Hi Dayuhan,

Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Certainly it's possible to hypothesize a development model that does not rely on concrete roads, and with sufficient central direction (sufficient meaning a whole lot) one might even implement such a model. While the desire for military mobility in general (not only for tanks) has in many cases driven road construction programs, I'm not convinced that military considerations in general or tanks specifically have been the principal reason for the emergence of road/motor-based development paradigms.
Actually, I don't have to hypothesize it; it's how Britain, France, the US and most of Western Europe industrialized. The concrete road phenomenon is a result of post WW I development activities both internally and externally. If you wanted more modern examples, Singapore and Brunei offer different ones (variants on the old Port of Trade model using waterborne transport).

Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
To assess the social consequences of the decision to acquire tanks and the (frequently absent) decision to use them efficiently you'd hve to separate those consequences from those of a whole raft of other parallel factors, and I suspect that at the end of the day the causative role of the decision to acquire tanks would be fairly minor.
Could be, although I'm not sure how much you could disaggregate them causally given that people often make decisions with minimal logic and multiple justifications (this, BTW, is why I tend to preffer the concept of "mutual arising" to that of "causality").

Cheers,

Marc