Originally Posted by
tdracer
The problem with the whole "Quantity has a Quality" is that - while you may eventually come out on top, you're going to experience horrendous casualties in the process. Maybe when you outnumber the other guy ten to one, and it takes 8 of yours to take out one of theirs, you'll eventually prevail. But you're still taking 8 times the casualties. In this day and age, not many western leaders would accept that.
I think back to WWII - the 50,000+ American Sherman tanks eventually overwhelmed much smaller numbers of German Tiger and Panther tanks due to weight of numbers. But American and British tank crews paid a horrendous price for the relative inferiority in quality of their tanks.
is it not more nuanced than that:
Yes Tiger and Panther were more than a match for the Western tanks on the battlefield.
But they were very hard/expensive to produce – very unreliable – hard to maintain.
also oversized and too heavy for a 1944 western Europe road net- so they could not use a lot of bridges – got stuck on narrow roads and streets etc etc.
So they often were not on the battlefield where and when they were needed
The Germans would have been much better having less ambitious designs.
While I agree With Bob’s premise – we in the west are often in danger of swinging the pendulum too far toward quality and end up with too complex/expensive – then too few.
If you designed an F-15 replacement again would you come up with something as advanced as F-22 – then end up with so few?
Perhaps they would have got 1:1 replacements if they had plumped for something like Typhoon? Top drawer but not a generation too far?
While it is obvious quality is important for combat aircraft it is less so with other platforms and often how do you define ‘quality”?
Would you pay for the quality of a NH-90 over a Mil-8/17? It’s still the same squad of infantry that is delivered
But one helicopter has 37% availability the other only need Vodka to fly (and so does it’s pilots)