It is worth noting those odds do not have to be across the front, creating those odds locally at your break-though point(s) can achieve the same result.
It is also worth taking into account that the more technically advanced your force is, how driven your troops are and even terrain, amongst many other factors, can play roles as Combat Modifiers. Many of Germany's early war achievements were against Armies who on paper should have been able to hand the Wehrmacht it's A**! However, many things contributed to the Wehrmacht creating the correct odds to win these battles. T o put Combat Modifiers another way, attach an Apache Attack Helicopter to an American Mechanized Company with an ammo supply, and the German Force in a short time would know the meaning of CM’s and Hellfire!!!
History is rift with Battles and Wars won against what should have been unbeatable numbers. There are attempts at formulating some aspects of how these combat modifiers actually modify the odds, but IMHO if you study the battles besides the military science involved, in most of these victories a lot of military art comes into play. That is to say the effect that the Leaders, the troops and their fusion with their engines of war had in those conflicts, these factors are much harder to quantify. There are certainly cases where even the Generals of either side when questioned as to what went wrong or right, especially right after the fray, neither could tell you until giving it much study or many others gave it much study as to what did happen. To this day some of those battles still leave room for plenty of discussion.
We here who fight the battles we fight come away from some battles thinking the very same things, especially when the Commanders are both human......
Another way of looking at this as well is subjectively, what does a force consider victory? On paper the USSR should have folded as quickly as Hitler envisioned, (even the Allies believed this at first) no one counted on the USSR being so willing to take much punishment in order to regroup and start coming out swinging. In retrospect, it is easy to see how the early defeats in Russia were not so much the victories the Germans believed they achieved.
Bottom-line IMHO is Odds are a starting place at best, a guideline if you will, something a Commander has to use his many assets to create, to forge the conditions to victory, at their worse Odds are not to be treated as a numbers game alone.
Bob out
