I'm a big fan of Askey but his criticism of Overmans is really poor:stg44 wrote:Overman's study has been found to be flawed:
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viewtopic.php?f=76&t=140220
For this one you'll have to search for Overman's name and you'll find the relevant sections (starts bottom of page 3):
http://www.operationbarbarossa.net/wp-c ... tation.pdf
A sample size of 10,000 is easily sufficient to create a 99% confidence level with 2% m.o.e. https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm Indeed very little public polling involves such large sample sizes. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/po ... /national/ Askey is smart enough to know better; this analysis is redolent of bad faith.A sample (less than 10,000)
was taken of the German military personnel records, and their fate and where this occurred were
recorded. What was not recorded was cause of death (eg, died in combat or from pneumonia in a rear
area) or if the death was associated with a particular Army, operation, or within a reasonably narrow
time frame. It should be noted that there are over 18,000,000 individual records involved (the
approximate number of total personnel mobilised for all paramilitary type organizations in the entire
Reich in the entire war). Therefore the sample is statistically very small (around 0.05%) which is a
huge problem in itself. Overmans maintains that there was a ‘99% confidence level’ that the results
were accurate based on the sample size, which is statistically (i.e. mathematically) completely
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I'd note that whether Overmans or OKW figures are correct is largely immaterial to our larger debates. Even if German losses were 30% higher, German human factors enabled one German to incapacitate Soviets at a rate multiple times that of a Soviet soldier. What is your argument that this disparity is traceable to German material superiority, per man, even were I to concede such superiority? Even if we assume a linear relationship between equipment/man and killing power, is there any argument that the Ostheer had multiple times the equipment per man?
And even if the Red Army incapacitated "only 3.7mil" Germans by 1945, that's still war winning under my strategic conception because those losses were critical to the push into Germany.
Thought experiment: Say the German losses in the East were 3mil by June '44 and give those soldiers back to the Heer with their lost equipment. That's significantly larger than was Ostheer in OTL June '44. Put half of those men in the West and D-Day is a no-go. Put the other half in the East and the Red Army is stopped.
So yes, the primary tactical/operational goal of land warfare is to destroy the enemy army. But that tactical/operational goal serves the strategic goal of taking enemy territory - the only means of winning wars pre-A-bomb.