Fire with Fire

[Fuchs]

Wilf, JMA; you both have very odd world views.

Example: A large army is a cost, not an achievement in my opinion.


To me, countries consist of many individuals who have needs and preferences. Security (this includes freedom/liberty), health and material consumption are indicators of a good life.

Being part of a powerful nation or a well-armed nation has yet to be proved to be a positive factor in average quality of life. In fact, both can very well be considered to be detrimental to material consumption and in some examples even to security and health.


Besides, Wilf; the Germans and Japanese did not benefit from rebuilding from scratch at all. That's a myth. It took hard work and privations to catch up and then both simply continued their superior economic development of the earlier decades. Post-1960 Germany was as clearly in a superior industrial development than the UK as it was in 1880-1914.

[William F. Owen]

Example: A large army is a cost, not an achievement in my opinion

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It's a cost if you cannot use it. Large armies are instruments of strategy. If you wish to the strategically relevant, you need a large army - and Navy.

Being part of a powerful nation or a well-armed nation has yet to be proved to be a positive factor in average quality of life. In fact, both can very well be considered to be detrimental to material consumption and in some examples even to security and health.

All of which is why I defer to Strategic history and not social history, but Strategic history does encompass cost. Having a big/capable Army and being able to fund it, is a requirement of being strategically relevant.

Besides, Wilf; the Germans and Japanese did not benefit from rebuilding from scratch at all. That's a myth.

It's not a myth. Yes both Germany and Japan were industrially capable nations prior to 1939, but there was massive benefits to zeroing the economy and having the vast majority of the infrastructure rebuilt. Yes, it did take a lot of hard work and privation, but at the material level it also had substantial benefits. Just look at the differences in power plants between German and the UK in the 1960's.
Worth the cost in the human life? Not in my opinion. As I said, it wasn't part of a plan.

[Fuchs]

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It's a cost if you cannot use it. Large armies are instruments of strategy. If you wish to the strategically relevant, you need a large army - and Navy.

It's not a myth. Yes both Germany and Japan were industrially capable nations prior to 1939, but there was massive benefits to zeroing the economy and having the vast majority of the infrastructure rebuilt. Yes, it did take a lot of hard work and privation, but at the material level it also had substantial benefits. Just look at the differences in power plants between German and the UK in the 1960's.

a) You misunderstood "cost" and "net cost". A use of a tool cannot delete its costs.

b) Actually, power plant infrastructure did not take much damage in WW2 - the USAAF Strategic Bombing Survey Europe clearly understood this mistake in '45. We had a powerplant of 1912 running in Eastern Germany in 1990...it hadn't been modernised once.

Any modernity advantage of the German economy and infrastructure in the 1960's was the result of low consumption (and correspondingly high investment), not of the war itself.
Look at Spain, Eastern Europe, France - those countries took much damage and did not modernise as much as Germany, Italy (even higher growth rates than germany) and Japan did.
The Americans used the still extraordinary situation of 1945 to follow a low consumption path in the late 40's in order to reduce the extremely high New Deal+WW2 debt.

The British never seemed to recognise the necessity of such drastic saving for macroeconomic problem solving - neither when they lost industrial leadership around 1900 nor to pay off WW1 debt, nor to fend off the 29-33 crisis nor to pay back WW2 debt. And I assume they won't do it now even though the present economic and fiscal imbalances call for it.