Posted on 11/12/2018 12:25:56 AM PST by familyop
The standard view of World War I is that it is a testament to the futility of war. Yet maybe the better way to think of the war, which lasted from 1914 to 1918—including American participation in 1917-1918—is that if war comes, it’s better to win than to lose.
[...]
Most of the chronicling of that war is heavy on mournfulness, along with the implication that war solves nothing. Hence we see headlines such as “The Tragic Futility of World War I” and “The Most Unnecessary War in History.”
Still, we are left to wonder: If the war was “futile” and “unnecessary,” does that mean it would have made no difference if, for instance, the U.S. had not fought in it? Would it have been okay if the Kaiser’s Germany had won?
[...]
So what went wrong? How could the U.S., boasting the largest economy in the world, let itself be flummoxed on the basics of military production? Well, that’s a good question; perhaps the biggest single reason is that the Wilson administration chose to run war production with a series of boards and administrations; the result was a bureaucratic mess.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The writing flows, and it's not overly long. The content about our forerunners' shortcomings in developing tactics, equipment design and production are written in such a way as to also be very interesting and easily understandable for folks who are not technically inclined.
And cheers to all of my buddies (including women) out there for Veterans Day.
ping
Excellent. Thx for posting.
One century later, we have the might of the American military-industrial complex stymied by unlawful combatants with makeshift weapons. We have a legal system that affords rights to terrorists, and a world that has attacked discrimination with such a vengeance as to surrender the entirety of Western civilization to barbarians—all while claiming the moral high ground.
Instituting democracy by force has become not just accepted doctrine, but ex cathedra. Profiteering is endemic, and the current war-without-end continues apace. Tens of thousands die and our American military languishes in countries most couldn’t find without consulting Google Maps.
The quote I find most applicable:
“So we can see: Once you’re in a war of national survival, there’s no point in thinking about whether it’s “futile” or “unnecessary.” Instead, the point is to win it, with as few casualties as possible—or, more precisely, with as few casualties on your side as possible. As George Patton—by then Lt. General Patton—said in 1943, “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.” “
Where is America failing today? Recognizing a war of national survival. That war is occurring on multiple fronts while the nation perseverates about the colored underwear of a mentally-ill former Olympian. Spies, saboteurs, terrorists and armies without uniforms have none of the rights granted to honorable combatants. Once we were a country that understood such concepts; now we fight about the very existence of any concept.
Today, America wrangles with political sophistry as our children squander the birthright purchased by the blood of their fathers.
You end up in a war when you have lost deterrence. Hitler and Tojo were convinced America would do nothing because they had done nothing to help Britain or China. Americans were, therefore, weak and would capitulate easily.
We should be grateful that, for the most part, our enemies did not attack us while lead-from-behind Obama was president. We haven’t seemed weaker in a hundred years.
I recently saw a list of Iranian US Navy ship harassments during the Obama administration. There were many. Zero since Trump became president.
Nice video. Never saw that many trees when I was in the sandbox. LOL
Happy Veterans’ Day
Your post is more prescient about today’s insanity and what it means for our future than Pinkerton’s history lesson.
I learned that when I next invade France I will keep my right wing strong.
Good read, thx...
I disagree with the assessment of Tojo’s view of the US. The oil embargo forced Japan to go to war because they’d return to the 1700s without oil. Both Germany and Japan understood they were already at war with the US in the sense that we were arming their enemies while officially “neutral”. Japan could either die without a war, or hope to negotiate a peace through war; at no time did either Germany or Japan expect the US would surrender. Germany in particular understood it could fight limited, short-range wars (no aircraft carriers, few long-range bombers beyond experimental stages, etc.); the Blitz seemed miraculous until it was used against the USSR - a country with endless territory.
Never seen so many misintepretations in one thread, piling mistaken beliefs about World War One onto mistaken analysis of World War Two.
James Pinkerton accedes to the boringly conventional view that America failed to produce enough weapons of the “proper” varieties due to failures of privately owned industrial companies. America was not ready militarily because most Americans weren’t interested in being ready: the country was largely isolationist for decades prior to the start in 1914, and egotistically self-righteous to the point of megalomania, deeming their nation too “sensible” (read: too morally superior) to involve itself in nasty little foreign squabbles.
Non-involvement in World War One was never possible, given that America was a trading nation and had been since before it formally declared independence. The “shining city on a hill” was moralizing claptrap, propaganda to bolster hesitant souls, or cow those still unconvinced into silence.
The United States did do business in asymmetric fashion, once war engulfed Europe in 1914, but there wasn’t much choice. British naval supremacy shut down access to Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Turks, so the Allies became the only choice by default. The United States would have come out the loser from any direct challenge to the Royal Navy, so US shipping stayed out of Central Powers ports just like the merchant vessels of every other nation were forced to. It was theoretically possible that Americans could have been “high minded,” and refused to trade with the Allies, but a nation of ambitious and independent-minded businessmen would not have been able to resist the lure of making a bundle, while their competitors of more “moral” inclination stayed out of the game. So pretty much every enterprise rushed to harvest the goodies while they could.
Thus industrial producers were geared toward what the Allied nations actually in combat wanted to buy: not American weapons nor munitions (of which there were hardly any, anyway, in 1916). American industry was already famous around the world at the time for its flexibility, but not even the savviest manufacturing outfit could turn on a dime; neither could they make weapons that had not yet been designed. Armored vehicles like tanks were still highly experimental, and details were closely held by the French and the British. Blaming Henry Ford for lack of timely response is disingenuous; his firm was making the Model T, which was not at all similar to even the smallest Renault FT-17.
Aircraft were not mass-produced on an assembly line, they were still built by hand, by small crews of skilled craftsmen. There was no American aircraft industry to call on, for fleets of warplanes; no American aircraft designer had the faintest familiarity with the requirements that a military aeroplane must satisfy. Some aircraft produced in America did make it to the front, but they were nmade to a British design (the DeHavilland DH-4) that had been frozen early, for political reasons, and were approaching obsolescence when they arrived: to the extent anyone was capable of imagining just what aeroplanes were supposed to do, besides eyeball enemy troop movements. Every warring nation was feeling its way.
Not even the American arms industry was up to doing anything much different. No commercial US gunmaker made a single M1903 rifle during the war: Remington, Winchester, and other gunmakers spent a few days looking at the drawings and spec tables for M1903 rifles that had been made until then at government-owned arsenals and nowhere else, and declared that none of the specifications and tolerances were compatible with anything they had made, or were making for the French, Russians, and British. Colt’s was already maxed out, making M1911 pistols under military contract, plus many other models of various arms for various customers foreign and domestic; only by the greatest luck (and the brilliance of a couple engineers at Smith & Wesson) was it possible to modify existing revolver designs to handle the standard-issue auto pistol cartridge.
By the late 1930s, much had changed, but not everything.
Public confidence in American business leadership, and free enterprise as a feasible organizing concept, had been seriously degraded by the Great Depression. Many expected the nation to tip over the edge into dictatorship at any moment; many others openly hoped for it. Specialized “czars” answerable to President Franklin Roosevelt were accepted, and obtained results, as much because business were more inured to taking orders as for any other reason. Military planners still faced a monumental task, in organizing industry for wartime production, though industry leaders were inclined to take the view of the War and Navy Depts about the chances for war without any argument.
Deterrence = capability X willpower
Early in world War One, both capability and will to produce the weapons & supplies were lacking. The will changed but capability never caught up. The German high command openly disdained American willpower and the fighting spirit of individual American troops; not until they were severely mauled during the summer of 1918 did they begin to have doubts.
By the time World War Two rolled around, American industrial capabilities were greatly expanded, and moreover much capacity had been idled by the endless depression, so it was more readily switched into war materiel production.
But willpower still lagged. By the 1930s, Americans were if anything more isolationist than in 1914-17, having already made big sacrifices to no purpose (or so we saw it; the other Allies, already embattled, looked down their noses at American self-involvement and self-righteousness, dismissing earlier American efforts as overlate, American sacrifices as trivial, American notions as quixotic, and American understanding of worldwide geopolitics as puerile and superficial).
The Axis powers gambled that Americans were too corrupt, lazy, and wimpish to respond to intimidation; for years, they were right (about the other Allies as well). They got away with it. The time to get the Nazis to back down was when they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, not when Allied interests fell into in grave peril three years later; Adolf Hitler and his cronies were amazed (and relieved) that a (still very weak) Germany got away with that early caper. But the American public, still mulishly gazing at its own belly button, would never have accepted intervention. Neither would the public in France nor Britain.
To believe that the United States hoodwinked an unwary Imperial Japan into full-scale war is to flirt with megalomania. One can accuse Americans of 1940 of poor foresight, but one cannot accuse them of possessing either the discipline or the attention span to execute a strategy so subtle, so exacting, so time-sensitive, so Machiavellian in intent. But we Americans - self-designated conservatives in particular - are convinced of our importance, and the obviousness of our good intentions. But we cannot be both at the same time. We’ve a fantasy that we can live life in a way so inoffensive that we will anger no one, that we are (or can be) so morally pure that the brilliance of our righteous existence will so dazzle everybody, that they will genuflect and follow us as we lead by example.
That simply cannot happen the real world. Even the tiniest sovereign state had enough pride that it cannot accept our purity and goodwill (noisily proclaimed by our self-promoting hometown cheerleaders) at face value. We are laughed at.
To live is to have enemies; no reality of grater profundity exists. And some of those enemies will always be implacable, no matter how nice, how friendly, we act. Only strength and stalwartness, the refusal to back down, will cause enemies to back down themselves. Not a pleasant truth, but an undeniable one.
Yep, if only being in the field were as easy and fast as watching a video... My Guard unit missed being mobilized to the first Gulf War by a hair.
Most days will be happier veterans’ days, if we try to get in shape, focus on the real life around us in the present and do the best that we can do with it.
3 Doors Down - Citizen Soldier - DVD Extended Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvOLkN4-cJ8
Wish I’d seen this one before. *Not* another cheesy recruiting video. It’s about help for veterans who need help.
Five Finger Death Punch - Wrong Side Of Heaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_l4Ab5FRwM
For many, it’s not easy to harmonize their training and posture with civilian society, jobs, etc., much less long tours in other worlds.
For later.
L
Thanks for posting.
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