Since the Great Recession, the Fed has transformed itself into an entity more and more responsible for asset prices. This was the stated goal since 2009 as the Fed adopted a new philosophy called the "Wealth Effect." The thinking behind it was simple: growth in asset prices would translate to an increase in consumer spending and hence demand itself. It was a 'trickle down' economic philosophy an increasingly financialized economy.
This backdrop has defined our post-2009 era which stirred certain pathologies that were reflected in the greater culture and politics. It was the time when 'finance became a culture' and actual-productivity plummeted across most developed economies, especially the United States. But somehow in spite of the accumulating dysfunction across most key areas, everything kept trudging along, partly thanks to investors being satiated with record returns.
While the near-zero interest rate regime may now be ending, it is worth considering how much of the water we were all swimming in excused poor state capacity, distorted economic fundamentals, and how it even kept a lid on the dysfunction potentially blowing up in our faces. Now that we have to reckon with these realities, it may be wise to ask how many worldviews were simply products of the the cheap money regime - which is now, in a shock to many, coming to a close. Whether or not it will easily be let go, however, is another matter.
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By late '42 they had mostly figured the biggest production problems out, but legacy issues (like massively over-heating the armor steel, which caused significant interior spalling on impact and a lot of needless crew-deaths, and the absolutely nightmarish gearbox which required significant force to even get into 3rd gear, and would frequently break gear levers on attempts to get into 4th) remained for years.
I mean, maybe? But given that a lot of the problems that went into T-34 production actually caused significant combat-losses before even making contact with the enemy (breakdowns, fuel problems, lack of spare parts, defective ammunition, etc.), and also significantly reduced the performance of the tank in combat (i.e. made it much more likely that their tanks would be destroyed by "inferior" opposition), I doubt it.
Focus on logistics, and adequately supporting those numbers of well-functioning vehicles and units they had. That "Enemy at the Gates" meme that the Soviets didn't have enough guns to arm all their soldiers is false - they had oodles of materiel (admittedly, much of it outdated), but their logistics were so shit, and they were so myopically-focused on things which obviously looked good on paper (i.e. the number of soldiers, tanks, etc. in front-line units) that they completely failed to ensure that their soldiers and weapons at the front were able to actually fight. They were also getting thousands upon thousands of lend-lease tanks from the western allies, including many, many, many Shermans (called "Emcha" by Russian crews). So it's not like they were hurting for medium armor; they were just shit at designing and making it.
Every technician man-hour spent repairing shitty broken T-34 gearboxes could, and arguably should, have been spent fixing supply jeeps and rail systems. Every railway carriage ton dedicated to carrying badly-equipped T-34s to the front lines could have been used instead for food, water, ammunition, or other badly-needed supplies for existing front-line units. Etc., Etc.
Interestingly, a lot of big gas companies are staffed by the same PMC urbanites staffing every other ESG enterprise out there. And those folks (plus all the good ESG folks in major lending institution) took one look at projected fossil fuel usage charts which were super-optimistic about the "green transition", noticed that demand would allegedly be tanking in the mid 2020s, and stopped funding new infrastructure/exploration efforts, which wouldn't have enough time to make back their investment until fossil fuels were (allegedly) obsolete. Amazing, I know. But seriously, investment dropped by like 30%.
The Pentagon, which is the lion's share of that NATO spend, has never passed an audit, and after significant reform (and finding new ways to sweep things under the rug) still can only account for 39% of its assets. Shit's broken, yo.
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