Determining America's Role in the World

History repeatedly shows a tension between expensive, high-quality weapons and cheap masses of good-enough weapons. At Agincourt in 1415, the French advanced with 8,000 to 10,000 men-at-arms, featuring the knights, battle-tested and elite. Henry V had deployed 5,000 and 6,000 longbowmen whose rate of fire—10 arrows per minute—sent 50,000 arrows into the air for every minute of combat. Mud, channelized ground, and that storm of arrows broke the French momentum. Quality based on decades of lineage, tradition, training, and wealth had produced the mounted knight. He was the most expensive weapon system in Europe. But the charge of the knights collapsed before massed firepower produced by the cheap, rapidly trained yeoman archers. The French casualties (likely 5,000–7,000 dead) dwarfed English losses (under 200). The rate of fire plus numbers trounced aristocratic excellence.

At Kursk in 1943, the largest armored clash in history, the Germans fielded roughly 2,700 tanks and assault guns, including the technically superior Panther and Tiger. The Soviets flooded 3,600 tanks into the salient and 5,000 across the front. Their tanks were inferior individually, but overwhelming in quantity. The Panther’s 75mm high-velocity gun outranged the T-34; Tiger armor was impervious at long range. But Panther mechanical failures were catastrophic: over 150 of the first 200 Panthers were out of action within 48 hours, mostly from breakdowns and the lack of repair supplies. The Germans lost 1,612 armored vehicles during the operation. The Soviets lost five times that number, over 6,000. Attrition was the determining factor at Kursk. Thanks in large measure to Allied convoys providing materials, the Soviets built 24,000 T-34s in 1943, while Germany produced only 1,800 Panthers. The industrial arithmetic, not the........

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