Billy Brown [bbrown@conemsco.com] wrote:
>The high cost of military hardware is due to two factors: intrinsic
>complexity and small manufacturing runs. An anti-tank missile is a more
>complicated machine than a rifle, so it will naturally be more expensive.
That's weird: I've seen LAW rockets for sale for $250, which won't buy you a particularly good modern rifle. Admittedly they won't do much against a $20million main battle tank, but they'll be perfectly good against an APC costing a thousand times as much as the missile.
And this is the point: it doesn't matter if an anti-tank missile costs $10,000 in bulk, if it has a 50% chance of knocking out a $20million tank. No nation can afford to lose a billion dollars of tanks to a million dollars of missiles; or an entire army to a single million-dollar nuke.
>The important measure of size is money, not people. In the modern world you
>will run out of money long before you run out of people.
So you see our point? When one side is spending a thousand times as much as the other, they lose.
>Warlike groups practice divide-and-conquer strategies. You don't attack
>the whole world at once. You pick some unpopular little group, and conquer
>them.
>If my military is twice as good
>as yours, and I invade your country, I can defeat 100% of your troops
>without loosing anywhere near 50% of mine (10% would be a more likely
>figure).
[In another message]
>With the invention of gunpowder, this began to change. Now a group of
>well-trained soldiers could easily defeat a much larger mob of civilians.
This is silly. Gunpowder brought the end of feudalism because now a single individual with a gun could kill the best mounted knight, and a small army with a cannon could bring down the best defensive walls. Just as widespread ownership of nukes and other mass destruction weapons will bring down modern authoritarian government.
Mark