During World War II, there were tons of issues with the healthiness of recruits. Sadly, this was because of all the malnutrition of children (and adults) that occurred during The Depression.
This did not really effect the war effort during WWII. Fascinatingly, the US never really fully mobilized for WWII, and could have easily fielded an output 2-3x higher than it did. One of the more famous pieces of data is a survey at the end of the war that asked “did you feel you had to make significant sacrifices in your life or living style during the war”. 7 out of 10 said no.
Also, the US has always ramped up INCREDIBLY quickly during war. It’s a testament to the latent, incredible power of democracies. For example, it was just 6 months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, where 4 Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and hundreds of planes / pilots destroyed.
To be completely fair about this, the US was ramping up a long time before Pearl Harbour. (This is part of the extended discussion around the attack itself, and whether it should have been anticipated.) British rearming began in 1936, the US was certainly planning in the late 30´s, actual spending began in 1939, and ramped up quickly after that during 1940.
In war, as in many other things, if you want to ride the wave, you have to be ready long before you see it coming.
Roosevelt definitely saw the war coming and prepared for it. He was hampered by the strong isolationist feelings at the time but he never gave in to them, and was careful never to run too far ahead of public opinion.
The Washington Naval Treaty [1] was also in effect until 1937, limiting new naval construction.
I think the original point is valid, subject to the vagaries of international agreements at the time.
The production dates and rate of the Essex class [2] were simply ridiculous... (said as someone whose grandfather worked at Newport News during the war)
Roosevelt saw the war coming because he wanted it to come and engineered a way for the US to be attacked (the US way of war has alway been to provoke and goad the other side into firing first [or outright faking such a provocation] then feigning moral outrage) and overcome these (sensible) sentiments. The "isolationist" strain of US diplomacy was part of its founding ethos and WW2 was responsible for obliterating it from the American identity. Was this really a good thing?
You’re right, we should have just let Germany, Japan, and maybe Stalinist Russia split up the rest of the world between themselves. That definitely would have worked out fine and they never would have bothered us. Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him...
Well look how communism in Asia played out over the ensuing 40 years. Would it have been such a horrible idea to let Japanese boys die fighting off communists? And why are 50+K American lives still at stake (and billions of dollars in defense spending) policing the region?
We should have worked with the Japanese and had them mostly run the place.
Would there have been a "Holocaust" without the war? What would the fate of the interned Japanese in the US have been should the mainland have come under massive bombardment and firebombing that left the populace barely able to eat?
Seeing as those same America First party people are the same strains of America trying to sell the upside of neo-nazism, I’m going to go with yes? Sorry I’m not edgy enough to sell myself on the upsides of racial and ethnic cleansing...
Seeing as how those America First people are the ones who came around to fighting and defeating the Nazis, that's quite a disgusting and loaded remark. It is a shibboleth among the alt-right that they are called Nazis by people like you for sharing beliefs of their grandfathers who fought Nazis and you are reinforcing that perception.
But not a disgusting remark like when you stated that 'the "genocide" of native Americans was a result of European diseases, not barbarism' in another thread and argued that evidence of deliberate killing was more like a "rounding error". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17023220 Not disgusting like that, right?
Not just ramping up, but we also had fairly direct involvement. 'Lend-Lease' occurred before Pearl Harbor providing large amounts of military and non military aid and had a significant impact.
Very much so. In Churchill's war diaries there's this great begging letter to Roosevelt early on in the war, which basically says, for God's sake, send rifles now. After Dunkirk, the UK didn't have enough to even arm the men they had in the army, never mind the home guard and reserves. Then there were the shipments to Russia. The Allies could never have won the war without the US's incredible production capacity.
It is good policy for any military to work out plans for various kinds of war. Even during extreme pacifism days in the 1930s, the US had contingency plans for wars with Germany (War Plan Black), Britain (War Plan Red, with different shades of red for different colonies), Japan (War Plan Orange).
In WWI, it took about a year for the US army to ramp up involvement in the war effort following its entry. There was thus a recognition by 1939 that the US needed to prepare for war or similarly spend a long time ramping up. In 1940, FDR authorized the draft, and throughout 1940 and 1941, the US strained the definition of neutrality to its breaking point, particularly as cash-and-carry (we'll only sell to people who can pay in gold) gave way to lend-lease (we'll only sell to countries named Great Britain or the Soviet Union, and we offer a 60-year payment plan).
It's pretty interesting actually - I'm reading The Last Lion (a biography of Winston Churchill), and it's amazing how much the British appeased Hitler and neglected to rearm, while the Nazis built out a serious army. But then to imagine the current mood for American intervention in Syria being championed by someone like Donald Rumsfeld and it's perhaps a little easier to understand, with Churchill being blamed for a lot of the loss of life in WW1.
But I think US ability to organize and deploy faster is something that has materialized after army reforms around 1900-1905, as I understand from Barbara Tuchman biography of General Stillwell. It appears US had major trouble in managing a speedy mobilization in the Spanish American war, and so it does not alwyas imply that democracies have inherent capability to mobilize troops faster.
> America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had:
* Nearly twice the population of Japan.
* Seventeen time's Japan's national income.
* Five times more steel production.
* Seven times more coal production.
* Eighty (80) times the automobile production.
> Furthermore, America had some hidden advantages that didn't show up directly in production figures....the per capita productivity of the American worker was the highest in the world. Furthermore, the United States was more than willing to utilize American women in the war effort....The net effect of all these factors meant that even in the depths of the Depression, American war-making potential was still around seven times larger than Japan's, and had the 'slack' been taken out in 1939, it was closer to nine or ten times as great!
> ...
> By 1944, most of the other powers in the war, though still producing furiously, were beginning to max out their economies (i.e. production was stabilizing or plateauing). This resulted from destruction of industrial bases and constriction of resource pools (in the case of Germany and Japan), or through sheer exhaustion of manpower (in the case of Great Britain and, to an extent, the USSR). By contrast, the United States suffered from none of these difficulties, and as a consequence its economy grew at an annual rate of 15% throughout the war years. As scary as it sounds, by the end of the war, the United States was really just beginning to get 'warmed up.' It is perhaps not surprising that in 1945, the U.S. accounted for over 50% of total global GNP.
> ...
> But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
The major change to the US economy was the mass movement of (mostly black) labor from inefficient small-scale farming to industrial manufacturing. Effectively, when the factories ran out of white males, they turned to black males, and later females of all colors, to provide the manpower to keep them going. The German war production was largely being staffed by French and Belgian workers in more or less slavery rather than adopting German women into the workforce.
Another key difference is that Germany rationed differently based on nationality. Germans in the home front were allotted about 2000 calories per day, even in 1945 when the country was falling apart. The factory workers in occupied territories were allotted only about 1300 calories per day, while their compatriots not in labor got closer to 1000 calories per day. The standard US civilian rations were perhaps 3000 calories per day. I think UK civilian rations were around 1800 calories per day. When the people making your war materiel are basically starving, it's no wonder they're less productive.
I'd say free markets. The US was able to handily fight two wars (against Japan and Germany) as well as massively supplying Britain and the Soviet Union.
What's the difference between France (lost quickly in WWII), Britain (barely evaded invasion), and the US (not invaded, economy grew during the war)? Is it democracy, free markets, or accessibility to German tanks and war planes that is the likely reason for the difference?
8 out of 10 Germans losses were inflicted by the Soviet Army; the USSR didn't rank high on democracy or market freedom but it had no choice but fight Germany, whereas the US could afford to choose the extent of engagement and let the USSR (and Britain) bleed while inflicting losses on Germany. This is not to say that the US policy wasn't sensible for the US, just that WWII is not a clear testament to the latent strengths of democracies and free markets at waging war.
And on the point of democracy specifically, in "The Gathering Storm," Churchill nearly pins the breakout of WWII on the inherent difficulty of conducting sensible foreign policy under democracy (both in the case of the badly designed peace treaties at the end of WWI, and in the case of subsequent appeasement of Nazi Germany.)
I wouldn't want to live where they don't have democracy or a reasonably free market, but neither is a reliable device to either prevent or win a world war.
> What's the difference between France (lost quickly in WWII), Britain (barely evaded invasion), and the US (not invaded, economy grew during the war)?
A lot of it is location, to be honest. Invading the U.S. was nowhere near as easy as invading France, Poland, etc. for Germany (or Japan, for that matter).
France and Great Britain never really recovered from the losses incurred during WW1. Not just financially, but in losing a generation of men in their prime.
Japan and Germany fought WWII because they wanted to secure oil supplies. The USSR and USA defeated them because they had massive amounts of oil at their disposal. The USA was #1 producer at the time. Also, both the Germans and Japanese failed to secure oil supplies and refineries quickly enough and quickly ran out of liquid fuels. WWII can almost be boiled down to this factor alone. If Germany and Japan had secured supplies of liquid fuels they would not have been defeated. Democracy and capitalism has nothing to do with it.
Even in the early stages of the Pacific war, the Japanese soldier was very lightly equipped and the Japanese could not replace their losses, while the US produced a tsunami of equipment and supplies starting from near zero at the outset.
You'll see the impact of free markets even in the Civil War. The Southern slave economy could not produce what was needed - they couldn't even produce shoes for their soldiers. The free Northern economy buried them with well equipped well fed soldiers. (The North and South were both democracies. Slave/free economies made the difference.)
I think it helped that the war wasn't fought on American soil (outside of Pearl Harbor, obviously). This means the homeland, industrial capacity and transport systems weren't disrupted.
The speedy US ramp up in WWII is illusory, because the US essentially entered the war effort in 1940, well before its official entry in 1941.
That said, logistics has long been one of the core competencies of the US. As far back as the American Revolution, Henry Knox transported captured cannon at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston--in the middle of winter--and then installed them in a single night on Dorchester Heights, which forced the British evacuation of Boston. The Americans also managed a major supply route to China via an aerial airlift (The Hump), which became the template for supplying Berlin via airlift--something most military planners thought completely impossible until the British and the Americans pulled it off.
A lot of the US production numbers peak in 1943/1944, though, and even then, only because we thoroughly outgunned the Axis and didn’t actually need to keep producing at that rate. The amount of ramp up that was politically possible in 1940 was nothing close to what the US was capable of.
Most of German manpower and materiel was bled out on the steppes of Russia - even the greatest threat to the ETO (Battle of the Bulge) was a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, compared to even the shadow of the Wehrmacht that was still fighting in Poland and Hungary at the same time.
> For example, it was just 6 months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, where 4 Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and hundreds of planes / pilots destroyed.
Part of that was that Pearl Harbour didn't really accomplish the strategic goals. The US didn't lose nearly enough to cripple them.
I am always surprised that people analogize moonshot as the ultimate national effort opposite WWII.
Despite noir movies like Double Indemnity, which don't seem to show any effects at all, reading about it, it always seems that WWII effected practically every part of life down to the steel penny.
Whereas despite the "let them eat moonshot" quip from Asimov I haven't heard of great initiatives which didn't take place because of the space race.
The Manhattan Project alone is close to the scale of the moonshot, and the US was devoting so many resources to the war that virtually no one even noticed that the Manhattan Project was happening. Not even Vice President Truman knew about it until after FDR’s death.
"Including design and production, at over $3 billion it was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion"
I've been in the Army for 16 years. Dumb recruits are their bread and butter. They wouldn't give them up for anything in the world. Independent thought,or intelligence in general, are strongly discouraged unless you're lucky enough to be in one of the tiny,incredibly rare units that does something interesting.
The military desperately needs smart people, but they only begrudgingly allow them to exist.
Good highschool performance involves a lot of organized instruction-following. It's not so much that the dropouts are "dumb" per se, just that they don't perform well on mental tasks that they have been instructed to complete. Most of the poor academic performers I have known were more lacking in self-control than they were in IQ points. That's the antithesis of what the ideal soldier is pictured to be, a human machine that performs every task exactly right. Someone like that would absolutely steamroll highschool.
There are people that can accomplish most tasks after having been shown once, but for some reason can't perform on texts or written assignments. Going back to the military, in the course for my technical role, we had a guy that barely passed each test,but was by far better than any of us on the practical exercises. If I had to hire one of us, I'd have picked him over the guy that got the highest grade for the course (which incidentally was me).
I did poorly in highschool and I agree it was largely due to self-control. Once I was doing something that I wanted (working), I suddenly became a good performwr. Once I grew up a bit, I became interested in getting an education and did pretty well in college.
> Independent thought,or intelligence in general, are strongly discouraged unless you're lucky enough to be in one of the tiny,incredibly rare units that does something interesting.
That's not been my experience in the Army (British, but I've worked with Americans).
The Army fights hard to get soldiers to think intelligently and independently. One of the foundation stones of how the Army does things is 'mission command' (which the US uses as well) that is designed to make sure junior soldiers can think and act independently and that commanders allow them to do this and do not over-control them.
One of the major lessons you learn as a leader in the Army is to decide what you want your soldiers to achieve, and then to give them the time and space to achieve that without excess control or direction.
In fact I think the Army is uniquely good in society at developing young people to able to make their own confident decisions. The biggest difference I see between soldiers and civilians is that soldiers are able to make a decision and come up with a plan in any kind of chaos, and it's the Army that develops that.
Junior soldiers who show potential are mentored and nurtured, up to the point of plucking them out of the ranks and commissioning them if they show enough potential, no matter what their background is.
The British might work differently, but the things you describe sound like US Army marketing materials and things that our officers say without intending to implement or follow up on. There are good commands that might be better than average, but most of the US Army is intentionally discouraged from taking initiative on anything more complex than mopping a floor.
Another thing to consider is that when any nation does a joint excercise with another country, their primary objective is to make a good impression.
I was in ROTC for a few years, which isn't the actual military, but it is the future officers. They worked pretty hard to make sure we understood that even asking clarifying questions when assigned a task was both insubordinate and showed that you were incompetent. I don't know ow where it started but at some point one group of upperclassman took the approach of teaching the lower classman that they are allowed to listen and not speak under all circumstances, and every class after that felt like it was their turn to be in charge when they became upperclassman
> They worked pretty hard to make sure we understood that even asking clarifying questions when assigned a task was both insubordinate and showed that you were incompetent.
That's so totally inconsistent with everything I know about Army doctrine, people in the Army, the approach to training western militaries use, and ROTC, that I'm honestly not sure to believe you (but I'm sure you're telling the truth if that's what you say).
When you deliver orders do your crib cards not include a massive highlighted block that says to at this point ask for questions from the subordinates and answer them?
Don't you do that thing of keeping taking questions and then when they run out turning it around and asking them questions back to check they really asked about everything they weren't sure about?
Doesn't the US Army have a sort of little ceremonial tick that after every point of instruction the instructor pauses to ask 'do you understand that?'
If there's one group that I know that does 'there's no such thing as a stupid question' it's the Army.
Military doctrine as stated and as practiced are routinely inconsistent in practice. In the same ROTC course we spent the entire year being taught about how militaries that jumped on new technologies and adapted to change faster was the way to win war, and then right after class all but two of the cadets thought that we should never even think about replacing fighter jets with drones that had better performance because of A: the drones might take control of themselves and it'll be like Terminator, B: we've never used drones before, and C: being a fighter pilot is cool and being a drone pilot isn't.
There are undoubtedly a number of good officers and enlisted in the military by sheer virtue of their numbers, and I'm sure many of them helped write those forward looking doctrines. The reality of the actual situation inside the military is a morass of waste, micro managing and simultaneously not giving enough instructions, and politics.
The meritocracy of the military only comes into play when it is facing a mortal enemy and the people who do their jobs poorly actually are removed by dieing. When you are in the situation that US military is where it outclasses every enemy it's fought for decades by orders of magnitude then incompetence is covered over just by the momentum of the entire system.
Just look at the waste and turmoil over uniforms[0] When I was in the program it became apparent through scuttlebutt from the officers that most changes or cancellations in programs like this lined up 1 for 1 with people being promoted into positions and deciding to clear out their predecessors work so they could make their own mark. A common complaint about new second lieutenants as well, was that they were always making up some new work or replacing working processes so that they could point towards their accomplishments when going for a promotion. Those are all the hallmarks of a system dominated by politics, not meritocracy and if it's happening at the junior level those same officers are going to bring those habits with them when they promoted to higher ranks
Edit: They had the "do you understand that" pauses when I was in the program as well. After indicating that I did not understand I was taken aside and told that if I planned on continuing in the military then I should not be voicing any doubt. It was not told to me as a threat but as career advice, and they coupled it with techniques for finding out what needs to be done when you don't have information such as nodding politely and saluting your commanding officer, immediately forgetting what they said, and then finding a seargant to ask what should really be done. My school's program may have been an outlier but I heard the same stories and advice from the upperclassmen, the teachers who we're actual officers and enlisted, and enlisted members we met on base visits
According to "The Pity of War" by Ferguson, the Germans in WW1 were able to kill British soldiers at about twice the rate as vice versa. They attributed this to the German Army giving goals as orders rather than methods, allowing the lower officers flexibility in achieving them. The British Army, on the other hand, would give orders as methods, with little flexibility.
Flexibility means needing intelligent soldiers, not cannon fodder.
Dumb but not imbecilic. Dumb is "I point you that way and tell you to walk forwards and you walk forwards." That's useful, predictable, reliable. If I point you that way and tell you to walk forwards and you maybe walk for a few seconds but then forget what you were doing and decide now's a good time to call your mom, then you're not useful.
> I've been in the Army for 16 years. Dumb recruits are their bread and butter. They wouldn't give them up for anything in the world.
The article seems to be talking about the almost dumbest of the dumb "Category IV" recruits, not the merely dumb. Prior to the Iraq war (when this article was written), the military more or less kept this category out:
> on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s [emphasis mine].
> Independent thought,or intelligence in general, are strongly discouraged unless you're lucky enough to be in one of the tiny,incredibly rare units that does something interesting.
Are you sure you're talking about intelligence? It sounds like your really talking more about independence of thought and obedience.
I could totally see the Army valuing obedience over intelligence, while still highly valuing intelligence (e.g. intelligence applied to fulfilling orders rather than questioning them).
Honestly entire Army is a about being dumb. (In my opinion). And it is costing ton of money for us any ways.
Instead having a good productive life where you engage with society (Pizza and Netflix) and create value it is stupid to join a cult like Army where you are brainwashed into being a robotic human being fighting wars for old infirm men in Washington. Are we really supposed to feel proud about young soldiers dying in Syria, Afganistan or Iraq ? What for ?
That is a metaphor for enjoying life on your own terms instead what US army might force you to do. That is living life like as slave. You sit when they say sit you shit when they say you can shit.
I have not even tried to join Army because I saw them as people doing pointless shit to quote you.
Wearing weird clothes, weird rituals, self importance and keeping the brain locked up at home is how I describe general the Army people. You cant smoke or drink until 21 but sure you can die lonely death in a middle eastern desert so some impotent old man in pentagon could show his dick is bigger than others.
I think your opinion is irrelevant. My opinion matters to me and my kids and my friends so I use it to influence their choice and make sure they do not join Army. You are welcome to send you kids to Army though I wish they are never sent in wars that we should not be fighting in first place.
(Tell me you will feel proud if your loved one is blown up in Iraq. Tell me you think it was a well spent life. )
The Military does add considerable value to society.
Look at the technological research born from war, almost our entire base of modern technology was born out of wartime creations or funded by the defense establishment.
Do I think we (as americans) should have less muscular foreign policy and a smaller military, yes - but the military remains important, its one of the many many elements that bonds a nation together as a whole - and adds a whole lot more value (in dollars and intangibles) than pizza and netflix.
Not to agree with the OP, but the military didn't develop that technology. Contractors did, and they could have been paid to do it any time.
It doesn't make any sense to talk about spin-off war technologies when we could just as easily be getting them from the space program or whatever else we'd want to do.
Innovation does not happen with a drive to make it happen.
The vast sums invested in Radar, Nuclear Technologies, Computing, etc - never would have happened without war - while you're correct, they could have been paid to do so at any time - no one would take such grave technological risks without something driving them to do it.
Then we better find other ways to motivate humans. War is getting more risky with each technological advancement. We have not even seen the really dangerous stuff yet.
We are lucky it requires a lot of expertise, equipment and raw materials to build a nuclear device. Chemical attacks, even though it can be done much more cheaply and by moderately educated people, has the disadvantage of any weapon in that it does not scale. If you only have half a ton of chemicals the danger only is local.
Now, the real danger is when home-grown biology-tech becomes more and more feasible. Because you can do this in a basement - and, most important, it scales! Because that stuff replicates itself! You only need to create the "starter pack".
In such an environment, the more people you piss off/make aggressive, the higher the chance of severe undesirable consequences. Right now it is still kept in check because of the amount of skills and organisation it requires, even the suicide attackers can't achieve all that much. But technology works without looking at who uses it, and biotech in particular, with its unique self-replication feature...
Well, I think that making the world more peaceful might become a necessity at some point. If you are right and we as a species require war to achieve great progress we might be walking on a knife's edge because of escalating uncontrollable consequences.
Or maybe I'm wrong and it won't be a big problem (on "mankind scale") and we can have our little and big wars so that people remain willing to spend money on R&D. I must say I agree that this seems to be the case - try to get the US to vote for a party that promises to spend a fuck ton of money on civilian R&D, or on the military. Civilian spending seems to be very hard to get accepted, but military spending works every time. So I blame the electorate, the politicians as far as I can see actually truly represent the wishes of the voters in this regard.
I dont think developing tech for government money would be possible without army.
Government has no reason to develop tech and many reasons to just use that money to grow beaurocracy. I belive most of US tech advantage is due to army being able to pay for development of whatever tech it wants. That tech eventually trickles down to civilians.
Not sure if that's the way it should be but that's the way it is in US.
I am not saying military is unimportant. Without assurance of safety of your country you can not progress. But that technology point is obsolete. Leaving those trillions of dollars in private hands is likely to lead to better outcomes for society than the Pentagon driven research.
As a counter point: most young men I knew growing up (in a upper middle class, left leaning neighborhood) really could have used some time in the military. I know I could have. I ended up getting a similar-ish experience working construction.
And that's just at the personal development level. As a society, I think some kind of compulsory service (not necessarily military, but military as an option) for young men and women would go a long way toward healing the political, class, and racial divisions in the US. It's hard to other a group of people when you've worked alongside and bonded with individuals of that group.
As a counter point, since throughout history we have had plenty of states with a big role for the military, I don't think your theory that it helps "heal" the nation passes the test. I'm not sure, I'm far from being a historian, maybe somebody could offer an educated opinion on the subject... but my point is we don't need to wait, there should be plenty of data to look at.
One data point would be Germany prior WWII the other soviet russia. In Germany, the lower levels of government being composed of ex-soldiers was factor that made Nazi takeover easier (based on Evans books for example).
As for eastern block, I knew personally people of older generation that have been through draft and their memories were not rosy. A lot of bullying, a lot of having to submit yourself to bullying or various abuse of higher ups or just stupidity. (Turned out smartest profesional soldiers were not the ones dealing with draftees). One was forced to steal, many learned to smoke and generally it was exercise on avoiding duty+doing minimum once you are after basic training. Army quality went up after all those people who really did not wanted to be there were not there.
Israel has draft too, but it is real war going on there so it might be different. Switzerland has military duty, but they do shorter stints at time.
I really don't think you can solve racial divisions by that. Racial divisons are a lot about ideologies and believes and legacy of history and so on.
Interesting, I've actually heard the opposite point made about Germany. My understanding is that the Allies considered Junkers, a Prussian and later German hereditary military class, to be one of the key factors that led a Germany to instigate WWII in Europe. This is why the Allies wanted Germany to institute a draft, to prevent one segment of the population from exerting near total control of the military.
At least that's my understanding of the establishment of the West German military.
Both can be true, but i dont know much about after ear. Prior WWII ex-soldiers had guaranteed employment in goverment. By law. So, trains, post, police, social help etc were all ex-soldiers. Meaning socialized in military, military values of obeisense, duty to do what is told, etc determining how all those institutions worked. They adjusted to Nazi rule remarkably well and without any fuss, including in beginning. Also, Germany had conscription since 1935 including labor for those not trusted to be in military.
Hitler wanted war two no matter who ruled army, germany foreign policts wanted imperium, so I think it would happen even if hereditary officers were someone else.
One more thing here. Nazi army and conscription and also school system were preparation for brutal war where Germans were meant to be the most brutal. Which essentially happened. One issue with military as mandatory training to teach you values and discipline and what not is that they might teach you wrong values including to be remarkably brutal.
> They would have paid their blood tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
Yup.
A couple of further thoughts:
1. To me, one of the more important aspects of my time in construction is that it showed me my physical and mental limits. And I think it is only by locating the extremes that we are able to accurately place the locations between the extremes.
2. I think most men need something that marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. Something which they can point to which was hard, which required toughness to overcome, and which was witnessed by others. IMO a right of passage like this is sorely lacking now that most people grow up without having done hard work on a farm.
My military experience was in the Air Force rather than the Army, but I'm pretty sure there's crossover in this case.
It sure appears to me like your opinion is informed by shallow media depictions rather than reality. You seem to be conflating three entirely different concepts: political will, basic training (aka boot camp), and military as a job.
The purpose of the military and how it is deployed is a political question, not a military one. So comments about feeling proud (or not) of young soldiers dying in conflict have nothing to do with the military per se - they are completely about politics. The military doesn't get to pick and choose which conflicts they engage in. Their responsibility is to be ready and capable of handling any conflict they might feasibly be involved in - and then executing when they are involved.
The military is a giant organization, a bureaucracy with many, many moving parts. To be able to operate with any degree of certainty and efficiency, they've developed systems where strategy and basic codes of conduct are determined and refined at high levels in the organization and are balanced tactical decision-making conducted further down in the organization. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act since it requires a level of autonomy and trust at fairly low-levels of the organization. To achieve this, we've developed two basic groups of personnel:
* The enlisted corps. These are "individual contributors" of the organization - the experts at performing particular tasks.
* The officer corps. These are the "leaders" of the organization - generally *not* as competent at task execution, but with a broader, higher-level responsibility (including unique legal responsibilities).
The training for the two groups is different - officers are generally required to have college degrees and have additional education in management, military doctrine, and history. Enlisted personnel are trained (initially) to be cogs in a giant machine - executing their specific assigned tasks completely and efficiently.
The popular media representation of the military often focuses on the enlisted basic training experience - where kids out of high school have to be taught how to be the cog in the machine - to execute orders without question, without being the 20% problem child that gums up the machine. It is intentionally a "break you down before building you up" experience. At that age and education level, you frankly don't have much to contribute to the organization except following orders.
But it doesn't stay that way. Once you get on the job, you start gaining experience and expertise. Even if you aren't an officer, your contributions start to extend beyond yourself (just as with senior engineers who don't move into management). You never reach the point where you can say "f*ck off - I'm not going to follow that order", but every junior officer is highly encouraged to seek the input of their more senior enlisted personnel. Still, at the end of the day, the commander is the commander. They have to keep the train rolling (and have certain unique legal responsibilities), and have to develop their own systems for motivation and problem solving. Operational context and commander personality have a lot to do with how folks are treated, but nobody other than the most junior enlisted folks are generally treated like "robots".
I am pretty sure there are amazing Defence people who are intelligent, competent and smart. My point is that these people could have been much better doing something else in the real world. For a developed country like USA soldiers is mostly a very low productivity job often a drain on tax payer. Can US Military reduce its manpower by 10% and still defend its country ? I believe the answer is Yes. How about 20% ? How about 50% ?
The point is that the guy who is wasting his life in Iraq as a Captain could have become and engineer and lead a team. Each time a bodybag returns from Iraq I see a life wasted.
I'm curious how this problem has aged a decade on, when these soldiers (and their fellows) should be taking up more and more leadership positions. Are they up to it? Does having to put up with incompetence lead good soldiers to bail on the military as a career?
As I understand it, with combination of the Great Recession and the winding down of Afghanistan/Iraq, recruiting became much easier and so the need for gimmicks like moral waivers or tweaking test scores disappeared and recruiters could afford to try to get a better grade of recruit. I imagine that something similar took place with all of the people who did get recruited beforehand: commanders took opportunities to get rid of those who hadn't excelled or simply not encourage them to re-enlist etc, and natural attrition takes care of it all.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThis did not really effect the war effort during WWII. Fascinatingly, the US never really fully mobilized for WWII, and could have easily fielded an output 2-3x higher than it did. One of the more famous pieces of data is a survey at the end of the war that asked “did you feel you had to make significant sacrifices in your life or living style during the war”. 7 out of 10 said no.
Also, the US has always ramped up INCREDIBLY quickly during war. It’s a testament to the latent, incredible power of democracies. For example, it was just 6 months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, where 4 Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and hundreds of planes / pilots destroyed.
In war, as in many other things, if you want to ride the wave, you have to be ready long before you see it coming.
I think the original point is valid, subject to the vagaries of international agreements at the time.
The production dates and rate of the Essex class [2] were simply ridiculous... (said as someone whose grandfather worked at Newport News during the war)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex-class_aircraft_carrier#S...
And why did we stop selling them steel? Because we didn't approve of them invading China and massacring people.
In wartime, when your neutral, you’re supposed to supply all sides or nobody. Who made US protector of the world?
Meanwhile George Bushes grand daddy was funding the Nazis with his bank.
We should have worked with the Japanese and had them mostly run the place.
> Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him
Agreed.
In WWI, it took about a year for the US army to ramp up involvement in the war effort following its entry. There was thus a recognition by 1939 that the US needed to prepare for war or similarly spend a long time ramping up. In 1940, FDR authorized the draft, and throughout 1940 and 1941, the US strained the definition of neutrality to its breaking point, particularly as cash-and-carry (we'll only sell to people who can pay in gold) gave way to lend-lease (we'll only sell to countries named Great Britain or the Soviet Union, and we offer a 60-year payment plan).
> America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had:
* Nearly twice the population of Japan.
* Seventeen time's Japan's national income.
* Five times more steel production.
* Seven times more coal production.
* Eighty (80) times the automobile production.
> Furthermore, America had some hidden advantages that didn't show up directly in production figures....the per capita productivity of the American worker was the highest in the world. Furthermore, the United States was more than willing to utilize American women in the war effort....The net effect of all these factors meant that even in the depths of the Depression, American war-making potential was still around seven times larger than Japan's, and had the 'slack' been taken out in 1939, it was closer to nine or ten times as great!
> ...
> By 1944, most of the other powers in the war, though still producing furiously, were beginning to max out their economies (i.e. production was stabilizing or plateauing). This resulted from destruction of industrial bases and constriction of resource pools (in the case of Germany and Japan), or through sheer exhaustion of manpower (in the case of Great Britain and, to an extent, the USSR). By contrast, the United States suffered from none of these difficulties, and as a consequence its economy grew at an annual rate of 15% throughout the war years. As scary as it sounds, by the end of the war, the United States was really just beginning to get 'warmed up.' It is perhaps not surprising that in 1945, the U.S. accounted for over 50% of total global GNP.
> ...
> But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
Another key difference is that Germany rationed differently based on nationality. Germans in the home front were allotted about 2000 calories per day, even in 1945 when the country was falling apart. The factory workers in occupied territories were allotted only about 1300 calories per day, while their compatriots not in labor got closer to 1000 calories per day. The standard US civilian rations were perhaps 3000 calories per day. I think UK civilian rations were around 1800 calories per day. When the people making your war materiel are basically starving, it's no wonder they're less productive.
I'd say free markets. The US was able to handily fight two wars (against Japan and Germany) as well as massively supplying Britain and the Soviet Union.
8 out of 10 Germans losses were inflicted by the Soviet Army; the USSR didn't rank high on democracy or market freedom but it had no choice but fight Germany, whereas the US could afford to choose the extent of engagement and let the USSR (and Britain) bleed while inflicting losses on Germany. This is not to say that the US policy wasn't sensible for the US, just that WWII is not a clear testament to the latent strengths of democracies and free markets at waging war.
And on the point of democracy specifically, in "The Gathering Storm," Churchill nearly pins the breakout of WWII on the inherent difficulty of conducting sensible foreign policy under democracy (both in the case of the badly designed peace treaties at the end of WWI, and in the case of subsequent appeasement of Nazi Germany.)
I wouldn't want to live where they don't have democracy or a reasonably free market, but neither is a reliable device to either prevent or win a world war.
A lot of it is location, to be honest. Invading the U.S. was nowhere near as easy as invading France, Poland, etc. for Germany (or Japan, for that matter).
I think the closest we got to invasion during the war (outside Pearl Harbor) were some isolated submarines off the coast of Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Fort_Stevens
GDP grew during the war due to federal debt. The standard of living markedly declined and didn't recover until much later.
You'll see the impact of free markets even in the Civil War. The Southern slave economy could not produce what was needed - they couldn't even produce shoes for their soldiers. The free Northern economy buried them with well equipped well fed soldiers. (The North and South were both democracies. Slave/free economies made the difference.)
I think it helped that the war wasn't fought on American soil (outside of Pearl Harbor, obviously). This means the homeland, industrial capacity and transport systems weren't disrupted.
That said, logistics has long been one of the core competencies of the US. As far back as the American Revolution, Henry Knox transported captured cannon at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston--in the middle of winter--and then installed them in a single night on Dorchester Heights, which forced the British evacuation of Boston. The Americans also managed a major supply route to China via an aerial airlift (The Hump), which became the template for supplying Berlin via airlift--something most military planners thought completely impossible until the British and the Americans pulled it off.
Part of that was that Pearl Harbour didn't really accomplish the strategic goals. The US didn't lose nearly enough to cripple them.
Despite noir movies like Double Indemnity, which don't seem to show any effects at all, reading about it, it always seems that WWII effected practically every part of life down to the steel penny.
Whereas despite the "let them eat moonshot" quip from Asimov I haven't heard of great initiatives which didn't take place because of the space race.
"Including design and production, at over $3 billion it was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion"
The military desperately needs smart people, but they only begrudgingly allow them to exist.
I did poorly in highschool and I agree it was largely due to self-control. Once I was doing something that I wanted (working), I suddenly became a good performwr. Once I grew up a bit, I became interested in getting an education and did pretty well in college.
That's not been my experience in the Army (British, but I've worked with Americans).
The Army fights hard to get soldiers to think intelligently and independently. One of the foundation stones of how the Army does things is 'mission command' (which the US uses as well) that is designed to make sure junior soldiers can think and act independently and that commanders allow them to do this and do not over-control them.
One of the major lessons you learn as a leader in the Army is to decide what you want your soldiers to achieve, and then to give them the time and space to achieve that without excess control or direction.
In fact I think the Army is uniquely good in society at developing young people to able to make their own confident decisions. The biggest difference I see between soldiers and civilians is that soldiers are able to make a decision and come up with a plan in any kind of chaos, and it's the Army that develops that.
Junior soldiers who show potential are mentored and nurtured, up to the point of plucking them out of the ranks and commissioning them if they show enough potential, no matter what their background is.
Another thing to consider is that when any nation does a joint excercise with another country, their primary objective is to make a good impression.
That's so totally inconsistent with everything I know about Army doctrine, people in the Army, the approach to training western militaries use, and ROTC, that I'm honestly not sure to believe you (but I'm sure you're telling the truth if that's what you say).
When you deliver orders do your crib cards not include a massive highlighted block that says to at this point ask for questions from the subordinates and answer them?
Don't you do that thing of keeping taking questions and then when they run out turning it around and asking them questions back to check they really asked about everything they weren't sure about?
Doesn't the US Army have a sort of little ceremonial tick that after every point of instruction the instructor pauses to ask 'do you understand that?'
If there's one group that I know that does 'there's no such thing as a stupid question' it's the Army.
There are undoubtedly a number of good officers and enlisted in the military by sheer virtue of their numbers, and I'm sure many of them helped write those forward looking doctrines. The reality of the actual situation inside the military is a morass of waste, micro managing and simultaneously not giving enough instructions, and politics.
The meritocracy of the military only comes into play when it is facing a mortal enemy and the people who do their jobs poorly actually are removed by dieing. When you are in the situation that US military is where it outclasses every enemy it's fought for decades by orders of magnitude then incompetence is covered over just by the momentum of the entire system.
Just look at the waste and turmoil over uniforms[0] When I was in the program it became apparent through scuttlebutt from the officers that most changes or cancellations in programs like this lined up 1 for 1 with people being promoted into positions and deciding to clear out their predecessors work so they could make their own mark. A common complaint about new second lieutenants as well, was that they were always making up some new work or replacing working processes so that they could point towards their accomplishments when going for a promotion. Those are all the hallmarks of a system dominated by politics, not meritocracy and if it's happening at the junior level those same officers are going to bring those habits with them when they promoted to higher ranks
Edit: They had the "do you understand that" pauses when I was in the program as well. After indicating that I did not understand I was taken aside and told that if I planned on continuing in the military then I should not be voicing any doubt. It was not told to me as a threat but as career advice, and they coupled it with techniques for finding out what needs to be done when you don't have information such as nodding politely and saluting your commanding officer, immediately forgetting what they said, and then finding a seargant to ask what should really be done. My school's program may have been an outlier but I heard the same stories and advice from the upperclassmen, the teachers who we're actual officers and enlisted, and enlisted members we met on base visits
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/politics/military-uniform-red...
Flexibility means needing intelligent soldiers, not cannon fodder.
The article seems to be talking about the almost dumbest of the dumb "Category IV" recruits, not the merely dumb. Prior to the Iraq war (when this article was written), the military more or less kept this category out:
> on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s [emphasis mine].
> Independent thought,or intelligence in general, are strongly discouraged unless you're lucky enough to be in one of the tiny,incredibly rare units that does something interesting.
Are you sure you're talking about intelligence? It sounds like your really talking more about independence of thought and obedience.
I could totally see the Army valuing obedience over intelligence, while still highly valuing intelligence (e.g. intelligence applied to fulfilling orders rather than questioning them).
Instead having a good productive life where you engage with society (Pizza and Netflix) and create value it is stupid to join a cult like Army where you are brainwashed into being a robotic human being fighting wars for old infirm men in Washington. Are we really supposed to feel proud about young soldiers dying in Syria, Afganistan or Iraq ? What for ?
> That is living life like as slave. You sit when they say sit you shit when they say you can shit.
Sounds like someone who flunked out of basic. That drill sergeant stuff ends after about 2 months in.
Wearing weird clothes, weird rituals, self importance and keeping the brain locked up at home is how I describe general the Army people. You cant smoke or drink until 21 but sure you can die lonely death in a middle eastern desert so some impotent old man in pentagon could show his dick is bigger than others.
Again that is my opinion.
So you have even less experience and are just pulling your strong opinions out of your ass. Got it.
(Tell me you will feel proud if your loved one is blown up in Iraq. Tell me you think it was a well spent life. )
You're giving a prime example of how binary thinking ruins the human mind.
Look at the technological research born from war, almost our entire base of modern technology was born out of wartime creations or funded by the defense establishment.
Do I think we (as americans) should have less muscular foreign policy and a smaller military, yes - but the military remains important, its one of the many many elements that bonds a nation together as a whole - and adds a whole lot more value (in dollars and intangibles) than pizza and netflix.
It doesn't make any sense to talk about spin-off war technologies when we could just as easily be getting them from the space program or whatever else we'd want to do.
The vast sums invested in Radar, Nuclear Technologies, Computing, etc - never would have happened without war - while you're correct, they could have been paid to do so at any time - no one would take such grave technological risks without something driving them to do it.
We are lucky it requires a lot of expertise, equipment and raw materials to build a nuclear device. Chemical attacks, even though it can be done much more cheaply and by moderately educated people, has the disadvantage of any weapon in that it does not scale. If you only have half a ton of chemicals the danger only is local.
Now, the real danger is when home-grown biology-tech becomes more and more feasible. Because you can do this in a basement - and, most important, it scales! Because that stuff replicates itself! You only need to create the "starter pack".
In such an environment, the more people you piss off/make aggressive, the higher the chance of severe undesirable consequences. Right now it is still kept in check because of the amount of skills and organisation it requires, even the suicide attackers can't achieve all that much. But technology works without looking at who uses it, and biotech in particular, with its unique self-replication feature...
Well, I think that making the world more peaceful might become a necessity at some point. If you are right and we as a species require war to achieve great progress we might be walking on a knife's edge because of escalating uncontrollable consequences.
Or maybe I'm wrong and it won't be a big problem (on "mankind scale") and we can have our little and big wars so that people remain willing to spend money on R&D. I must say I agree that this seems to be the case - try to get the US to vote for a party that promises to spend a fuck ton of money on civilian R&D, or on the military. Civilian spending seems to be very hard to get accepted, but military spending works every time. So I blame the electorate, the politicians as far as I can see actually truly represent the wishes of the voters in this regard.
Government has no reason to develop tech and many reasons to just use that money to grow beaurocracy. I belive most of US tech advantage is due to army being able to pay for development of whatever tech it wants. That tech eventually trickles down to civilians.
Not sure if that's the way it should be but that's the way it is in US.
And that's just at the personal development level. As a society, I think some kind of compulsory service (not necessarily military, but military as an option) for young men and women would go a long way toward healing the political, class, and racial divisions in the US. It's hard to other a group of people when you've worked alongside and bonded with individuals of that group.
As for eastern block, I knew personally people of older generation that have been through draft and their memories were not rosy. A lot of bullying, a lot of having to submit yourself to bullying or various abuse of higher ups or just stupidity. (Turned out smartest profesional soldiers were not the ones dealing with draftees). One was forced to steal, many learned to smoke and generally it was exercise on avoiding duty+doing minimum once you are after basic training. Army quality went up after all those people who really did not wanted to be there were not there.
Israel has draft too, but it is real war going on there so it might be different. Switzerland has military duty, but they do shorter stints at time.
I really don't think you can solve racial divisions by that. Racial divisons are a lot about ideologies and believes and legacy of history and so on.
At least that's my understanding of the establishment of the West German military.
Hitler wanted war two no matter who ruled army, germany foreign policts wanted imperium, so I think it would happen even if hereditary officers were someone else.
One more thing here. Nazi army and conscription and also school system were preparation for brutal war where Germans were meant to be the most brutal. Which essentially happened. One issue with military as mandatory training to teach you values and discipline and what not is that they might teach you wrong values including to be remarkably brutal.
> They would have paid their blood tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
Yup.
A couple of further thoughts:
1. To me, one of the more important aspects of my time in construction is that it showed me my physical and mental limits. And I think it is only by locating the extremes that we are able to accurately place the locations between the extremes.
2. I think most men need something that marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. Something which they can point to which was hard, which required toughness to overcome, and which was witnessed by others. IMO a right of passage like this is sorely lacking now that most people grow up without having done hard work on a farm.
So long as the US continues to engage int he current state of endless war, hell no.
Then again, a system that actually results in the 20 year old children of the old men in power dying, would certainly help.
It sure appears to me like your opinion is informed by shallow media depictions rather than reality. You seem to be conflating three entirely different concepts: political will, basic training (aka boot camp), and military as a job.
The purpose of the military and how it is deployed is a political question, not a military one. So comments about feeling proud (or not) of young soldiers dying in conflict have nothing to do with the military per se - they are completely about politics. The military doesn't get to pick and choose which conflicts they engage in. Their responsibility is to be ready and capable of handling any conflict they might feasibly be involved in - and then executing when they are involved.
The military is a giant organization, a bureaucracy with many, many moving parts. To be able to operate with any degree of certainty and efficiency, they've developed systems where strategy and basic codes of conduct are determined and refined at high levels in the organization and are balanced tactical decision-making conducted further down in the organization. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act since it requires a level of autonomy and trust at fairly low-levels of the organization. To achieve this, we've developed two basic groups of personnel:
The training for the two groups is different - officers are generally required to have college degrees and have additional education in management, military doctrine, and history. Enlisted personnel are trained (initially) to be cogs in a giant machine - executing their specific assigned tasks completely and efficiently.The popular media representation of the military often focuses on the enlisted basic training experience - where kids out of high school have to be taught how to be the cog in the machine - to execute orders without question, without being the 20% problem child that gums up the machine. It is intentionally a "break you down before building you up" experience. At that age and education level, you frankly don't have much to contribute to the organization except following orders.
But it doesn't stay that way. Once you get on the job, you start gaining experience and expertise. Even if you aren't an officer, your contributions start to extend beyond yourself (just as with senior engineers who don't move into management). You never reach the point where you can say "f*ck off - I'm not going to follow that order", but every junior officer is highly encouraged to seek the input of their more senior enlisted personnel. Still, at the end of the day, the commander is the commander. They have to keep the train rolling (and have certain unique legal responsibilities), and have to develop their own systems for motivation and problem solving. Operational context and commander personality have a lot to do with how folks are treated, but nobody other than the most junior enlisted folks are generally treated like "robots".
The point is that the guy who is wasting his life in Iraq as a Captain could have become and engineer and lead a team. Each time a bodybag returns from Iraq I see a life wasted.