In Mises book Interventionism, he says that the French could of prevented Germany from taking over the country in WWII by having a privatized military indistrial complex (they had previously nationalized it to eliminate war profiteering). But wouldn't Germany's MID of been socialist too? How did they make themselves such a successful socailaist war machine?
It's been a while since I've read up on this stuff. The French had a military which could have quite easily beaten the Wehrmacht. The major difference was that the Germans had a far superior air force, and they concentrated their tanks into divisions more so than the French, instead of distributing them with their infantry divisions. Also they had a brilliant general, Heinz Guderian. He came up with the plan for a tank drive through the Ardennes and carried it to fruition which resulted in the encirclement of the French and British forces. Part of it was luck. Part of it was the slow incompetent Allied command. Part of it was the fact that Hitler was a reckless gambler. I haven't read Interventionism, but I don't know if having a larger, better equiped army would have made much difference for the French. Their main problem was their outmoded planning and command structure.
I am a bit of an history buff, so let me clear a few things. It was not about economics.
The French Army of the '30s was considered to be the world's finest by analysts all around the world. Missions from all over the world (Paraguay, Japan etc) were sent to the Ecole de Guerre to pick up the secrets of the French masters. When the French resistance collapsed so rapidly and spectaculary in 1940 nobody, except perhaps the Wehrmacht higher ranks, could explain how such a perfect fighting machine could crumble to pieces so rapidly. The causes are really many. It was not a simple matter of equipment: the Germans overrun the best part of European Russia with tanks which were clearly inferior to the Red Army's. It must be understood that the Germans knew that they would collide with France again the very moment that the Versailles Treaty was ratified. Back when Hitler was just another visionary speacher preaching his gospel of hatred in Munich's beer halls, what was left of the Wehrmacht was already reorganizing and planning for vengeance. Read General Heinz Guderian's pre-war (1937) masterpiece, Achtung Panzer! , and you'll understand a lot of things. The fact that the book was a bestseller speaks volume not only about the General's writing skills (which were as impressive as his fighting prowess) but also about the average German's mentality. It's ironic that Guderian spends much time in all of his books praising the British Army for developing the basis of the mechanized warfare that allowed both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS to become such feared fighting machines.
Superior organization and training (for example before the war started each man in the regular army recieved a training for a rank considerably superior to his nominal one) played a decisive role. But the French tactical shortcomings (they had basically planned for a rehearsal of the 1914-1918 trench warfare and still considered both armoured corps and the air force as simple auxiliaries to infantry and artillery)) and, what's more important, their spectacular collapse in morale played a very important part. German WWI veterans were shocked to find out that the "metropolitan" regiments were nowhere near as formidable as the ones they faced at Verdun and Guderian remarked that during his advance towards the Swiss border the most determined resistance came from "colonial" units, mostly from Indochina and Madagascar. French leadership also seemed incapable of a prompt reaction to a kind of warfare they had not planned for. The small british Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the only unit which seemed to be able to fight the Germans according to their own tactical system but they were swept away by sheer numbers and superior unit cohordination.
So you see, the even with superior equipment produced by a privatized war industry were was very little that the French Army could do under its own obsolete and overstiff system of tactics.
Trianglechoke7:But wouldn't Germany's MID of been socialist too?
I am guessing here that the difference between the arms industries that Mises may have been referring to would have been that there would have only been one designer and manufacturer of a particular type of rifle, tank, aircraft etc, whereas Germany may have had a number of "private" companies competing for government contracts.
Today in the UK we would therefore be like France was in the 30's: one manufacturer of tanks (produced with bent barrels that don't shoot straight); one manufacturer of rifles (that jam if you drop them in the sand - great for Iraq!); one manufacturer of aircraft (shot out of the sky by Saddam Hussain's anti aircraft batteries in the first Gulf War!). And the US would be more like Germany: one buyer, the government, but competition between manufacturers.
The fact that the Soviet Union ended up defeating the Wehrmacht shows that it doesn't really matter what quality your war materiel is, wars are won by strategy.
William Lind often gets published at LRC discussing how different the French-American style of warfare is to the British-German style. The French fought line warfare, whose objective is to push back the enemy with attrition and lots of bombs. The Germans fought encirclement warfare, whose objectives is to pierce the line and encircle the enemy army to destroy it before it can reorganize.
It happened that encirclement was superior to line warfare, and after a while the allies figured it out and employed it, but the inability of the U.S. military to win decisively in Iraq and their Shock and Awe approach to the campaign shows that line warfare is back in force.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
Stranger:The fact that the Soviet Union ended up defeating the Wehrmacht shows that it doesn't really matter what quality your war materiel is, wars are won by strategy.
The Germans could have beat the Russian conventional army if they had followed Guderians plan. After the initial breakthrough encirclement and annihilation of the bulk of the Red army they could have deployed the majority of their panzer divisions in the center. The roads were better there and would have allowed for a faster drive. They could have also fought the war at the pace of tanks instead of infantry without waiting for the foot-marching bulk of their army to complete every encircling maneuver. If they followed this strategy they would have reached Moscow before the winter came. But I still don't think they could have ever pacified Russia. The partisan guerrillas would have continued their attacks and I think something similar would have happened to the Germans that happened to the French in Spain during the Napoleonic wars.
Stranger:It happened that encirclement was superior to line warfare, and after a while the allies figured it out and employed it, but the inability of the U.S. military to win decisively in Iraq and their Shock and Awe approach to the campaign shows that line warfare is back in force.
All this shows is that guerrillas can defeat a numerically superior enemy over time. The U. S. army toppled the regular Iraqi forces easily. They just haven't pacified the nation and probably never will be able to.
Stephen Forde: All this shows is that guerrillas can defeat a numerically superior enemy over time. The U. S. army toppled the regular Iraqi forces easily. They just haven't pacified the nation and probably never will be able to.
The Iraqi forces retreated, although not in a line-warfare type of retreat. This is why there was no one to surrender when the U.S. arrived in Baghdad.