• huf [he/him]
    hexbear
    28
    3 months ago

    before a war starts, everyone has dreams of the initial rush succeeding spectacularly, because it's an incredibly bloodless and quick way to finish a war.

    thing is, sane people also plan for the rush failing, and how to win after that.

    fascists will instead go "if the rush fails, we've got nothing. so the rush better not fail"

    nazi logisticians told the nazi army in ww2 that they basically if they didnt win before winter, they had no chance of winning. this was calculated before barbarossa. it was a very unpopular point of view at the time, so the report gut buried.

    the nazis then decided to go ahead anyway, with no contingency for the failure of the initial offensive.

    mere will is not enough to triumph, but these types will never face this fact.

    link
    fedilink
    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
      hexbear
      16
      3 months ago

      Exactly, the fact that the west didn't have any plan B is the most shocking thing about the whole war for me. Like yeah it's great if your initial strategy works and you get an easy win, but you gotta have some contingencies for when things go wrong. Seems like politics trumped logic both with the nazis and the west today.

      link
      fedilink
      • huf [he/him]
        hexbear
        19
        3 months ago

        and they're still not ramping up armament production. they've had what, 2 years to figure out that this is an attritional war and they're STILL stuck at "but surely you can turn dollar bills directly into artillery shells if you wish hard enough".

        for fuck's sake, it's artillery shells, not a mars mission. we know how to make them. we know how to crank them out. they can build amazon warehouses quickly, but somehow couldnt build 92 armament factories in all this time?!

        just all around brain geniuses, all of them.

        link
        fedilink
        • @Oppo@lemmygrad.ml
          hexbear
          16
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          we know how to make them

          That's the neat part: [I'm slowly getting convinced—they certainly are acting as if they can't—that] because of all the de-industrialization they don't.

          link
          fedilink
          • huf [he/him]
            hexbear
            17
            3 months ago

            eh, there are probably still a bunch of retired workers who could be tempted back for a nice salary. they could teach the newbies how to make this stuff.

            and you could get so many actually motivated smart workers if you dropped a plant and offered good salaries for manufacturing work. a lot of these production line improvements tend to come from motivated line workers trying to crank more out.

            i dont think the problems are really about know-how. yeah, it's a bottleneck, so you cant just ramp up production in 6 months, but again, they've had at least 2 years. more if you realize that they've been anticipating this war for like a decade.

            the main problem is that this political/economic system simply no longer has a button for you know, reality-based intervention by the state. so they're left with pushing the two remaining buttons they have. unfortunately, you cant outsource or austerity your way out of this problem.

            link
            fedilink