I’ll stop my hijack, too. If you wanted to start another thread more fully explaining your views on technology, I’d be game.
Actually, one of the things we did well in WW2 was not make things too advanced. The Sherman tank was designed for two things: (1) ease of manufacture and maintenance, and (2) ease of operation. Same goes for the original Willys Jeep. Neither was particularly good at anything, but you could build dozens of them for every one tank or light truck the Germans turned out.
This, I think, is a crucial point. Compared to the other factors in war, I think “will” is the most “woo” like factor that’s often mentioned. Actually, it’s a lot like crappy sports commentary: “The Ravens won the Super Bowl because they wanted it more.” Well, that’s pretty meaningless.
We know that wars are won when one side has lost the will to fight, but will is more or less just a passive, subjective measurement. You can’t go out and buy more will. Will changes on its own and it isn’t really a factor that can be controlled: if you’re think you’re winning, will is strong. If you know you’re losing, will sucks. I think the fluidity and lack of control of will makes it most useful to historians to explain something (in cheap and easy ways), but it is a poor predictor for future events.
Sure, it’s not quantifiable, but that doesn’t mean it should be discounted. History is full of stories of hugely outclassed forces winning wars because they had more at stake. Vietnam, Afghanistan (all of them), Grenada… okay, maybe not Grenada.
Actually, the Afgans enjoyed a technological superiority in a key area - in their primary infantry weapon. The Afgan gun was simply better. The Afgan long gun, the jezail, was often rifled and so considerably outranged the “Brown Bess” smoothbore musket in use by the British.
Where the Brits had the advantage was in other areas - military organization and discipline. In the 1st Afgan War, these advantages were nullified by monumentally incompetent leadership.
Technology changes the battle space but is only a part of overall victory. An example, in WWI most soldiers went to war without steel helmets and very quickly death and injury rates from airburst munitions skyrocketed. Steel helmets are introduced and the rates from those kinds of injury fell dramatically, but it was only a blip in the overall death/injury rate. The carnage continued because the introduction new technology forces a change in tactics. Or how about this, your army moves at night for cover, your enemy develops night vision, you change tactics or you lose. But…
An army fights on its stomach is still very true, logistics are a big part of winning wars
Will, both the army and the people have to have it.
Training, a well armed rabble is not an army. If you cannot coordinate with other units, follow orders etc and your enemy can, you lose.
I could go on but you get the idea, remember anytime you commit the troops, even if you have every advantage, you can still lose.
Eisenhower wrote two letters for D-Day, one for victory and one for defeat.
Capt
My initial conclusion is not that those forces fought harder, it is that they fought better. In each case you mentioned, the “disadvantaged” force adopted (at least in parts) unconventional strategies specifically meant to counter the advantages of the large invading or occupying force.
I think that in general, one is better off attributing success to actual decisions or measurable factors: how well was a military supplied? What was their military strategy and how did it work? What were their objectives? The problem with will is that, if examined on its own, becomes a chicken and egg thing: is a force demoralized leading to battlefield losses, or do battlefield losses lead to demoralization? And if battlefield victories reverse the demoralization, why don’t we just cut to the chase and measure battlefield wins and losses, because clearly will is more of a dependent, rather than independent, factor!
Will is overrated. The French in WWI build their entire strategy around Will, and it made not one whit of difference.
The problem with the OP is that different wars have different objectives, and so, necessarily, different means of achieving those objectives. A strategy that can win a revolution is not the same as a strategy that can win a war of conquest, or a defensive war of attrition.
The United States didn’t lose in Vietnam because of a lack of will. It lost because the brutality required to truly crush the Viet Cong would have eliminated any pretense that the war was being fought to protect the Vietnamese people. And since the whole premise of the war was that it was being fought to protect the Vietnamese from the brutalities of living under Communism, winning by turning the entire country into a mass grave would be pointless.
What ended the Vietnam war was not a failure of will, but the realization that the continuation of the fighting was actually harming our chances of success in the larger context of the Cold War.
Most wars are won or lost according to the quality of the aggressor’s strategic reasoning. Admiral Yamamato kicked off the Japanese campaign against The US in glorious fashion, knowing all the while it was strategic suicide. LBJ poured troops into Vietnam after the battles in Ia Drang knowing full well we couldn’t win without invading the north and risking all out war with the Soviets and Chinese. The Southern strategy in the Civil War was based on their view that superior numbers and wealth in the North meant nothing because Northerners were sissified city boys (they still are). We lost the war in Iraq because our strategic goals were to create a strong democratic ally that would let us base troops there and so control the Middle East. It goes on and on, the Germans were pretty sure after decades of planning before WW1 that their armies would bog down as they got close to Paris, but the went to war with no idea what to do about it or what the consequences might be.
This notion of elan as the way battles are won is directly related to the colonial wars these powers fought. When you have a small number of troops, but with vastly superior firepower and discipline and logistics, boldness is everything. Your troops can win any particular battle, but they can’t just sit there. They have to take the fight to the enemy, otherwise they get ground down.
The worship of ice cold bravery and obedience in the face of death is also based on the logic of how battles worked. If two sides are trading blows, eventually one side or the other will start to lose ground. And if your side is losing ground, and it looks like your side might lose, what would a logical soldier do? Run away, because it’s hopeless. So it’s smart to run away. Except when lots of people on your side start to run away, your side is doomed. And then the enemy cavalry is free to slaughter the retreating side.
And so battles turned on which side began to run away first, which meant that smaller forces could absolutely defeat stronger forces, if only the stronger side started to retreat and thus could be massacred. And so the cult of bravery was instilled in every soldier from the Greek phalanx to the American civil war, because bravery was the way armies won battles.
You learn something every day! Thanks Malthus 
The jezail also was capable of shooting a man in two widely different anatomic locations at the same time (i.e. John Watson, wounded in the shoulder and the leg, according to Arthur Conan Doyle).
Heh no problem.
Reading Flashman is both fun and educational. 
So? You say that like it makes it illegitimate. Fact: Some tools are better for winning wars than others. They’re therefore more advanced. Therefore, having the more advanced tools wins wars.
Y’know, there are whole degree programs based around teaching this stuff. This thread is like asking “How do you engineer an airplane?” Start here, then go here, then here, then here. I’ll let you take it from there.
Ah… I mostly agree, but the phrasing is infelicitous…
Having the more advanced tools helps win wars, but it isn’t enough to produce a win right away. I might have a Platoon of the best tanks on earth…and you’ve got an Army Corps of crummier tanks. I lose…
All other things being equal, the better tools dramatically increase the odds of winning. But, even then, weird things can happen, especially in battle. (What’s the military equivalent of Murphy’s Law? SNAFU?)
Well, it’s still muddier than that. Because if you use your platoon to defeat the Corps in detail, or effectively end the enemies’ will to fight, you can still win. Though, it still takes more than just technology.
The military has many variations on that theme. My favorite is: No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.
In reference to the OP, what wins wars? Doing as much as you can right, and being lucky and well trained, and experienced enough to guess what the right thing is with scant information. Any advantage that reduces your losses when you do things wrong helps greatly. Tech is one of those things.
In a symmetrical war, it pretty much comes down to the stronger side winning. Of course “stronger” in this context can mean not just more troops but troops that are better trained, motivated, armed, supplied, informed, led, etc. Once the point has been reached that one side’s supremecy becomes self-accelerating (every encounter on average leaves the underdog proportionately weaker), victory becomes almost inevitable. Either the loser surrenders, flees (if that’s an option) or is annihilated until no further organized resistance can be mounted.
In an asymmetrical war, it becomes like the battle of the lion and the crocodile: having met at the river’s edge, the lion wins if it can pull the crocodile up onto the shore, and the crocodile wins if it can drag the lion into the water. In the most common form of asymmetrical warfare, occupiers vs. guerrillas, it’s a contest of whether the occupiers can destroy the guerrillas’ support base (food, recruits, weapons, hideouts) versus the guerrillas’ attempts to hide from such destruction by stealth while inflicting an unwinnable stalemate on the occupier at a cost it is unwilling to bear indefinitely.
With regards to technology and winning or not winning wars, imagine the following situation from WWII. What if the Germans had a tank with the capabilities of an M1A2 Abrams instead of Tiger tanks, F-18’s instead of the Messerscmitt’s, and LA class nuclear submarines instead of the u-boats, along with trained soldiers, sailors, and pilots to man them, and ammunition to resupply them. Wouldn’t that have been enough for them to win the war, at least against the British and the Russians?
Not if they ran into the same problem they had with their Tigers. You have to build them. Once one was out of action, there wasn’t another one on the way for some time. The Tiger outclassed the T-34, but they made 84,070 T-34s, and they produced less than 2000 Tiger I and IIs. Heck, they produced more T-34s than the entire Axis produced tanks.
F-18’s still require jet fuel, and a lot of it, which eats into the diesel available for everything else. Even if you have the fuel to fly it, you have to use it properly. They had the Me-262, and more advanced planes on the books at the end of the war. Since Hitler was fixated on attack rather than defense, it was late to be adapted as an interceptor.
Los Angeles class subs might actually have been advanced enough to make a difference. If it’s armed with nuclear Tomahawks, the Nazis would certainly have a chance to sue for peace. Anything short of that, probably not. They built the most advanced submarines for the time, some of which served in other’s navies until the 60’s.
But as it was, the Nazis generally did have the most advanced weapons available during WWII. However, they couldn’t produce them fast enough to cover their losses, and the military equivalent of the “killer apps” for WWII were cracking your enemies’ encryption, and producing like the bejeezus. Without them, I’m pretty sure it would have gone worse for the allies. The Nazis had great tech, but they didn’t have the right great tech for the moment, and couldn’t exploit their advantage for long.
The answer is to go read “How to Make War” by James Dunnigan.
That book has been around for 30 years or so, and is based on extensive statistical and historical research, and within certain broad parameters, is pretty effective at giving the reader a sense of not only who will win a given war, but how much of a rout or not it will be.
He goes on to describe the effects of positive and negative leadership, training and logistics in a way that makes it pretty clear to a non-military reader how these interact to produce victory or defeat.
Put simply, the book points out that if the opponents have a broad parity in technology, then it’s leadership, training and logistics that make the difference between victory and defeat.