SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Sometimes a “good enough” military technology can achieve victory over better military technologies. Such a fact probably gave very little comfort to the five-man crews of U.S. Sherman tanks who faced an uphill battle against more powerful German tanks during World War II. British tank crews gave Sherman tanks the unflattering nickname “Ronson” — a grim reference to the Ronson cigarette lighter’s ad slogan “lights first every time” and the unfortunate fact that Sherman tanks often burned after taking just one hit. But that did not stop the U.S. from supplying tens of thousands of Sherman tanks to U.S., British, Canadian and other Allied forces, tipping the scales against the smaller numbers of elite German tanks on World War II battlefields.
The armchair historian debate over the Sherman’s war legacy could blaze up once more with the new war film “Fury”, starring actor Brad Pitt as a U.S. tank commander leading a five-man Sherman crew deep within Germany in the closing days of World War II. Some historians and military history enthusiasts still scoff at the capabilities of Sherman tanks when compared with the German Panther and Tiger tanks that carried both more armor and more firepower. But the U.S. strategy of mass-producing a reliable tank in large numbers should not be underestimated, according to the book “Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II” by Steven Zaloga, a military historian and senior analyst at the Teal Group Corporation. The tale of the Sherman tank’s road to victory represents a history lesson with implications for the future of warfare.
“In battle, quantity has a quality all its own,” Zaloga writes. “Warfare in the industrial age requires a careful balance between quality and quantity.”
“Overwhelming adversaries through greater numbers is a viable strategy for technology competition, and was used successfully by the United States in World War II,” writes Paul Scharre, a fellow at CNAS, in a preview for the new report titled “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm.” ( http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNAS_TheComingSwarm_Scharre.pdf )
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2014/10/16/good-enough-us-tanks-won-wwii/#5465
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 13 2014, @04:56PM
but isn't most U.S. debt held by the Social Security Administration?
That figure is for publicly held debt, not imaginary debt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @05:06PM
It is not imaginary. US has "reinvested" the social security payments into general budget. That's where you have all these trillions (about 8-ish) of debt come from.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Friday November 14 2014, @04:53AM
This is an excellent discussion such as you never see anywhere else. It turns out that of the 17.6 trillion total, 5.06 trillion is in intragovernmental holdings, and the remaining 12.57 trillion is public debt.
Of the public debt, 5.95 trillion of it is held by foreign entites, 2.39 trillion is owned by the Federal Reserve, 0.79 trillion by state and local government, 1.1 trillion by mutual funds, 0.52 trillion by private pension funds, 0.37 trillion by banks, 0.27 trillion by insurance companies, 0.18 trillion by suckers holding the farcical US Savings Bonds, and the remaining 1.09 trillion by "others": individuals etc.
Source: Who Owns the U.S. National Debt? [about.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 14 2014, @05:25AM
It is not imaginary. US has "reinvested" the social security payments into general budget.
I couldn't help but notice the scare quotes on "reinvested". While I think that particular defense is rhetorically self-defeating (due to the vast and astounding ability of the US government to squander "reinvestment"), it turns out to be irrelevant to how Social Security actually operates.
What makes the debt imaginary is that the US doesn't have to honor it nor does that debt have anything to do with how Social Security or the US's bureaucracy operate. For the former observation, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program that taps the US general fund to handle surpluses and deficits of Social Security. US Congress could explicitly restructure the entire program as such tomorrow, zeroing out the Social Security debt while doing so, without actually changing a thing.
For the latter, it doesn't matter if the US government owes Social Security nothing or a quadrillion dollars. Social Security has the same obligations no matter what games are played with the accounting books or how big the resulting numbers are.