Quote:
Originally Posted by Suhiir
Equipment is always the problem. You can fairly easily expand a cadre military into a full sized force. But when they US did so in the late 1930 they wound up training with brooms in place of rifles and had a devil of a time just equipping the 1st MarDiv for Guadalcanal in August 1942.
That's one thing the politicians always seem to forget, soldiers need equipment and that takes time to manufacture.
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UK faced exactly the same problem in WWI, with the added difficulty of losing most of its trained and experienced officers and men in 1914-15 and that was, at least partly, responsible for the disaster on the first day of the Somme in 1916 (the troops, brave as they certainly were, were not well trained, especially by 1914 BEF standards) and WWII where British tanks were generally far weaker than German tanks between 1941 and late 1944, only the Comet, of late 1944, and the Centurion (just too late for WWII) were a match for German tanks. History repeats itself because people never learn the bloody lessons of it...