Manpower Supply Quotes

Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.

Employment of this concept of surfaces and gaps, then, gives us many advantages over what could be called slower moving forms of combat, where strength is thrown against strength. Attacking through gaps, avoiding surfaces, gives us an advantage of economy of force. If we are pitting strength against strength, assaulting enemy strong points, we are consuming our manpower as well as ammunition and supplies as we go along. If we go through the gaps, we are practicing economy of force. We are reaching our objective without using up our men. We are leaving the enemy behind. Because we are moving faster, we have the advantage of rapid exploitation.

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

Mughals to the importance of sea power. The Mughals had a predominantly continental outlook. Preoccupation with cavalry warfare blinded the Indian rulers to the maritime challenge of the European powers. The Mughals would only take an enemy seriously if he confronted them with large contingents of cavalry. Thus, they neglected the Indian Ocean as the most important element of the total Indian environment. They knew the monsoon would not permit a sustained maritime invasion of India. Thus, a maritime invader would find his supply lines cut in a short time-frame. The European powers, however, never attempted such an invasion. India itself had a huge military manpower pool with a mercenary orientation. It generally flocked to the banner of whichever local ruler paid the best. The European success lay in nativisation. They built up their military contingents in India by drilling local infantry troops who were far less expensive to maintain but in the end proved fatal to the Indian cavalry.

Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.

Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the uncivilized world during the past half-millennium. It was not the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics. In modern guerrilla warfare, when superior primitive tactics are wedded to even very limited civilized logistics, more completely civilized adversaries are very commonly discomfited. Guerrilla warfare merely incorporates manpower and supply capacities on a civilized scale and uses more up-to-date weaponry. Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means. The

Only a handful of iconoclasts guessed that airplanes and submarines would rewrite all the rules of naval warfare, that by the late 1930s battleships would be worse than useless (because of the money and manpower they diverted), and that Mahan’s three dogmas were sinking rapidly into obsolescence. The First World War revealed glimpses of the future. The German U-boats proved that submarines could menace seaborne supply lines. The war in Europe hinted at the possibilities of airpower, and by the end of the war the British had demonstrated that airplanes could take off from and land on ships. Jutland, the largest naval battle of the conflict, neither bore out Mahan’s doctrines nor completely refuted them. But none of the lessons of the First World War could break the power of the battleship cult, whose acolytes dominated the ranks of all the world’s major navies until the opening salvos of the next war.

He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, “a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic skills.

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east—the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

Over Europe as a whole, alterations in state control of capital and of coercion between AD 900 and the present have followed two parallel arcs. At first, during the age of patrimonialism, European monarchs generally extracted what capital they needed as tribute or rent from lands and populations that lay under their immediate control - often within stringent contractual limits on the amounts they could demand. In the time of brokerage (especially between 1400 and 1700 or so), they relied heavily on formally independent capitalists for loans, for management of revenue-producing enterprises, and for collection of taxes. By the eighteenth century, however, the time of nationalization had come; many sovereigns were incorporating the fiscal apparatus directly into the state structure, and drastically curtailing the involvement of independent contractors. The last century or so, the age of specialization, has brought a sharper separation of fiscal from military organization and an increasing involvement of states in the oversight of fixed capital. On the side of coercion, a similar evolution took place. During the period of patrimonialism, monarchs drew armed force from retainers, vassals, and militias who owed them personal service - but again within significant contractual limits. In the age of brokerage (again especially between 1400 and 1700) they turned increasingly to mercenary forces supplied to them by contractors who retained considerable freedom of action. Next, during nationalization, sovereigns absorbed armies and navies directly into the state's administrative structure, eventually turning away from foreign mercenaries and hiring or conscripting the bulk of their troops from their own citizenries. Since the mid-nineteenth century, in a phase of specialization, European states have consolidated the system of citizen militaries backed by large civilian bureaucracies, and split off police forces specialized in the use of coercion outside of war. By the nineteenth century, most European states had internalized both armed forces and fiscal mechanisms; they thus reduced the governmental roles of tax farmers, military contractors, and other independent middlemen. Their rulers then continued to bargain with capitalists and other classes for credit, revenues, manpower, and the necessities of war. Bargaining, in its turn, created numerous new claims on the state: pensions, payments to the poor, public education, city planning, and much more. In the process, states changed from magnified war machines into multiple-purpose organizations. Their efforts to control coercion and capital continued, but in the company of a wide variety of regulatory, compensatory, distributive, and protective activities.

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.