanks had a lot of quality (i.e., they were technologically advanced), and the Russians had simpler tanks. But the Russians had a lot of them; and, being simpler, were less problematic than the German opposition. ISTM that that was the strategy used by the Americans as well. The M4 Sherman had a 76 mm gun and lighter armour, and most ran on gasoline instead of Diesel fuel. Lighter hitting, more lightly protected, and more likely to ‘Light the first time, every time’ than German heavy tanks. But there were a buttload of them.

36

Only the latest model Shermans had the 76mm high velocity gun, most of the run had a less powerful 75mm medium velocity gun. Didn’t have nearly the same punch to it. Actually, a quick look at Wiki says that some of the later models of M-4 carried a 105mm howitzer. :eek:

37

Artillery, & other troops for that matter, can be dealt with via MLRS.

And some “fun” could also be had with FASCAM.

38

I stand corrected. I didn’t know there was a 75 mm gun, or that the 76 mm was ‘high velocity’. (Now that you mention it, I dimly remember hearing ‘high velocity’ on one documentary or another.)

39

And to expand on that, WWII was the first modern mobile war.

To gain A miles along a front, you needed B tanks, which will consume C gallons of gas and will fire D rounds of ammo.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Shermans vs Panzers or M1A1 vs T72, it’s the same equation.

40

Not really - the T34 and M4 were good tanks when initially introduced, the Germans were very worried by the T34 in particular.

As a solution Germany tried to bring in new tanks like the Tiger, but the problem with doing that is you slow down production while swapping over, and there are teething problems, training, etc etc. They were going to get swamped anyway, but it magnified the imbalance rather than reducing it, and by the time they somewhat corrected things with the Panther which was far cheaper, it was too late and the same ramping up issues occurred.

The USSR and the US mostly stuck with improving ‘good enough’ designs rather than trying to do that, until enough resources were free to do so. The US did actually pay a bit of a price later in the war because of this strategy, as they did have the resources to introduce a new heavier tank earlier on (the Pershing), but there was an ideological divide over whether to do so and as a result it didnt make it there in large enough quantities to make a difference. Give the US’s resources, they probably should have but hindsight is easy.

Otara