That motivated me to start a discussion that I've long kicked around: The general relationship between material intensity and combat power.
I consider this relationship to be non-linear.
Consider a very rough graph of combat power (per soldier) vs. material intensity:
EDIT- This is TACTICAL combat power - basically the ability to inflict bloody casualties. Operational/strategic considerations are different. I've argued elsewhere, for example, that German mobile divisions had operational effects out of all proportion to their manpower/material resources. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=243557That's a different topic, however.
Point A: 0 equipment expenditure; soldiers fight with rocks or whatever else they can pick up (think Japanese Home Army plans for civilians to wield bamboo sticks against invaders). Soldiers so equipped have very little combat power.
Point B: This is basically an all-rifle army. Soldiers are many times more powerful than rock-throwers and bamboo-wielders but can gain a lot of combat power, relatively cheaply, my moving up to Point C. Chiang Kai-Shek's army is closest to what I'm imagining. A very poor country can field such an army but will see disproportionate casualties.
Point C: This is a fairly modern infantry army with artillery, anti-tank, reconaissance, and combat engineer support and adequate logistics. This would approximately represent foot-mobile WW2 infantry divisions such as Red Army's. The cost per soldier is something that a poorer industrial country (Soviet Union or Japan) can manage quite well but that a mostly non-industrial country like China or (to a lesser extent) Romania cannot.
Point D: This represents a decent combined arms, mechanized unit such as Soviet tank corps, German panzer divisions, and standard American/British late-war ID's. For ~twice the equipment intensity vs. a modern foot-mobile infantry division, combat power per soldier increases by ~1/3. It is less efficient on the use of war goods but more efficient on the use of manpower.
Point E: This is something like the U.S. army's armored divisions plus their non-divisional mobile assets (e.g. M1 "Long Tom" battalions): lavish provision of mechanization, firepower, and logistical support. On this graph, however, material intensity has doubled but combat power has expanded by only ~20%. Efficiency of war goods usage, by combat power, has decreased but efficiency of personnel usage has increased. This is clearly the strategy for a very wealthy country such as the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, UK. Despite the increase in personnel efficiency within combat units, however, Point E may imply an army-wide efficiency decline owing to more service troops in the logistical train. American divisional slices were quite large and were acknowledged by the U.S. Army to be suboptimal.
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If the broad outlines of my concept are correct, it has a few strategic implications:
It's really bad news for very poor countries, as an even slightly-richer enemy can deploy greater combat power out of all proportion to the relative economic picture. That tracks with, e.g., Japan vs. China. Japan wasn't wealthy but its economic edge over China moved it from "B" to "C" on the portion of the graph where material intensity shows greater-than-linear returns to combat power. Similarly, Romania had trouble supporting its riflemen with adequate artillery and anti-tank forces; it arguably experienced lower combat power against the SU to a greater extent than linear extrapolation of relative GDP's.
It's good news for middle-income countries facing advanced economies. On the Eastern Front, it implies that higher German wealth levels would provide less-than-linear returns to greater material intensity. The SU could reasonably hope, therefore, that the effect of manpower quantity would dominate the effect of higher German material intensity [as an aside, it isn't clear that Germany maintained significantly higher material intensity for long against Russia, as most of Germany's war production flew/sailed against the Wallies]. Likewise Germany could view a land battle against the slightly-richer Western Powers without as much trepidation as the economic fundamentals would dictate. Given the less-than-linear returns to material intensity between points C and E, Germany might expect that a slight advantage in combat effectiveness would obviate Western wealth effects.
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This is a preliminary discussion to illustrate the concept of non-linear returns to equipment intensity, not to quantify anything beyond the rough shape of my proposed curve.
There are of course many other points of significance besides A-E. There are of course considerations beyond material intensity measured simply by expenditure per soldier, such as the quality of war material and whether a country can make an item in sufficient quantity, regardless of whether it would be willing to spend money on it (Red Army needed more and better radios and expenditure on them would have been worth it, for example, but SU just didn't have the domestic electronics industry).
Does anyone know of research that has attempted to quantify the marginal impact on combat power of equipment intensity as this graph proposes?
In further posts over the coming [months, years] I'll add some thoughts, figures, analysis to quantify my proposed model - hopefully.
