Great Power contentions

[Montmorency]

Shower thought: Technically the history of "drones" is much longer and more winding than this analogy allows... but the timespan between the public emergence of powered flight as a hobbyist technology (~1906) and its mass-industrial application in combat (1915/16) mirrors the trajectory of light/medium drones a century later.


Whoa

And let's not forget that the most valuable component of a multi-million pound tank is not the weapon, the armour, or the engine; it is its crew. Equipment production can be scaled up. Efficiencies can be found to produce things more quickly. But personnel cannot be trained more quickly than they are, and practical experience is priceless. Hence arguments of drawing down manpower because of new warfare doctrine misses the point.

I point anyone who's interested to a youtuber called Nicholas Moran, aka the Chieftain. Employed as a tank historian by World of Tanks, he is also highly prized by the US military, being one of the last active members to have seen action in both an Abrams and Bradley. IIRC he was fast-tracked for promotion to his current rank (Colonel) for precisely this reason: experience of old school warfare.

Mind the balance!

Strictly speaking,what we've seen in this war is that crews and infantry rapidly mustered and trained over a few weeks are good enough to take to field, sometimes to greater effect than ought be expected (e.g. Ukrainian NATO artillery). Yet lead time on new runs or new capacity to produce the weapons systems can drag on into years. (For example, the Russians reportedly have only a handful of machines for boring artillery cannons, and might not be able to produce new ones in the war's timeframe.) A crew or infantryman trained at high expense to exquisite standards in all individual, unit, technical, and combined arms dimensions are a great thing to possess, but they have to be supplemented by mass-mobilized recruits and reservists; remember the fate of the British Regular Army in 1914. These need to have access to equipment and vehicles in order to join the fight in anything but the most trivial application, whether the equipment is sourced from storage or a fresh production line (technically import is another source but not a reliable or deep one these days).

Thus the throughput of equipment to the point of use is the bottleneck in war planning and execution - it remains so after all these years. War evidently hasn't changed enough for quality to decide all.

Which isn't to imply an inevitable return to WW2 levels of output - it's just no longer feasible even in the context of another world war, despite the increase in gross population since then. But maybe it calls for a return to late Cold War military-industrial capacity and storage (such as when global arms manufacturing and surplus permitted Iran and Iraq to source hundreds of new tanks and planes off the market in short order.

The readiest rebuttal is to avoid going too far in the other direction from quality of men and materiel, or you end up in the same place as the Russian Armed Forces - loads of equipment, crappy manpower, and not enough of it. That's why I recommend a European emphasis on mid-grade surge capacity in both.

Of course, one might also point out that the crash course lead time for the stuff that really matters to specifically American expeditionary power - ships and planes - is so hopelessly protracted that all of the above doesn't even matter that much as long as we don't plan on becoming enmeshed in a years-long ground war in Asia...