I had an interesting conversation with Martin van Creveld not long ago about fighter jets. Since he is one of the more famous military historians out there, he often gets asked for advice by senior defense personnel. Lots of European governments asked him if they should purchase F22s, etc. from the US. His advice, get UAVs, fighters don't matter any more (He just wrote the definitive book on the history of Air Power, btw).
Anyways, no one actually takes his advice. Acquisitions are always busy buying supplies for the last war. Surprise, surprise.
Britain had the naval and air power to hold off Germany. Russia had sprawling territory and the winter; Britain had the English Channel. Germany would have been better served to win the North Africa campaign; that might have actually left Germany with a defensible position. On the other hand, the entire purpose of the Nazi regime was to conquer eastern Europe, enslave or exterminate its population, and resettle Germa…
Point of order: In retrospect we can clearly see that the RAF was losing the Battle of Britain. It was within weeks of being completely eliminated by the Luftwaffe, when Hitler, quite unexpectedly for the British, switched to a strategic bombing campaign of major population and industrial centres. If the Luftwaffe had air supremacy, then naval supremacy and invasion would have followed. Invasion would have left very…
The United states was already giving overt aid to Britain at that point. Had RAF lost and the German invasion of Britain seemed realistic, the USAF would have joined in to prevent that. While it would have taken only weeks to end the RAF, Germany didn't have the shipping capacity to maintain an invasion, and it would have taken months to build.
Also, few considered air power to be actually capable of fighting battleships until the Battle of Taranto, where the effectiveness of air raids surprised almost everyone. The German planners almost certainly didn't believe in the capability of Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Navy.
He misses the point entirely with missile silos. The backbone of the modern nuclear arsenal is the ballistic missile submarine. Far more mobile and far harder a target than any railborn missile.
An intermediate solution are land mobile launch platforms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2UTTKh_Topol_M They have randomized patrol routes, so it is hard to track them, but they can launch thermonuclear MIRV warheads. Yeah subs are a lot better but also a lot more expensive...
Subs aren't necessarily such a hugely expensive option though. A single typhoon or ohio class missile boat can carry up to about 200 total warheads. That's on the order of the entire nuclear arsenal for the average nuclear power (e.g. France, China, Israel, India). Considering the massive survivability boost of a submarine, it's one of the better bets as a nuclear deterrent backbone, provided you have the technology to build such things.
If the other guys are attacking, you wait them out. Defence was cheaper than attack in those days. IF the other guys are also defending, you can think about, maybe, peace?
Yes, peace would be the best outcome, but there is probably some overarching reason for the war that won't be solved by two armies deciding not to fight for tactical reasons.
The Germans could have chosen to fight in the east, where they actually won historically, and decide to sit it out in the west.
except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority. Ever see Independence Day or, more recently, Battle LA? Didn't you find it stupid that once the command ship are destroyed, the enemy essentially dies? This is what aircraft carrie…
except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority There are 190-odd countries in the world. The US Navy's aircraft carriers are extremely effective against at least 185 of 'em. All the countries with a "remotely comparable force" a…
No aircraft carrier has actually been sunk since World War 2. So they can't be that vulnerable.
Isn't that like saying Hoover Dam has never been destroyed, so it can't be that vulnerable?
I'm not sure that there have been serious attempts to destroy either (is my point).
The Mongols could defeat regular armies because they had many thousands of men who lived their lives on horseback, with bow in hand. It's not that they were smarter, it's that they had the option.
It's also worth noting that the Mongols were turned back by the Germanic tribes because, well, compound bows simply don't work in damp European forests whereas francesca _do_. Phallanx tactics versus maneuver, as the author has it, is meaningless in the face of the inability or unwillingness to adapt to your environment.
Some guy called Napoleon seemed to know a little bit about maneuver warfare, and he was around before battleships. There was this little thing called the Battle of Austerlitz[1] that the author may be interested to read about.
Napoleon kind of knew what he was doing. His use of position and movement is actually mentioned in the Wikipeda's article on maneuver warfare [2].
But then when they don't attack you have 2 armies sitting and waiting until the supplies run out (assuming the other learns you are not going to attack back). So when one realizes they will run out first, or another army is coming to cut their lines, or the city behind them is starving, or one side drops mustard gas into the other trench ... what do you do?
If the other guys are attacking, you wait them out. Defence was cheaper than attack in those days. IF the other guys are also defending, you can think about, maybe, peace?
It wasn't a symmetric situation though. The Germans generally held better ground because they were the ones who initially made the decision to entrench after First Marne. They chose the best defensive positions they could find, and the French and British had to make do (although I guess there would have been exceptions, such as the Verdun sector). Politically, the French and British couldn't just sit there and do nothing or sue for peace because they had a vast enemy army encamped on their territory -- what terms do you think the Germans would have imposed when they were clearly at the advantage? Under these circumstances they had to launch offensives, and given that they were at war and in stalemate, this was not a mad decision although it seems like it to us a hundred years on. The real madness was in letting the war happen in the first place, and the real tragedy was the criminally slow pace at which the general staff on both sides learned the errors of their pre-war doctrines.