“The reference, surely deliberate, was to the 1938 Munich Agreement at which Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler on the hope that he would stop there.”
This is not fully accurate: the British and French had effectively dearmed themselves and were not in a position to put up resistance in 1938. They had a crash rearmament programme in place such that, on paper, by September 1939 they were more powerful than Germany. Notwithstanding the fact there was no broad based support for another continental war barely 20 years after the last one ended.
Don’t read into history only the lessons you want to comment on. It’s more complicated than that.
Fair point. My sense is that Germany was also not fully rearmed in Sept 38 and may not have been able to win an offensive campaign against Czechoslovakia through heavy terrain and fortifications, if it also had to contend with a western front and a naval blockade. Then again, perhaps its forces would have pushed through, in which case it could then have defeated France in maybe 1939. And indeed it would have been a hard sell to the populations of Britain and France. Alternate history is fascinating but ultimately a futile exercise!
I'm not sure about your last paragraph. Russia's tank factories are, I understand, struggling and Russia is already spending a large proportion of its GDP on the military and its defence industry. Many of its current drones are Iranian imports. Young Russians are not so gung-ho with Putin having to pay increasingly large sums to get Russians into the military and to the Ukrainian front line. That said, I agree with your European side of the analysis.
Certainly the factories aren't cranking out tanks as fast as they're being lost, and the same is probably true of manpower. But that's inevitable after three years of high-intensity war, and in both regards Russia's war economy has stepped up significantly from where it was in 2022, whereas Europe's has barely changed. Russia has a long history of winning wars after taking far higher losses than the other side, and unfortunately this one seems to be going in the same direction.
“The reference, surely deliberate, was to the 1938 Munich Agreement at which Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler on the hope that he would stop there.”
This is not fully accurate: the British and French had effectively dearmed themselves and were not in a position to put up resistance in 1938. They had a crash rearmament programme in place such that, on paper, by September 1939 they were more powerful than Germany. Notwithstanding the fact there was no broad based support for another continental war barely 20 years after the last one ended.
Don’t read into history only the lessons you want to comment on. It’s more complicated than that.
Fair point. My sense is that Germany was also not fully rearmed in Sept 38 and may not have been able to win an offensive campaign against Czechoslovakia through heavy terrain and fortifications, if it also had to contend with a western front and a naval blockade. Then again, perhaps its forces would have pushed through, in which case it could then have defeated France in maybe 1939. And indeed it would have been a hard sell to the populations of Britain and France. Alternate history is fascinating but ultimately a futile exercise!
I'm not sure about your last paragraph. Russia's tank factories are, I understand, struggling and Russia is already spending a large proportion of its GDP on the military and its defence industry. Many of its current drones are Iranian imports. Young Russians are not so gung-ho with Putin having to pay increasingly large sums to get Russians into the military and to the Ukrainian front line. That said, I agree with your European side of the analysis.
Certainly the factories aren't cranking out tanks as fast as they're being lost, and the same is probably true of manpower. But that's inevitable after three years of high-intensity war, and in both regards Russia's war economy has stepped up significantly from where it was in 2022, whereas Europe's has barely changed. Russia has a long history of winning wars after taking far higher losses than the other side, and unfortunately this one seems to be going in the same direction.