I agree with your observation but not the reasoning behind it.
It’s true that most wars are not trivially won by whoever has the better toys. But the reason for that is that in most conflicts the difference in technology is usually slight. We’re not talking crossbows versus assault rifles.
And in a total war situation gaps can often be closed quite quickly as a lot of effort and expense is focused on copying enemy weapons (where they have an obvious superiority), and allies are often tapped for what tech they can provide.
All this means that other factors than technological superiority can be more significant.
But I think it’s wrong to depict it, as you seem to be, of “cheap and cheerful” weapons versus maybe more accurate, but more expensive, harder to operate etc. One weapon really can be better than another for the vast majority of factors relevant to combat.
First, I want to apologize for being so late with this. I’ve basically been at work continuously for two weeks and all posting has been in whatever breaks I can catch.
The concept of Will in wartime has many expressions. Perhaps the earliest clearly recorded version is Sun Tzu’s. In keeping with the concepts of Chinese philosophy, we looked at the idea form the perspective of harmony between disparate elements. There was harmony between ruler and subject, harmony between commander and soldiers, and harmony of military and civilian roles. These elements in concert enabled the state to sustain a military effort and resist the attack of others.
Not coincidentally, he proven correct in the ultimate unification of China under the first Emporer, Qin Shi Huang Di. (He occaisionally posts around here. Stupid ghosts!) The genius of the Qin state was a borderline totalitarian society, or at least as close as was possible with relatively limited technology and resources. The shame of the Qin state was that this couldn’t work indefinitely; it placed so much strain on society that it broke down in revolt in just a few decades. The Qin were wiped out. Their “Harmony” was powerful, but temporary.
By my definition, Will is a major factor in war and affects all levels of society, from civilian laborers to front-line soldiers, and from Generals to Kings and Presidents and Prime Ministers. But each of these groups plays different roles and affects the will to victory in different ways, depending on the social and military organization. Culture counts in these matters at every level.
And what is that definition? Will is made of the willingness to aggressively defeat the enemy, accept casualties and expending resources in the pursuit of that goal, and choosing to extend a conflict. You will notice that this definition has implications for different social groups and that it’s possible to be strong in one area and weak in others. America, for instance, has a tendency to spend a lot of money but is not very willing to accept casualties. Likewise, political or religious or ideological principles can strain or encourage support for conflict depending on the nature of the conflict. Will isn’t a simple concept at all.
There was an argument on the previous thread about whether democracies or tyrannies had better “Will”. That’s a difficult question because it comes down to the Sun Tzu once again. Which side has the stronger bond between leader and people? Which side can best rally the people to fight on? This is why it’s so difficult to define. At times, it may be a cruel totalitarian nightmare which can more effectively do that. But at others, the democracy can leave them in the dust.
In general, the more tyrannical a society is, the easier it is for leaders to enforce their decisions - less need to gather public support - but the less enthusiastic the soldiers and people will be. Even if public support is strong, command-and-control societies often prevent, prohibit, or weaken the communiciation so vital to a successful military operation. Republics, on the other hand, encourage vital information flow but can suffer from scattered and confusing shifts in public opinion or divided leadership. In general, the smaller and more homogeneous the democracy or republic, the more effective and united it is. Hence the Roman Republic and some of of the Swiss Cantons were able to utterly destroy enemies with better training, more soldiers, and greater generals. Even if they were beaten, they’d survive. Sooner or later, you’d lose, and lose big. The Late Roman Empire, or Late Medeival/Early Renaissance France, by contrast, couldn’t afford defeats very easily.
Likweise, the cause is a huge issue. A group which is insulted and attacked in a way it views as cowardly and unfair will often fight back with vindictive and unbreakable will. One thinks immediately of Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese attack came after a formal declaration of war, which even if it had been delivered properly would not have satisfied ordinary Americans. The treachery of it awakened a concealed fury which obliterated Japan is virtually every aspect: its military was wiped out, its wealth destroyed, its culture forcefully changed. The Japanese envisioned a quick strike which would bring them a political victory; they got a total war which led up to the edge of becoming a war of annihilation. Likewise, Hitler tried to wipe out the Soviet Union… and instead managed to wipe out Germany. I could give a lot of examples, but in short doing this implicitly raises the stakes in the mind of the victim, or self-perceived victim, or unjust war. And then there’s actual raising of stakes - if you move from, saying, raiding to massacres, you may push your opponent into much stouter resistance than was previously possible.
One should also look at the level of internal separation in society. Groups which can disassociate themselves from war may do so even if the larger people are for it. One could look at how various groups internal the South or North successfully dodged draft or failed to provide resources to the military effort, in part based on their attitude towards the conflict, and that some of these groups changed their attitute over time. In feudal societies you could find that lords actually ended up providing aid to both sides of armed conflicts, as they posessed fiefs (fief-contracts) which obligated them to two masters. Not only was this not considered dishonorable, it was not even that uncommon in some periods!
Finally, we must consider the limits of human physical and psychological endurance. There comes a point when people can fight on no longer, or are paralyzed through sheer terror. The Japanese in WW2 finaly fell the the former - continued resistance was pointless and they could do no more than annoy a United States which had nuclear weapons. The Mongols quite deliberately inculcated the latter on and off the battlefield, seeking the simply break enemies and potential enemies with displays of power and violence, risking less.
In any case, that’s as full a treatment as I care to give here. Please feel free to provide your own thoughts on the subject.
Yes, but that’s not the usual case, and must always be considered in the context of function needed. Technology is the but one aspect in a long pipeline of production, support, and training. It is rarely the deciding factor in a war, and most definitely doesn’t overwhelm other factors in the majority of cases.
Additionally, cheap & plentiful weaponry is only one possible choice. You can go for low-quantity, extremely well-rounded tools that require a lot of support. You can try for extremely large barrages of fire. You can try for robust tools that may not have many individual advantages, but work extremely well with superior training. You can even use weapons that are inferior to the enemy’s in every way… except the one way you use them.
This is why comparisons of technology, or descriptions that rely on the concept of “advanced”, fail on every level. Weapons are useful depending on whether or not you can use them to effectively demolish the enemy. Sometimes that means a reasonably sharp knife based on technology developed in the goddamn Stone Age. Other times that means a remote-controlled drone firing laser-guided missiles. The better technology you have, the more options you have, and hopefully some of them will give an advantage against what your current enemy can use.
But I may break this entire subject of into its own thread.
Not in World War II they didn’t. We’ve discussed Soviet tank production several times on the SDMB, and the 80,000+ figure includes many T-34s built for export years after the war.
The number built during the war (while they still mattered against the Nazis) isn’t expressly given in Wikipedia, but has to be less than 57,000 – possibly a significant number less.
Of course your point as a whole stands – 50,000 or so T-34s beats the 1300-ish Tigers made, hands down – I am just nitpicking a number in the never-ending struggle for accuracy.
That’s a very thoughtful and comprehensive case, but I disagree. I was going to post a rebuttal to your points, because I simply don’t believe that “will” is any more real that “having the mandate of Heaven” or similar romantic, unscientific notions. But instead I’ll ask another question to get at the same point: where are the military or political professionals who study “will?” Here is the course catalog from the Air Force’s Air War College. There’s courses on strategy, decision making, leadership, and a good number of related fields.
If you look through the course descriptions you can find that the courses discuss political/military issues involved in grand strategy, legal implications for war, logistics and intelligence, technology, economics, and many other things. I just can’t find anything that teaches will, or mass psychology, or things like that.
Do you think those classes deal with will? Which ones? If not at the Air War College, where do leaders study and learn how to improve a nation’s will? Where do we learn how much will other countries have?
The Mandate not real? It was real enough to create dynasties - and destroy others. Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, it affected the real lives of millions upon millions of people.
If you read some military classics, you’d find it was most definitely not forgotten as a subject.
You don’t think mass psychology, for one, gets studied? Oh, it may not be a particular aspect of military planning - but it’s definitely a consideration for politicians, spies, and pundits.
blinks
Did you actually read anything I wrote about? This isn’t CIVILIZATION V and you don’t research the Will to Power technology for a new infantry unit with 30% more hit points. This is fundmental aspect fo warfare between two peoples: the battle over perception of victory.
Are you freaking kidding me? It’s superstition, nothing more. There is no mandate of heaven. It does not exist. To the extent that countries built or lost their empires based on the mandate of heaven, they predicated their power on woo. Just because old doctors practiced medicine based on their analysis of a body’s humors doesn’t make humors real.
Yes, same with the mandate of heaven. I’m saying that if the concept of will had significant value, there would be military doctrine based on exploiting will, it would be studied extensively at war colleges, and so on. Will as a national strategic factor in the conduct of war doesn’t seem to be a very important topic in professional military education, which further leads me to the conclusion that it is superstitious nonsense.
I understand you, but you’re not getting me: if will is a real thing, people would seek to study and harness it to win wars, just like they do for strategy, technology, training, intelligence, logistics, finance, decision-making, and many other disciplines that improve a country’s military abilities. I can’t find anything that indicates that will is a strategic resource that can be manipulated to win wars. I’m strongly inclined to think that any subject that can’t be manipulated or examined for military advantage is not real. For crying out loud, the military spends a hell of a lot of money studying weather, oceanography, even the weather in space. Weather is real.
Show me specifically where armies seek to understand and harness the power of national will. Or, explain to me why they don’t. Because I believe what you’re talking about is as real as a soul, humors, the mandate of heaven, patterns of luck, the favor of the gods, and other similar non-relevant things.
With all due respect but teaching ‘the will’ to the military themselves would undermine ‘the will’. The men would learn how they are played.
But the ‘the will’ is taken very seriously by those higher up.
Why do you think the US has such a huge propaganda machine?
How come, you think, so many young men happily went to Afghanistan and Iraq?
They really believed they were going to fight ‘evil’, to ‘liberate’, ‘build democracy’ etc.
What else is believing such nonsense other than instilled will to fight.
Who is manipulating this “will” for all the poor, helpless soldiers, officers, and generals? The Man? Wizards? Lizard-men? Because your arguments for will have as much basis as does an argument for chi/qi. Or magic. Or divine intervention.
That doesn’t make any sense. You familiarize yourself with the tools of your enemy so you aren’t susceptible to it.
The very concept that you don’t forewarn or prepare for an attack (even on “will”) is ludicrous on its face.
The only plausible exceptions are one-offs to avoid tipping off the enemy (like Coventry). But not teaching your military about a focused, military-wide effort to reduce their effectiveness is beyond stupid. Forget the sniff test. It doesn’t pass the ‘cogent thought’ test.
They believed they were doing the right thing. They didn’t go “happily”. As the war dragged on, they continued to go, despite losing faith the populace would ever really support them.
If that’s the US version of building up “will to fight”, we’re damned poor at it.
How does this have any bearing on the sentence you’re quoting. I’m sorry but I can make heads nor tails of your answer.
They’re still going, right?
You may laugh at the North Koreans for their propaganda and indoctrination, which in our eyes looks clumsy and obvious, and think yourself superior.
But to non-Americans your propaganda seems obvious, yet you easily fall for your own government’s propaganda as easily as a Nork for his.
True, the US propaganda is far better than most, you’re really good at it, often you have others fooled too.
OK, “happily” is a bit over the top, but not too much, your whole nation was gung-ho to the max in march 2003. How do you think that was achieved?
Or do you think that just kind of happened..
A: You claimed teaching “the will” to the military would undermine the concept of “the will”.
B: That’s nonsensical - if there is a mystical “will” and you understand how to use it, you want the military to understand it and inure them to efforts by the enemy to sap “their will”.
C: Further, if you understand the effect of this “will”, you would want your military to sap “the will” of your enemy and train them in this effect.
What relevance does that have to do with “will”?
The US general population long ago lost “the will” or whatever to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If we’re still there, it’s not due to a “will to fight”, which is the claim you are making.
Oookay. You believe what you want, but then you’d be ignoring the evidence in front of your eyes.
Iraq? Yeah, that was a mistake, but I and several other posters on this board never bought the justifications for it and didn’t support the invasion in the first place. Further, we made many criticisms over the years about how it was prosecuted. How does that translate to “we fall for our government’s propaganda as easily as the Norks?” That doesn’t compute in the slightest.
Afghanistan? Remember the guys who actually did make a terrorist attack on the US? They actually were over there in Afghanistan. And their network was disrupted by going in there.
If there’s any single thing this message board shows, it’s that (1) it’s rare you can get even a majority of American to agree on anything in the first place and (2) no matter what the position is, somebody is willing to vociferously and publicly disagree with it.
Whole nation? Really? Got evidence for that.
It’s the 10 year anniversary of the invasion. We just had a “I told you so” thread about all the posters who didn’t support it.
ETA: While we’re over-generalizing, why do people around the world assume that any action taken by the US is somehow fully backed by every single American? It should be clear by now there are deep political and social agreements among different parts of the population.
Propaganda is just one element; many parts of national will are cultural and not easily changed; they developed for reasons over many generations and reflect the values of the people who adhere to that culture.
Likewise with the Mandate of Heaven: whether you believe in Chinese mythology or not, it was absolutely real, because the beliefs of millions of Chinese made it real. A cruel reigning Emperor which brutalized the people soon lost that Mandate. Signs would occur; the people would revolt, and everyone would know that the old authorities had lost their right to rule. It is not so different today: decades of seemingly immortal Communist rule in the SovUnion simply diossolved almost overnight. Outside of a relatively small cabal of hard-liners, the will to take, keep, and hold power was gone.
I see where the confusion lies.
First, not everything connected to the military has much to do with soldiers or generals. Technological development may almost completely bypass the official staff and so on - I could point to how troops in war zones use cellphones now, even without any higher ups realizing it until well after the fact. Will is principally built, targeted, and managed in the short run by politicians, cultural figures, and intelligence officials - not soldiers. That does not mean it’s irrelevant to combat; simply that it operates in a larger scale. But on that point, very high-ranking generals certainly do take into account the enemy’s will to fight by targeting perceived weak points, where an effective attack or strategem can demonstrated that continued resistance is pointless.
Here are a couyple of examples that may make it clearer. In Vietnam, the COmmunist forces used an extreme no-surrendur strategy of wearing down U.S. resistance politically and socially. They could not inflict reasonable defeats in the military sense, but by actively understanding and manipulating public opinion - but staying in the fight that much longer - they could in effect win their war. (Technically, the U.S. didn’t lose, either. We simply got fed up and left our ally to get torn to pieces, a subject which generally pisses me off.) The Virtnamese Communists accurately perceived that the U.S. was unhappy about the war and created the perception that victory was impossible; they didn’t have to win to win - they just had to not lose. It cost them grotesque casualties and nearly crippled their nation while wedding them to laughable economic ideas. But they got what they were after and the U.S. didn’t. They turned weaknesses into strengths; were willing to go to lengths we weren’t; won because they fought a war of raw endurance against an opponent who thought it was a contest of strength.
And here’s a flip side of that coin: in WW2 the U.S. bombed the bejeezus out of Japan. But despit massive damage and having virtually nothing left with which to fight, Japan didn’t surrender. Hence the use of atomic weaponry. But the way in which the weaponry was used was absolutely designed to break the will to resist, because military intelligence accurately understood that Japan was arming for a last-ditch last stand to the last, err, ditch. So we dropped one bomb - then carefully waited a brief period so as to have their failure to respond on record - then dropped another. The implication was that we could and would continue and it worked beautifully. A few hard-liners again wouldn’t break, but enough of the political leadership realized they had lost, there was no hope at all, and that was that. Time to negotiate for the best and go from there. Until that moment, the Japanese believed that maybe they could somehow stay in the fight, perhaps make it bloody enough for the U.S. to back off. They were a fighter on the ropes but not down: hence the one-two punch to demonstrate that they weren’t coming out of it. The military impact of the bombs was minimal, although both targets were legitimate even by the early-WW2 rules of war. The psychological impact was massive, resulting in the total surrender of Japan.
Second, the military most definitely uses and abuses PsyOps, and these are absolutely directed towards enemy Will in some form or another.
An interesting analysis of the factors which make insurgencies or counter-insurgencies successful (including a useful chart of various insurgencies and whether they were successful or not) is found in the recent book Invisible Armies by Max Boot (wonderful name for a military writer! ).
As for “will”, I suppose different people will have different notions as to what that means. I can think of at least three meanings off the top:
1- It can mean the “morale” of the individual combatants, in the sense of their eagerness to sacrifice their time and possibly lives in combat;
2- It can mean the popularity amoung the civilian population for participation in a particular conflict (obviously, something of more importance in a democratic society - but naturally also vital to an insurgency, whose fighters, to a great extent, rely on a friendly and supportive civilian population);
3- It can mean the perception that a combatant will simply not give up no matter what the odds. This has often been attributed to insurgents (as in, “time is on the side of the guerrilla”) - but, as is pointed out in the above-noted text, in most cases where insurgents are up against a regime that has no-where to go, in fact time is more often on the side of the counter-insurgents - a regime, or a population that supports said regime, cannot be “outlasted” if their backs are truly to the wall (unlike say a colonial overlord).
All three are pretty real, and it is a foolish military that ignores them (again, in the above-noted tome, various examples are given where combatants in insurgencies or counter-insurgencies ignore these factors to their misfortune).
Just to name two ways used to increase “the will”, or enhance combat morale to use a more modern term as smiling bandit said.
Give the men the idea that they are part of an elite, a crack unit.
How many American elite units can you name, just from the top of your head?
Quite a few I bet.
Just about any first line combat unit thinks it is elite or at least has a ‘proud
tradition’.
The tale of how accurate our bombs are nowadays. They can hit a target the size of a dollar with pin point accuracy, reducing ‘collateral damage’ (a propaganda term in itself) to be neglectable.
Those are just two small examples of what I meant. Do you think it would be wise to tell the soldiers themselves, during a course or whatever that “Hey we just tell you guys this nonsense so you will fight better.”?
That would undermine the whole thing, now wouldn’t it.
And sometimes they are both.
The term ‘Dead Enders’ was as much for the ears of the US soldiers in “Hang in there guys, we’re in the mopping up fase” as well as for the Iraqi resistance themselves instilling the idea that the outcome was inevitable, sapping their will to fight.
Well, at the time it sure seemed a lot more. In the thead referenced by Great Antibob there are people actually stating that they felt quite alone in their opinions. Besides being actually against the war was one thing but who could resist the “You must, at least, support the troops!”
).