Maxim Kalashnikov.
The price of military stupidity.
I'm posting here an excerpt from the work I'm doing for the Izborsk club magazine. At the price of narrow-mindedness in anticipation of future wars. Now, when the war in Ukraine has shown how our professional army could not foresee its reality, this is extremely relevant. Now that the brutal spirit of the Great War has once again been unleashed upon the world, as the enemy prepares armies with robots, artificial intelligence, quantum computers and communications - are we prepared for possible future battles? Do our generals represent them?
Meanwhile, let us study the sad experience of the Anglo-French of the past age. Who turned out to be more stupid than the Germans on the eve of World War II.
So, in 1937, Germany acquired its first tank corps. It arose through the works of the passionate Heinz Guderian. Despite the opposition of the retrogrades, and especially Chief of the General Staff Ludwig Beck. And thanks to the support of the head of state - that Hitler. That is, the Germans managed to prepare not for the past, but for the future war.
The dementia of the French rule.
But if in the Germany of the 1930s they overcame the inertia and myopia of the old generals - with the help of the country's leader who was prone to non-trivial thinking - then in France the situation was much worse. Although, it seems, the French generals were not at all the workers and peasants of yesterday, like ours. They represented a cultural "military caste"; Among them were many hereditary officers and graduates of elite educational institutions. They had the status of the victors of the Germans in the First World War. No one herded them into groups in 1937, sent them to the execution wall or the Kolyma. The fear of defamation did not hover over them. so what?
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