Word: make
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...nations which may be lined up against each other can be guessed, it is possible to make a reasonably accurate estimate of their fighting strength in men, guns, ships, planes. But such an estimate though quantitatively correct may be in total error from the qualitative standpoint...
...prohibited, has left the Germans weak in well-trained reserves, short on crack lieutenants and captains. The gap was not complete, however, because some German officer material was lent to train the Russian, Chinese, Bolivian armies. Young officers are being rushed through training schools, but no short course can make a well-grounded officer. Old Reichswehr sergeants, now lieutenants and captains, are good drill masters, but have more limitations than talents. By recently making officers of men from the lower middle class and even peasants, the Germans have lowered the morale of their old aristocratic officer class. But despite these...
Italy. Like Mussolini, Italian soldiers are pouter pigeons, wear caps eight inches tall to make up for their short stature. But in the hard school of war they have learned to fight as well as strut. For the modern Italian army (900,000 men) is the only important European military machine with recent war experience. So its junior officers are apt to know more about fighting than junior officers of other nations...
...ability to foresee, to outguess, to improvise, to make the best of what you have, is absolutely necessary to the successful military "scientist." The Allies almost lost the World War because Britain's Lord Kitchener had grown stodgy, because France's Foch kept mistaking a trench "war of position" fof an open "war of maneuver," because the campaign to take the Dardanelles got under way too slowly. Britain's Sir Douglas Haig threw away a chance for a decisive breakthrough when he allowed the new invention of the tank to appear on the western front prematurely, without...
...great unknown factor of the next war is the capacity of the minds that will devise its strategy. Brilliance on one side can make it into a quick and easy victory for either the stronger or the weaker military machine. A bad blunder on one side can turn it into disastrous defeat. Bad blunders on both sides-such as there were in the last war and are in most wars -can turn it into a military stalemate, another human holocaust, a war of economic attrition, with no victor anywhere...