And they never did that for national security reasons, even though they were broke as a joke after the collapse.
Meanwhile the United States shipped everything overseas to their adversary China, without so much as a thought about it.
Now they want to continue their monologue about disarming the people, so the United States itself can one day be completely defenseless.

Classic hubris on the part of the USA

The United States military strategy is based around dominating the skies and the seas. In a direct, conventional confrontation between NATO and Russia, NATO would simply bomb their factories, railways and supply routes and their advantage in terms of artillery-based trench warfare would be moot.

The way this whole war has unfolded is predicated on Russia getting to fight it on its terms because Ukraine has neither a noteworthy airforce nor the cruise missiles to devastate Russia's arms production. Whenever Russia attempted anything but a static, positional war of attrition - for example in the early stages of this war when they tried complex open field maneuvers with combined arms - they failed miserably.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 9 2024 05:03pm

That is true, the naval and air superiority of the USA is generally enough power to trump long-term logistical concerns. The US Carrier Strike Group is the most powerful weapon, next to the nuclear bomb, that the world has ever seen.

However, and this is a big however, this can't be relied on absolutely. The Germans had the same idea behind their technological supremacy on the onset of the War, and while they initially succeeded very well, their superiority was still repelled and then the Axis lost primarily due to logistical reasons.

If the US Air Force is routed and if they could not maintain a Carrier Strike Group mooring off the coast, the game changes to logistics.

Russia does indeed dominate land warfare, they tightened up their military doctrine in WWII and Stalin was an artillery expert who dubbed it the God of war. They win in the gritty ground based war, I guess it is also worth noting that it is difficult for an air force to strike deep into Russia due to the sheer land mass & size, Germany had initial success there with the Luftwaffe but they too were routed, the failure to pass and control the Ural mountains was a logistical death blow

At a fundamental level, the Nazis lost the war because a country of 70m simply cannot win 1v4 against two nations of 40m (UK and France), a nation of 150m with gigantic land mass and natural resources (USSR) and another huge-ass country of 125m with a modern industry (US). Particularly not when its allies were utterly useless.

The only way the Nazis could potentially have won that war is to force France to its knees quickly, capture Poland, not waste many resources on attacking the UK or its colonies in Africa, instead striking quicker and with more troops toward the Soviet Union, succeed with the decapitation strike on its capital Moscow in 1941, then consolidate the rest of Russia from there, particularly the oil fields of the Caucasus, while forcing Stalin and the Soviet arms industry to relocate behind the Urals. If things go well, isolationist sentiment in the US keeps them from declaring war on Germany in that scenario. Then consolidate power and resources in continental Europe for quite some years before brute forcing the invasion of the UK.

This would have set up a different kind of Cold War between the US and a Nazi-led Europe. And even in this scenario, it's questionable if Europe under the rule of genocidal maniacs would have been able to outcompete the US in the long run.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 9 2024 05:27pm

Germany lost by way of economics. They lacked the material and human resources necessary to win. The United States won because it possessed the industrial and demographic might to bankroll one war while waging another. Conflicts can be mostly boiled down to the macro, the larger player wins.

False. No air superiority = no operation sea lion
This is not a disputable idea.

US industry and manpower no doubt played a huge role in the war, but played almost zero role in preventing great Britain's capitulation to the German military.
Which was sealed by 1941 after the Royal Air forces victory over the Lufttwaffe.

True.

IMO attacking the USSR was the crucial mistake that cost Hitler the war.

The bulk of German manpower and resources were wasted there (insane numbers) and it gave the British time to rebuild their army that had been completely crushed in France where they had left all of their equipment behind (Dunkirk).

Because in a rule based world it's only okay for certain countries to arm others

Nah, the USSR was rapidly industrializing during the 1930s and had the manpower and the natural resources to become a behemoth once their production and technology had caught up. See also the Cold War which followed WW2. So in this sense, the clock was ticking for Germany to stop the Soviets before they would become too strong. Striking too late in the year, and with insufficient forces and equipment, in 1941 is what did them in on the operational level. In the end, they were able get within 20km of the Kremlin, although that's deceptive because it were 20km of dense urban area with heavy fortifications still lying between them.

Stalingrad was the symbolic and moral turning point of the war, but on a macro level, the war was already lost by that point. The Allied victory over the Axis in WW2 was a done deal since December 1941, after the Soviets had prevailed in the Battle of Moscow and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had prompted the US to enter the war against the Axis. The remaining 3.5 years of war only determined where exactly the dust would settle.


/offtopic history hour

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 10 2024 09:46am