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Notes -
Throughout history, militaries have been noted for their incredible waste and inefficiency.
In some rare cases, they can operate effectively. This is almost always during wartime – either because soldiers are willing to die for the cause or because they will be killed for disobedience. (Presumably, this gives the wartime military a significant advantage over Walmart).
Socialist countries have noticed this "one weird trick", which is why they try to frame the day-to-day business of government in terms of war.
In that militaries and socialist countries exercise absolute and capricious control of the lives of their subjects, they are quite similar, and often capable of amazing (though brief) feats of human achievement.
Well, I'd also note that for much of history, armies at wartime could be somewhat more self-funding that at present, thanks to looting and plundering — indeed, when it came to sacking cities, they could even be profitable endeavors.
Which gets to a counter-argument: the vast majority of modern military "soldiers" — those who aren't the "tip of the spear" actual fighting men — are performing roles that, up until sometime in the mid 19th century at the earliest, would be considered "camp followers." I note also how often generals and commanders would end up supplying their troops out of their own pockets — see George Washington petitioning the Continental Congress for reimbursement of various expenses of his troops. Add in things like buying and selling commissions.
So, is it really necessary that the camp followers of the past now be given the same uniform, the same honors, et cetera, as the actual warriors? (Or does this constitute a kind of "stolen valor" intended to lower the status of fighting men?) Could a modern army be run on an updated version of 18th Century "capitalist" logistics, rather than what we have now? Or is there something about the nature of modern combat that means military supply chains require this sort of "socialist" central planning to be effective?
Yes. I'll try to keep this short because I'm meeting a friend in fifteen minutes so I've got to go fast. But with the advent of heavy artillery, planes, tracked vehicles, trucks, etc. the fighting strength of armies have switched rather decisively from individual armed men to the equipment they operate. Because this heavy equipment requires so much fuel, ammunition, maintenance, etc. to operate, this means that the center of gravity (in the Clausewitzian sense) of any army of the 20th or 21st century is in its administrative "rear" and the logistical operations they run. An army separated from its source of supply ceases to become an effective fighting force and has to devote most of its time to somehow surviving, if it can.
This is why the operational and strategic doctrines that emerged during WWII and after focused on creating ways for the mobile forces of your army to target these rear elements. The Soviet or German plan for any great offensive was to figure out the best way to achieve this: usually by creating some kind of breakthrough on a narrow front that your tank/mobile infantry divisions can exploit to get hundreds of kilometres into the enemy rear and target the really important things: railway junctions, bridges, communication nodes, ammo depots, repair yards, slaughterhouses, granaries, oil dumps, etc.
WWII is the period I'm most familiar with but usually armies operated even then with much more rear personnel than those at the front. The Western Allies had a ratio generally of 1:6 frontline infantry/armour:rest of personnel. The Commonwealth forces generally had more artillerymen in a corps than infantry. Germans and Soviets ran more infantry-heavy because they were less mechanized (especially the Germans).
You don't read many memoirs from cooks or artillerymen or tank repairmen because they didn't see much combat, at least among the western Allies. In the more wider-open Eastern Front things were more fluid and the Germans were particularly enthusiastic about pressing administrative personnel and other rear-area types into infantry roles because of desperate manpower shortages. In any case in the mass encirclements that characterized the big offensives in the East it didn't matter what your job was, your life was on the line and everyone had to fight.
Really? Isn't the rule that infantrymen are always the most numerous? Even if you include AA and AT...
More numerous than any other individual combat arm? Generally, often yes. But in modern professional armies they don't tend to approach a majority. How things might actually play out for conscription-based armies which train most conscripts as light infantry remains to be seen though I suppose.
For the UK (and the Commonwealth countries which largely followed their military organization during WWII) there were two very important deciding factors which relegated infantry to a lesser size than the artillery. Most importantly was the scale of losses during WWI: politically, demographically, economically, whatever lens you looked through they were so high they could not be repeated. That inevitably meant a focus on greater firepower and heavy weapons rather than having infantry carry the burden.
Less importantly aside from the brief fracas in France the initial major land fighting the Brits did was in North Africa when the Germans were roughly on par with the in the air and the desert allowed for fluid maneuvers. This meant more losses to rear-area personnel and so they carried more men and got a higher proportion of trained replacements. This ended up adversely affecting British and Canadian forces in Europe because the decline of German air power and operational maneuver greatly reduced the risk to non-infantry combat arms. There was a persistent shortage of infantrymen throughout 1944 and 1945.
It is important to note that this wasn't some crazy or ineffective idea: artillery was in WWII, like all other modern wars, the main killing power on the battlefield. Certainly if you read German memoirs they are constantly bitter about the total dominance of Western Allied artillery (and air power). In Normandy there was frequent complaining about it being a "rich man's war" because of how badly the Germans were being outshot. Allied artillery command and control was also significantly more sophisticated and was a huge advantage.
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