napoleon_advancing_towards_paris.jpg
the historical reference in question:
I love how westerners need to keep rediscovering the "simpler equipment that you can actually make a bunch of beats the amazing wunderwaffe" idea over and over again, you'd think WW2, you know, literally the largest war ever fought, would teach some lessons, but I guess not
Lulz.
Yeah Neoliberal and NATO war strategy is hyper-focused on their fancy toys.
I keep trying to explain to people that hte T-72 is less armored than the Abrams bc the T-72 designers put "can this cross bridges so it can actually get to a battle" as the top of their weight allowance.
What? How would it withstand rocks thrown by terrorists when invading a 3rd world country then?
Me playing Master of Orion 2, fast tracking through the tech tree to Battle Pods, Fast Missile Racks, and the third or fourth level of missiles.
Then just pumping out frigates with nothing but missiles to unload their payload and retreat leaving one large ship with minimal weapons to stick around to see the 3 opposing ships get shredded by 20 or 30 missiles.
This is why I love the Sniper Elite games
Every single one (except the first) is about some Nazi Wunderwaffe that will make the Nazis win
Even the Zombie Army spin-offs have Nazi Zombie Wunderwaffe
It's like they're obsessed with the idea that the Nazis were so much smarter and better, that we just barely squeaked out a victory against them
It's been a huge part of re-writing the history of WWII in the USA. I think as historical memory tried to scrub the reality that the Soviets did most of the fighting, USians needed a story to tell themselves about how it is they beat the Nazis despite fighting on a fraction of them. And I think this narrative that Nazi military technology was so amazing and they had all these brilliant weapons is part of that. It fits with Neoliberal conceptions of war where a small number of expensive toys win wars.
They can tell themselves the Nazis were doing human wave attacks while they were fighting all the cool war-winning super-weapons.
The American military memory of ww2 was heavily influenced by nazi officers writing books about the eastern front for Americans to "learn" about how to fight the soviets, accepted pretty uncritically
Lanchester's Square Law stays winning
Thesis: T-72 is a piece of junk
Antithesis: T-72 is the best tank in the world
synthesis: T-72 is
The first two images are also not even Russian but Czech t-72 modifications - t-72m4cz