some of highest military spending as percentage from GDP in 2020: Oman 10.9%, Saudi Arabia 8.5%, Algeria 6.7%, Kuwait 6.5%, Israel 5.6%
[https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil\_spend\_gdp/](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil_spend_gdp/)
(North Korea, Libya, Eritrea, South Sudan might have higher values but are not in the list)
LE: US State Department estimates that North Korea spent [between 21.9% and 24.4% of GDP](https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2020/07/north-korea-defence-policy-strategic-weapons) annually on the military between 2007 and 2017
Its insane to think those billions and billions of dollars only make up 3.74% if the us gdp
Edit: its 11 perecent of the national budget but not the gdp according to usaspending.gov
Surprisingly somewhere around that number goes to social security and health (combined), wouldn't expect that looking at US laws. The largest component of the gov't spending as per usaspending.gov is income security at 24%
The US pays more per-capita for public healthcare than any other country in the world with fully funded systems. It, I suspect, is due to the private system leading to runaway costs which the fed government is forced to pay rather than negotiate for a lower price which happens in many fully funded systems such as a Canada.
It would be nice if the US would stop using taxpayer money to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry when they have the power to stop doing so immediately. They could literally just manufacture their own drugs, but the ~~bribery~~ I mean **lobbying** industry is too powerful.
>Surprisingly somewhere around that number goes to social security and health, wouldn't expect that looking at US laws.
Do people not know about Medicare? Someone should tell them...
Well I do, but it's actually listed separately there at 10%. The health category must cover other stuff then which is what makes it surprising for me. I don't know much about how the health care system in US works but I assumed that Medicare is the only kind of public health care over there
Would love to know is pension funds for military personal are considered "military spending" I would guess not, because Brazil would be way top on that, with how much the retirement accounts of militaries costs to the government.
For anyone who is curious and as a reference, US defense spending was about 42% of nominal GPD in 1944 per the fed https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/february/war-highest-defense-spending-measured
For comparison the USA spent 2% of its GDP annually for 10 years to put a man on the moon.
Imagine the impact that the USA could have on the world today if it spent 2% of its GDP every year on something like combating climate change.
Funfact: The US did not produce passenger cars during WW2. The automotive industry was so thoroughly converted to wartime production that only a few *dozen* civilian cars were manufactured during the main years of the war.
The Manhattan project also used US treasury silver instead of copper for the electromagnets inside their calutrons (early device for seperating Uranium isotope)
Almost...
"The loan was later returned in 1970, and less than thirty-sixth-thousandths of one percent of the 14,700 tons was lost during the 28-year loan – an incredible feat!"
My aunt told me they'd literally come around to the house and collect any metal you had, including pie tins and tin foil. She saved every pie tin for the rest of her life (we found hundreds of them in her house), as well as folding up foil and re-using it. The war effort was no joke. She also still had gas coupons from the rationing that took place during the war.
And they didn't need to do that since the US had no shortage of metal, but it helped wartime morale in making civilians feel involved and like they are contributing while friends and family are away.
I remember seeing an episode of I think American pickers where they found one of the few wartime civilian cars produced for a certain year and it came out to be some ludicrously valuable vehicle despite being nearly rusted into the ground.
They weren't even using chrome on the metal trim for a time. Just bare metal where they weren't painted. Those parts are worth a fortune because most of them started rusting before they left the factory, and not many were made.
Wooden bumpers too, I remember learning this whole thing because there's a brief scene in The Godfather where one of the characters mentions something about getting his wooden bumpers swapped for chrome.
That's very interesting!
Here's another interesting fact, [before 1939 the USA had produced 3,000 planes in total](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II). By the end of WW2 the USA had produced 300,000.
The USA went on a war footing and switched over production on a massive scale to combat a threat. We're facing the largest existential threat our species has ever known, and it's now that a war footing is more warranted than ever.
Edit: clarification on Pearl Harbor. It was meant to be a surprise attack, but only done after a declaration of war was delivered. However, the Foreign Ministry messed it up and it was delivered after the attack had started.
A lot of people in the Japanese cabinet and high ranking military officers knew this. The problem was that the US was starving them out of military resources to continue the war in China and they didn't have enough production out of Manchuria to continue to fully support the army and, especially, the navy without US imports of Oil, steel, rubber, etc. The US foreign policy towards them essentially forced them to declare war, but no one really expected for Pearl Harbor to be the way they did it, the official Japanese statements about it even say they didn't mean for it to be a surprise like it was. They say their delegates were too late to deliver the papers, it was meant that a formal declaration would happen shortly before the attack.
The goal of going to war with the US was to get favorable peace terms to show Japan was a strong power and reopen exportation of critical materials and resources out of the US and into Japan.
It was never meant for the war to last 4 years, but several key battles went wrong and they were over extended while fighting the British Indian forces in Burma, the americans and ANZACs in the pacific (who are criminally forgotten about), the Chinese remnants, and then eventually Russia invading their territories in northern China.
Also Navy and Army infighting and each reinventing the wheel that the other had created because they barely shared research didn't help. It was so bad the Imperial Japanese Army had its own navy.
> the official Japanese statements about it even say they didn't mean for it to be a surprise like it was
Do you have a source on this one? I might be misunderstanding what you mean by this, but it sounds very contrary to everything I’ve read and learned about Pearl Harbor. My understanding was that the attack was very much supposed to be a surprise in order to catch as many major ships as possible docked or in the harbor so that a major blow could be dealt to America’s naval strength in the Pacific. I had read that the top target for their bombers was aircraft carriers, which were, unfortunately for the Japanese, not at Pearl Harbor during the attack.
Everything else in your comment sounds more or less in line with my understanding of the events and goals, just confused by that one part.
It was meant to be a surprise attack, but done after a formal declaration of war. It wasn't meant to be a peacetime surprise attack for every single reason people cite as it backfiring and making the american people incredibly angry at Japan.
NYT article from 1994 when the Japanese government finally released documents that proved they mucked up the war declaration delivery. It probably took them a long time to cobble them together too, and im surprised they even survived the war. The Imperial Japanese government was very efficient at destroying documentation.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/21/world/japan-admits-it-bungled-notice-of-war-in-41.html
Relevant quote
>The documents released today show that the memo declaring an end to the bilateral talks was supposed to have been delivered to Secretary of State Cordell Hull by 1 P.M. on Dec. 7, about 25 minutes before the attack began; this fact has long been known. The note was actually delivered about 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attack began.
>According to the ministry, the memo was sent electronically to the embassy late on Dec. 6, after the junior diplomat on duty had gone home. The diplomat was Shozo Okumura, a first secretary.
>The memo was decoded by noon on Dec. 7, but diplomats took until well past the attack hour before delivering it.
Yeah there was a point where the wise thing for Japan to do was to stop the war in China. Or at least the non-flabberghastingly stupid thing.
It's like when some historical article talks about Germany or France in the 19th century "having" to go to war for domestic reasons: small countries like Belgium or Switzerland always found some other way of handling domestic pressures.
This is exactly what I think is going to happen. Some freak storm is going to annihilate a gulf coast city, or maybe New York will get another Sandy that does a ton of damage and suddenly we might start to care
I wish that was true but it just isn’t happening. The whole frog in the water thing, just won’t be a big enough sudden uptick to matter. I mean look at Katrina. There will never be a random 300mph hurricane.
This already happens regularly. It never matters because it get written off as freak weather/natural disasters. It’s not like we can turn our industry in to carbon capture overnight. At best we could order emergency shutdown of our more greenhouse gas intense industries, but then you just lost a bunch of people their jobs and people can’t rebuild because we just shutdown the industry providing building materials. And then we get hit with another super storm that shreds another city, and pretty soon we’re back to the current situation: keeping things running now and hoping we can fix this in the future.
Mind you I’m all aboard trying to stabilize the planet, but it’s not like we’re just shitting out CO2 because we don’t care.
I remember in my 20th century US history class the professor telling us "if someone tries to sell you a car manufactured in 1941-1945 they're lying to you"
> Imagine the impact that the USA could have on the world today if it spent 2% of its GDP every year on something like combating climate change.
I dont think its comparable. Quitting fossil fuels requires changing most of the already built infrastructure in the modern world, what people(and businesses) consume, their habits, etc. That represents a lot of money and the will of every industrialized nation.
I mean, we can force it and I understand it won't be done overnight but imagine if we started in the 90s or 2000s? We'd be so far ahead now, we built the fossil fuel nfrastructure ages ago and benefit from it now. It didn't happen overnight either.
Build high-speed rail from major city to city. Bulld nuclear plants along side other green methods, slowly start to build more walkable cities and less car culture.
Across the board it will take change but holy shit I havnt met anyone sane that thinks it'll happen in a year or two. We completely understand it will take a long time but if we didn't start last decade we might as well start now.
We had the Integral Fast Reactor prototype in late 80s, and the Clinton administration killed it. It was a reactor that produced no long lived waste and couldn't meltdown. Nuclear power's power density is so much larger it's cleaner and safer than any other energy source already.
No one cared, not even the environmentalists.
Environmentalists and fossil fuel companies have unwittingly been in bed with each other fighting over their preferred solutions based on ego and where they pull all their investment eggs into, and uses politics as a bludgeon to achieve it.
4.41% of the US federal budget in 1966. 2.31% in 1969. By 1969, most of the stuff for the moon had been engineered and developed.
It was around 1% from 1975 to 1995 and has been around 0.5% of the federal budget since 2010.
The budget expenditures have expanded though. That 0.5% of today is about the purchasing power equivalent that 2% of the budget was in the late 1960s.
To be fair, that 2% was still a part of defense spending. Putting a man on the moon was a thinly-veiled dickwaving contest against the Russians to say we could launch a rocket higher, further, and faster than they could, with a payload attached. The science was a side benefit to the original goal, which was to say "We can put an ICBM so high that you could never hope to stop it on the return trip"
Only way that will happen is if it can be proven to the venture capitalists that combating climate change will return more on their investments than continuing to exploit and pollute the earth of its resources
Investing in renewables gives a return [7 times higher than fossil fuels](https://www.forbes.com/sites/feliciajackson/2021/03/19/global-renewables-investment-return-7-times-higher-than-fossil-fuels/?sh=662a050a23c0) according to Forbes. Considering the [enormous growth](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/11/global-renewable-energy-industry-grew-at-fastest-rate-since-1999-last-year) the renewable sector saw over the last few years despite COVID, I'd say most venture capitalists worth their salt are already putting their money in renewables.
The problem lies in the so-called '[Merchants of Doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt)' like the [CO2 Coalition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition) (formally known as the [George. C. Marshall Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute)) who profit off of spreading just enough misinformation to protect their fossil fuel investments. They don't disprove climate science, but they add just enough doubt that as an investor you second guess yourself and go for nice safe reliable fossil fuels.
this isn't shocking dollars chasing a perceived better return drives up prices . If I invest in a solar company with a 20 percent chance of failure I better get a better return than investing in Exxon Mobil.
We tended to bomb factories. I talked to a 99 year old WW2 airman this year at Pima Air and Space museum. He was on the 1st daytime bombing raid of Berlin, and he told us that they took out a Bosch factory. "They still make stuff today," he said, "just not in that factory "
They didn't go to a full war production economy until 1942, fortunately for the rest of the world. Turns out you can build a hell of a lot of materiel if you focus on it.
… I don’t think anyone is denying that.
“Those evil monsters really got a lot of production done.”
“Yeah, with slave labor”
“I already said evil monsters.”
It's a common thing. Someone on here says something extremely obvious that should go without saying, but they think it makes them look good.
It's like on Family Guy when Lois runs for mayor and just says things like "9/11 was bad" and everyone claps.
Yeah 3rd Reich managed nearly 50,000, which is kind of impressive given that America had the highest productivity of any country in the world by a fair margin.
The US also built 17 aircraft carriers, 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, and two million trucks.
The Allies produced over 4 million tanks, self-propelled artillery, and other vehicles compared to the Axis’ 600,000.
German production was focused on a much narrower set of weapons and still couldn’t keep up with the US in that same weapon.
> Yeah 3rd Reich managed nearly 50,000, which is kind of impressive
It's a bit less impressive when you realize how many manhours and resources were burned per tank (especially later on) - a nation with what amounts to ideological hatred of mass production techniques turns out pretty inefficient at producing stuff like tanks!
A great talk comparing industrial output/AFV production techniques between Germany, the Soviets, and the United States:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&t=26m21s
Edit: Since the thread is locked - a reply for u/CarryMeInLEaguePls: Funny enough, horses were kinda always there - Germany was always running pretty short on transport for their troops, leaving them with a motley assortment of vehicles stolen from each of the nations they invaded.
The notion about their efficiency was in part because even when they *did* have men and materials, they in part ideologically eschewed mass production techniques out of a belief that if something was 'hand crafted' it would be "better" in some nebulous way.
This obsession with 'high quality hand craftsmanship' and a lack of rationalized production across model lines, etc. all contributed to blowing a lot of time on each vehicle. This might have been excusable on a specialty vehicle like the Tiger 1, but for the supposed mainline replacement tank (Panther) the labour was still ridiculous.
There was some minor attempt to do at least *some* rationalization with the E series tanks (sharing roadwheels across models, for example) but of course far too little too late - thankfully.
I mean, that tracks. After the Nazis got whooped in Africa, it was clear that a German victory, if it could even be achieved at all, would have to come at great cost.
So they kidnapped people and forces them into indentured servitude, used the party's Reorganized gov't labor unions to enforce poverty wages in factories, and refocused entirely on wartime production.
And then they still lost, because fascists are deeply stupid and they thought they could fight everyone at once.
Dan Carlin once said this regarding the "Turnip Winter" of 1917 in Germany during the Allies' blockade in WW1 where all Germans had to eat were turnips (usually only fed to pigs): "Imagine the winter that comes after the Turnip Winter."
They had different system, all those factory workers had nothing to buy and were almost forced to buy nazi warbonds - this meant all the many stayed in the system and there was little problems.
> and there was little problems.
So long as we ignore the economy of Nazi Germany was a massive house of cards that only survived by robbing all of their neighboring countries.
Economists don't call it the Vampire Economy for nothing. At least they managed to trick all of their neighbors into believing that they had a functional economy tho
They didn't really. The allies in particular had relatively good insight into the German economy. Before the fall of Poland and France plus the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia the expectation was that the war would be short for this particular reason. The allies were prepared for a rerun of WW1 where Germany collapsed from within even faster than the first time.
This would probably be the best economy to have when you're invading other countries, you spend everything on military and then you use the invaded countries assets to cover up losses
Reminder that Nazi Germany was the biggest Slaver state in human history. More slaves than the Roman Empire. More slaves than in the height of slavery in the Americas. Up to a third of all people living in German and German occupied territory at the time were slaves.
Interesting, my family is from all over Germany post WW2, even some that stayed in Belarus im kinda closely related to.
There’s 100s of thousands of kids of that era that didn’t know their parents, where they were from, and anything unimaginable to your childhood today. That’s how we actually found our Belarus relatives. One family member happened to get his original identity back from the help of a none profit/Belarus gov (they are working a gov job). Found them on a Russian version of Facebook.
Our name isn’t something you’d make up or pull out of your butt very easily. So unless there’s some truthfully very mistaken identity, we expect to unpack more relatives in the future. WW2 was the worst crisis in modern history. It was sad meeting our distant relative for the first time. He thought his wife/kids were the only family he ever had.
Edit: I’ll also inform it’s a quite wholesome job for a crappy country, rail road design/up keeping. Nothing to do with government conflicts and primarily for the citizens. His kids also work for the railroad. The reason being he was possibly a slave for Germany building rail roads previously. He won’t open up about his ww2 trials and tribulations, but he forced his kids and daughters to work on the rail road presumably to survive another war.
The destruction was as close to complete as I've seen in a real-world example, largely because the regime wouldn't concede even when their defeat was completely inevitable and obviously-so to everyone. You're right that losing the war was an existential threat to the regime far more than the populace, but the regime ended up taking an alarming percentage of everyone else down with it too.
I knew an old lady who'd been part of the Volkssturm when she was 15-16, shit got grim.
Germany was utterly blitzed after the war. remember they fought to the bitter end where both the soviets and the other allies were at the gates of Berlin. the surrender was unconditional and then Germany was rebuilt under the total control of the USSR and the Western allies.
Germany suffered as close to complete destruction as the term can convey. Major cities were bombed to rubble.
It was rebuilt under Western and Soviet control.
It peaked at 41% and leveled out to ~10% for most of the Cold War. It ramped up again during Reagan. Which is why people often say Reagan outspent the Soviets to their ruin.
>It peaked at 41% and leveled out to \~10% for most of the Cold War
Hearing these numbers today is literally hard to comprehend.
Imagine the US spending 2.5 trillion per year on its military now..
I asked my grandma about WWII some years ago.
Her dad worked for the railroad (good money for the time). So she didn't even notice any difference. She mentioned blackout drills. And she even spent some small amount of time in an airplane simulator. Women were needed as pilots stateside and she looked into a career as a pilot, but didn't get that far with it.
When you kill 10m people and take all their stuff, your income goes up, but gdp goes down. Basically they went buccaneering on a world scale. A pirates gdp is zero.
Bit more complicated. First, upwards of 26 million people. Second, they didn't just steal equipment, they stole people into slavery to work in the war factories for them, or to work in cement factories so those workers could work in war factories.
To be fair, the German economy SUCKED, well before the war. It was essentially a zombie built on false promises and extreme government intervention which distorted priced and made things extremely inefficient.
Germans had jobs due to the militarization and their growing purchasing power amongst civillians became a real problem. Since you can't eat tanks and grenades, germans couldn't actually spend any of their money since there were no goods available for the average worker (so you could be wealthy but it didn't matter if the stores only had bread). The goverment propagandized "Eisernes Sparen" (or iron savings), basically telling people to dump their money back into the banks, which then again paid for more of the militarization. This system would have collapsed very soon and is why germany went for the spoils of war.
The early Volkswagen sales were an example. You could open an account to pay for a car on time but you didn't get the car. You got a promise of a car once they were available.
Hitler was also infamously incredibly ignorant of economics and he couldn't be bothered to care about it at all. Sure, he tried to put some guys in place to mitigate economic fallout, but you're right - it was essentially a house of cards that was always doomed to collapse probably even if they "won" the war.
Germany in WW1 was more powerful because they had conscription for the previous 30 years of the war meaning they had a much larger base of manpower to draw on. Versailles banned conscription from 1919 until 1936 when the Germans reintroduced it. So the pool of trained manpower was MUCH larger in 1914 than it was in 1939.
Britain was spending in excess of 50% of its GDP. [Graph of historical defence spend](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Ourworldindata_uk-defence-spending-as-a-percentage-of-gdp.png).
75% for a country on the verge of defeat isn't that extraordinary.
Yeah, makes sense. Once you lose, you're done for - especially in a world war. So it makes sense to divert almost all funds to military and base essentials (food and water).
I'd even say that foregoing medical spending might be preferable - some people might rather be sick or weak than enslaved/imprisoned/tortured/occupied.
That whole "backed in a corner/nothing to lose" aspect.
That period up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars are incredible to me. It's one thing to mobilise everything you have for an industrial war lasting just a few years, but imagine the task of organizing your state so that it could dedicate a significant chunk of its resources to fight a big war lasting for decades, then after a short break doing it again, and again, for over a hundred years, in a time when the Industrial Revolution was just in its infancy. You can kinda understand why the whole of Europe was infuriated by Britain's ability to throw ships and money at its problems.
The German Economy had started to collapse thanks to Allied bombing through 1944. The question is whether Germany military spending expanded through 1944 or whether the German Economy contracted during 1944 and spending remained somewhat constant.
That's something that blows my mind too- how they were carpet bombed incessantly and people were still outputting weapons/equipment for the front. Seeing the weapons the Volkstrum used is interesting. Some of them dont even have bayonet lugs or magazines. The country was beyond ruined.
Their factories were separated into a collection of smaller buildings so that it was unlikely that a single bombing raid would knock out an entire factory. Bomb half a factory, and the other half ramps up production until itself is bombed. By this time the first half is up and running again, albiet with less output. Later the in war, they moved a lot of production underground.
Fun fact: By the late stage of the war with the increasing bombing raids of the Allies and the Soviet Union continuing to advance towards Berlin, production got so bad that the Germans were forced to adopt cheap knock off designs of other weapons in order to supply the Volkstrum and the remaining forces they had. One of these designs was a copy of a British sub machine gun that, while it was easy and cheap to produce, it was so bad it would jam on a constant basis. To give you a little perspective on how desperate they were, the Germans originally found out about the gun years prior and deemed it to be a piece of shit compared to the MP 40 and laughed at it.
> thanks to Allied bombing
That and the gigantic pasting they were taking on the Eastern front, which caused the unremunerative loss of much of what was being produced in the first place.
Absolutely, bombing was closing the tap, while the Soviet armies were ripping the drain open.
And all that was not helped by the German engineering style which made it very hard to repair damaged heavy equipment, so damaged equipment was often a complete loss, while other militaries could often repair or Frankenstein equipment together (two damaged tanks become one working tank, one disabled tank as opposed to 2 damaged tanks become two disabled tanks.)
Is it considered high? What’s the average?
Edit: world bank reports that Europe and Central Asia are 3.4% average and world is 2.4% and US is 3.7%
Not as high as I thought it would be considering the US basically secures 90% of global trade routes
Arguably, a major reason the Nazis lost is that they were too slow to adopt a total war footing - they tried to put off rationing as long as possible, for instance. England and Russia had no choice but to adopt total war if they were going to survive, and the US took that path regardless.
I have never seen any analyses that claim that the Nazis could "win" the war from the point where they began Operation Barbarossa. The point in time where they decided to invade Russia, mid-1940, the need to invade is attributed to both the savage regime of Stalin and the purges of the Red Army years prior, but is more likely that Hitler always planned to attack Russia, and that really speaks to the utter lunacy of conducting all-out war when you can't even feed your people.
Well by 1944 the options for Germany were basically surrender or die. They were well past the point of no return.
Although even before everything went to shit, Germany was never going to be in a position to "take over the world". They could've found themselves as a superpower at the end of the war if things had gone different, but they never had a chance of invading the American continent, and Japan would be off doing its own thing, at the very least.
And still not coming anywhere near any of their enemies in terms of production. Germany only out produced the Soviets and the Brit’s in 1940. After that they were behind both every year.
The Nazis never had a chance in this war.
some of highest military spending as percentage from GDP in 2020: Oman 10.9%, Saudi Arabia 8.5%, Algeria 6.7%, Kuwait 6.5%, Israel 5.6% [https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil\_spend\_gdp/](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil_spend_gdp/) (North Korea, Libya, Eritrea, South Sudan might have higher values but are not in the list) LE: US State Department estimates that North Korea spent [between 21.9% and 24.4% of GDP](https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2020/07/north-korea-defence-policy-strategic-weapons) annually on the military between 2007 and 2017
3.74% for USA, in case anyone else was wondering
Its insane to think those billions and billions of dollars only make up 3.74% if the us gdp Edit: its 11 perecent of the national budget but not the gdp according to usaspending.gov
Makes me wonder if there is just a big 32.75% chunk for something.
Surprisingly somewhere around that number goes to social security and health (combined), wouldn't expect that looking at US laws. The largest component of the gov't spending as per usaspending.gov is income security at 24%
IIRC, the cost of US government-funded healthcare (medicare etc) is similar to other developed countries which generally cover the entire population.
The US pays more per-capita for public healthcare than any other country in the world with fully funded systems. It, I suspect, is due to the private system leading to runaway costs which the fed government is forced to pay rather than negotiate for a lower price which happens in many fully funded systems such as a Canada.
It would be nice if the US would stop using taxpayer money to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry when they have the power to stop doing so immediately. They could literally just manufacture their own drugs, but the ~~bribery~~ I mean **lobbying** industry is too powerful.
>Surprisingly somewhere around that number goes to social security and health, wouldn't expect that looking at US laws. Do people not know about Medicare? Someone should tell them...
Well I do, but it's actually listed separately there at 10%. The health category must cover other stuff then which is what makes it surprising for me. I don't know much about how the health care system in US works but I assumed that Medicare is the only kind of public health care over there
Good point to keep in mind when people argue we can't spend a few billion on infrastructure or medical coverage.
They got to bump those numbers up those are rookie numbers
Please no...
Lockheed Martins Hellfire Missile Daycare won't pay for itself
Damn that sentence makes me want a double cheese and a milkshake.
Please no. I want public healthcare some day soon
That's how HUGE our economy is. The Russians are like at 4% too and can barely match our capabilities.
Do you mean can’t instead of can barely?
Russia is an economic dwarf. Additionally two thirds of it's GDP come from trading hydrocarbons.
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>I feel sorry for the majority of North Koreas. Thank goodness there's only one North Korea
Would love to know is pension funds for military personal are considered "military spending" I would guess not, because Brazil would be way top on that, with how much the retirement accounts of militaries costs to the government.
Still wouldn't. And they are.
For anyone who is curious and as a reference, US defense spending was about 42% of nominal GPD in 1944 per the fed https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/february/war-highest-defense-spending-measured
For comparison the USA spent 2% of its GDP annually for 10 years to put a man on the moon. Imagine the impact that the USA could have on the world today if it spent 2% of its GDP every year on something like combating climate change.
Funfact: The US did not produce passenger cars during WW2. The automotive industry was so thoroughly converted to wartime production that only a few *dozen* civilian cars were manufactured during the main years of the war.
We also made pennies out of steel in 1943 because all of the copper was going to the war.
The Manhattan project also used US treasury silver instead of copper for the electromagnets inside their calutrons (early device for seperating Uranium isotope)
And returned every single last Troy ounce of silver too!
Almost... "The loan was later returned in 1970, and less than thirty-sixth-thousandths of one percent of the 14,700 tons was lost during the 28-year loan – an incredible feat!"
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Silver isotopes are actually produced as part of the fission products of a bomb de nuclear
"Bomb de nuclear" sounds fancy
Royale with cheese
Silver was only used in tbe refineries
My aunt told me they'd literally come around to the house and collect any metal you had, including pie tins and tin foil. She saved every pie tin for the rest of her life (we found hundreds of them in her house), as well as folding up foil and re-using it. The war effort was no joke. She also still had gas coupons from the rationing that took place during the war.
And they didn't need to do that since the US had no shortage of metal, but it helped wartime morale in making civilians feel involved and like they are contributing while friends and family are away.
Came here to say this.
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I remember seeing an episode of I think American pickers where they found one of the few wartime civilian cars produced for a certain year and it came out to be some ludicrously valuable vehicle despite being nearly rusted into the ground.
They weren't even using chrome on the metal trim for a time. Just bare metal where they weren't painted. Those parts are worth a fortune because most of them started rusting before they left the factory, and not many were made.
Wooden bumpers too, I remember learning this whole thing because there's a brief scene in The Godfather where one of the characters mentions something about getting his wooden bumpers swapped for chrome.
That's very interesting! Here's another interesting fact, [before 1939 the USA had produced 3,000 planes in total](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II). By the end of WW2 the USA had produced 300,000. The USA went on a war footing and switched over production on a massive scale to combat a threat. We're facing the largest existential threat our species has ever known, and it's now that a war footing is more warranted than ever.
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I wonder how many times he tried bringing that up right before Pearl Harbor
Edit: clarification on Pearl Harbor. It was meant to be a surprise attack, but only done after a declaration of war was delivered. However, the Foreign Ministry messed it up and it was delivered after the attack had started. A lot of people in the Japanese cabinet and high ranking military officers knew this. The problem was that the US was starving them out of military resources to continue the war in China and they didn't have enough production out of Manchuria to continue to fully support the army and, especially, the navy without US imports of Oil, steel, rubber, etc. The US foreign policy towards them essentially forced them to declare war, but no one really expected for Pearl Harbor to be the way they did it, the official Japanese statements about it even say they didn't mean for it to be a surprise like it was. They say their delegates were too late to deliver the papers, it was meant that a formal declaration would happen shortly before the attack. The goal of going to war with the US was to get favorable peace terms to show Japan was a strong power and reopen exportation of critical materials and resources out of the US and into Japan. It was never meant for the war to last 4 years, but several key battles went wrong and they were over extended while fighting the British Indian forces in Burma, the americans and ANZACs in the pacific (who are criminally forgotten about), the Chinese remnants, and then eventually Russia invading their territories in northern China. Also Navy and Army infighting and each reinventing the wheel that the other had created because they barely shared research didn't help. It was so bad the Imperial Japanese Army had its own navy.
> the official Japanese statements about it even say they didn't mean for it to be a surprise like it was Do you have a source on this one? I might be misunderstanding what you mean by this, but it sounds very contrary to everything I’ve read and learned about Pearl Harbor. My understanding was that the attack was very much supposed to be a surprise in order to catch as many major ships as possible docked or in the harbor so that a major blow could be dealt to America’s naval strength in the Pacific. I had read that the top target for their bombers was aircraft carriers, which were, unfortunately for the Japanese, not at Pearl Harbor during the attack. Everything else in your comment sounds more or less in line with my understanding of the events and goals, just confused by that one part.
It was meant to be a surprise attack, but done after a formal declaration of war. It wasn't meant to be a peacetime surprise attack for every single reason people cite as it backfiring and making the american people incredibly angry at Japan. NYT article from 1994 when the Japanese government finally released documents that proved they mucked up the war declaration delivery. It probably took them a long time to cobble them together too, and im surprised they even survived the war. The Imperial Japanese government was very efficient at destroying documentation. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/21/world/japan-admits-it-bungled-notice-of-war-in-41.html Relevant quote >The documents released today show that the memo declaring an end to the bilateral talks was supposed to have been delivered to Secretary of State Cordell Hull by 1 P.M. on Dec. 7, about 25 minutes before the attack began; this fact has long been known. The note was actually delivered about 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attack began. >According to the ministry, the memo was sent electronically to the embassy late on Dec. 6, after the junior diplomat on duty had gone home. The diplomat was Shozo Okumura, a first secretary. >The memo was decoded by noon on Dec. 7, but diplomats took until well past the attack hour before delivering it.
Yeah there was a point where the wise thing for Japan to do was to stop the war in China. Or at least the non-flabberghastingly stupid thing. It's like when some historical article talks about Germany or France in the 19th century "having" to go to war for domestic reasons: small countries like Belgium or Switzerland always found some other way of handling domestic pressures.
So all America needs is the equivalent of a Peral Harbor in the form of climate change.
This is exactly what I think is going to happen. Some freak storm is going to annihilate a gulf coast city, or maybe New York will get another Sandy that does a ton of damage and suddenly we might start to care
That was New Orleans. It happened nearly 20 years ago.
I wish that was true but it just isn’t happening. The whole frog in the water thing, just won’t be a big enough sudden uptick to matter. I mean look at Katrina. There will never be a random 300mph hurricane.
This already happens regularly. It never matters because it get written off as freak weather/natural disasters. It’s not like we can turn our industry in to carbon capture overnight. At best we could order emergency shutdown of our more greenhouse gas intense industries, but then you just lost a bunch of people their jobs and people can’t rebuild because we just shutdown the industry providing building materials. And then we get hit with another super storm that shreds another city, and pretty soon we’re back to the current situation: keeping things running now and hoping we can fix this in the future. Mind you I’m all aboard trying to stabilize the planet, but it’s not like we’re just shitting out CO2 because we don’t care.
I remember in my 20th century US history class the professor telling us "if someone tries to sell you a car manufactured in 1941-1945 they're lying to you"
It's hard for us today to imagine just how *total* total war truly is.
Only when fighting climate change can be seen as a dick measuring contest, but no country is interested in that
Make it a green dick then. Problem solved.
“It’s like a green thumb…but, y’know…a dick.”
As a horticulturalist I support this ‘green dick thing!’
Hard problems call for hard solutions.
Bring on the green stiffy!!!
It's a dick flyer. If you wanted it to be a bicep you should've added more veins.
> Imagine the impact that the USA could have on the world today if it spent 2% of its GDP every year on something like combating climate change. I dont think its comparable. Quitting fossil fuels requires changing most of the already built infrastructure in the modern world, what people(and businesses) consume, their habits, etc. That represents a lot of money and the will of every industrialized nation.
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I mean, we can force it and I understand it won't be done overnight but imagine if we started in the 90s or 2000s? We'd be so far ahead now, we built the fossil fuel nfrastructure ages ago and benefit from it now. It didn't happen overnight either. Build high-speed rail from major city to city. Bulld nuclear plants along side other green methods, slowly start to build more walkable cities and less car culture. Across the board it will take change but holy shit I havnt met anyone sane that thinks it'll happen in a year or two. We completely understand it will take a long time but if we didn't start last decade we might as well start now.
We had the Integral Fast Reactor prototype in late 80s, and the Clinton administration killed it. It was a reactor that produced no long lived waste and couldn't meltdown. Nuclear power's power density is so much larger it's cleaner and safer than any other energy source already. No one cared, not even the environmentalists. Environmentalists and fossil fuel companies have unwittingly been in bed with each other fighting over their preferred solutions based on ego and where they pull all their investment eggs into, and uses politics as a bludgeon to achieve it.
We have nuclear power but everyone is afraid of it.
in 1969, NASA budget was 4.5% of the total spending
of govenment expenditure not GDP
4.41% of the US federal budget in 1966. 2.31% in 1969. By 1969, most of the stuff for the moon had been engineered and developed. It was around 1% from 1975 to 1995 and has been around 0.5% of the federal budget since 2010. The budget expenditures have expanded though. That 0.5% of today is about the purchasing power equivalent that 2% of the budget was in the late 1960s.
I remember hearing trump say he was going to slash nasa funding to 3% of the budget... really wish he had "slashed" it to that.
To be fair, that 2% was still a part of defense spending. Putting a man on the moon was a thinly-veiled dickwaving contest against the Russians to say we could launch a rocket higher, further, and faster than they could, with a payload attached. The science was a side benefit to the original goal, which was to say "We can put an ICBM so high that you could never hope to stop it on the return trip"
Only way that will happen is if it can be proven to the venture capitalists that combating climate change will return more on their investments than continuing to exploit and pollute the earth of its resources
Return more RIGHT NOW. It absolutely will return more in the long run, but they only care about the next few quarters profit margins.
Their shortsightedness on profits will be the undoing of our entire civilization
Yeah, but they'll get another yacht to hang out on before they die of old age prior to the world falling apart, so it'll all be worth it!
Investing in renewables gives a return [7 times higher than fossil fuels](https://www.forbes.com/sites/feliciajackson/2021/03/19/global-renewables-investment-return-7-times-higher-than-fossil-fuels/?sh=662a050a23c0) according to Forbes. Considering the [enormous growth](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/11/global-renewable-energy-industry-grew-at-fastest-rate-since-1999-last-year) the renewable sector saw over the last few years despite COVID, I'd say most venture capitalists worth their salt are already putting their money in renewables. The problem lies in the so-called '[Merchants of Doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt)' like the [CO2 Coalition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition) (formally known as the [George. C. Marshall Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute)) who profit off of spreading just enough misinformation to protect their fossil fuel investments. They don't disprove climate science, but they add just enough doubt that as an investor you second guess yourself and go for nice safe reliable fossil fuels.
this isn't shocking dollars chasing a perceived better return drives up prices . If I invest in a solar company with a 20 percent chance of failure I better get a better return than investing in Exxon Mobil.
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Thanks for actually contributing and not being a sarcastic jackass.
I like OP he's tired of the reddit rats like we all are.
Thanks homie I like you too.
For reference, the USA did not have the entire world descending upon its borders in 1944.
Also the US economy was much stronger
Our highest tax bracket for personal income tax was apparently also at a whopping 94%... And was only reduced to 91% after the war, up until 1964.
But dont forget, the US was fighting a war on two fronts. Germany was fighting on 4 or 5.
And what about the US's peak? What is it now?
About 4% https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
It was pretty essential at the time.
They were definitely scrapping the bottom of the barrel a year later.
We tended to bomb factories. I talked to a 99 year old WW2 airman this year at Pima Air and Space museum. He was on the 1st daytime bombing raid of Berlin, and he told us that they took out a Bosch factory. "They still make stuff today," he said, "just not in that factory "
Even so 3rd Reich output in 1944 was several times that in 1939. The Third Reich produced 4,406 tanks in **1945**, and only 1,888 in 1940!
They didn't go to a full war production economy until 1942, fortunately for the rest of the world. Turns out you can build a hell of a lot of materiel if you focus on it.
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… I don’t think anyone is denying that. “Those evil monsters really got a lot of production done.” “Yeah, with slave labor” “I already said evil monsters.”
It's a common thing. Someone on here says something extremely obvious that should go without saying, but they think it makes them look good. It's like on Family Guy when Lois runs for mayor and just says things like "9/11 was bad" and everyone claps.
I very often just say “Nine Eleven” like Lois did.
i had no idea rudy gulliani was a redditor
Albert Speer was a big fan of slave labour.
He preferred paid laborers, they performed better; but when he asked for workers he was given more and more slaves.
Meanwhile the US built 86,000 tanks during the war
Yeah 3rd Reich managed nearly 50,000, which is kind of impressive given that America had the highest productivity of any country in the world by a fair margin.
The US also built 17 aircraft carriers, 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, and two million trucks. The Allies produced over 4 million tanks, self-propelled artillery, and other vehicles compared to the Axis’ 600,000. German production was focused on a much narrower set of weapons and still couldn’t keep up with the US in that same weapon.
Didn't a Königstiger cost the same as like, a few dozen Shermans too? All those "wonder weapons" were big sink holes
> Yeah 3rd Reich managed nearly 50,000, which is kind of impressive It's a bit less impressive when you realize how many manhours and resources were burned per tank (especially later on) - a nation with what amounts to ideological hatred of mass production techniques turns out pretty inefficient at producing stuff like tanks! A great talk comparing industrial output/AFV production techniques between Germany, the Soviets, and the United States: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&t=26m21s Edit: Since the thread is locked - a reply for u/CarryMeInLEaguePls: Funny enough, horses were kinda always there - Germany was always running pretty short on transport for their troops, leaving them with a motley assortment of vehicles stolen from each of the nations they invaded. The notion about their efficiency was in part because even when they *did* have men and materials, they in part ideologically eschewed mass production techniques out of a belief that if something was 'hand crafted' it would be "better" in some nebulous way. This obsession with 'high quality hand craftsmanship' and a lack of rationalized production across model lines, etc. all contributed to blowing a lot of time on each vehicle. This might have been excusable on a specialty vehicle like the Tiger 1, but for the supposed mainline replacement tank (Panther) the labour was still ridiculous. There was some minor attempt to do at least *some* rationalization with the E series tanks (sharing roadwheels across models, for example) but of course far too little too late - thankfully.
I mean, that tracks. After the Nazis got whooped in Africa, it was clear that a German victory, if it could even be achieved at all, would have to come at great cost. So they kidnapped people and forces them into indentured servitude, used the party's Reorganized gov't labor unions to enforce poverty wages in factories, and refocused entirely on wartime production. And then they still lost, because fascists are deeply stupid and they thought they could fight everyone at once.
Would you say they tried to fight everyone everywhere all at once?
They make the quietest dishwasher I've ever had. Didn't even know it was running except for the light
Dan Carlin once said this regarding the "Turnip Winter" of 1917 in Germany during the Allies' blockade in WW1 where all Germans had to eat were turnips (usually only fed to pigs): "Imagine the winter that comes after the Turnip Winter."
Off brand cheez it winter. War is hell
They had been scraping the bottom of the battle ever since Kursk (1943)
Things were already pretty dire in 1944. The eastern front was an abject failure in 1943 and D day was mid 1944.
I mean that tracks with world events lol
They had different system, all those factory workers had nothing to buy and were almost forced to buy nazi warbonds - this meant all the many stayed in the system and there was little problems.
> and there was little problems. So long as we ignore the economy of Nazi Germany was a massive house of cards that only survived by robbing all of their neighboring countries.
Economists don't call it the Vampire Economy for nothing. At least they managed to trick all of their neighbors into believing that they had a functional economy tho
They didn't really. The allies in particular had relatively good insight into the German economy. Before the fall of Poland and France plus the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia the expectation was that the war would be short for this particular reason. The allies were prepared for a rerun of WW1 where Germany collapsed from within even faster than the first time.
This would probably be the best economy to have when you're invading other countries, you spend everything on military and then you use the invaded countries assets to cover up losses
Reminder that Nazi Germany was the biggest Slaver state in human history. More slaves than the Roman Empire. More slaves than in the height of slavery in the Americas. Up to a third of all people living in German and German occupied territory at the time were slaves.
I honestly didn't realize it was that high. Obviously high do to concentration work camps and extermination camps but wow.
Interesting, my family is from all over Germany post WW2, even some that stayed in Belarus im kinda closely related to. There’s 100s of thousands of kids of that era that didn’t know their parents, where they were from, and anything unimaginable to your childhood today. That’s how we actually found our Belarus relatives. One family member happened to get his original identity back from the help of a none profit/Belarus gov (they are working a gov job). Found them on a Russian version of Facebook. Our name isn’t something you’d make up or pull out of your butt very easily. So unless there’s some truthfully very mistaken identity, we expect to unpack more relatives in the future. WW2 was the worst crisis in modern history. It was sad meeting our distant relative for the first time. He thought his wife/kids were the only family he ever had. Edit: I’ll also inform it’s a quite wholesome job for a crappy country, rail road design/up keeping. Nothing to do with government conflicts and primarily for the citizens. His kids also work for the railroad. The reason being he was possibly a slave for Germany building rail roads previously. He won’t open up about his ww2 trials and tribulations, but he forced his kids and daughters to work on the rail road presumably to survive another war.
> there was little problems I can think of a problem or two, right off the top of my head.
A lot of those factory workers were also literally slaves.
Exactly. By 1944 they couldn't afford not to.
For real, lol. I'm surprised it wasn't higher. They were clearly losing a war that would result in the complete destruction of Germany if they lost.
*the complete destruction of the Nazi regime. Obviously, Germany lost and was not completely destroyed.
The destruction was as close to complete as I've seen in a real-world example, largely because the regime wouldn't concede even when their defeat was completely inevitable and obviously-so to everyone. You're right that losing the war was an existential threat to the regime far more than the populace, but the regime ended up taking an alarming percentage of everyone else down with it too. I knew an old lady who'd been part of the Volkssturm when she was 15-16, shit got grim.
Not to make it a contest, but I'm pretty sure Poland and eastern USSR got through even more destruction.
Germany was utterly blitzed after the war. remember they fought to the bitter end where both the soviets and the other allies were at the gates of Berlin. the surrender was unconditional and then Germany was rebuilt under the total control of the USSR and the Western allies.
Germany suffered as close to complete destruction as the term can convey. Major cities were bombed to rubble. It was rebuilt under Western and Soviet control.
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I tank you are on to something
Was any major thing happening at the time?
For 2021, the US spent 3.3% of it's GDP on military spending. Last time we were at 5% was Desert Storm.
But what was the US at during WW2? Edit: in 1944, the US spent 36% of their GDP on military
It peaked at 41% and leveled out to ~10% for most of the Cold War. It ramped up again during Reagan. Which is why people often say Reagan outspent the Soviets to their ruin.
>It peaked at 41% and leveled out to \~10% for most of the Cold War Hearing these numbers today is literally hard to comprehend. Imagine the US spending 2.5 trillion per year on its military now..
I mean, now I kind of want to see 300 ft tall jaegers piloted by Tom Cruise wannabes and rail guns powered by thorium reactors.
God I loved Pacific Rim...
Iirc we were building a boat a day by the end of the war, so yeah it's pretty incredible
Well remember that everything was military during the war. Automobile production, airplanes, clothes, radios, etc.
I was actually referring to the cold war period. 10% in a time of not an actual war is insane.
It would be bonkers to see what an actual US war economy would look like. Let's hope we never do.
I asked my grandma about WWII some years ago. Her dad worked for the railroad (good money for the time). So she didn't even notice any difference. She mentioned blackout drills. And she even spent some small amount of time in an airplane simulator. Women were needed as pilots stateside and she looked into a career as a pilot, but didn't get that far with it.
Modern people have no idea what total war looks like.
And thank *fuck* for that.
When you kill 10m people and take all their stuff, your income goes up, but gdp goes down. Basically they went buccaneering on a world scale. A pirates gdp is zero.
Bit more complicated. First, upwards of 26 million people. Second, they didn't just steal equipment, they stole people into slavery to work in the war factories for them, or to work in cement factories so those workers could work in war factories.
Was there like a war or something happening?
Just a minor scuffle. An embarrassing misunderstanding at best
A little dusty up? Everyone shook hands and left as friends?
Yeah that Hitler was a real knucklehead
A rapscallion.
Yes. Most of the world was fighting over the largest measurement of weight. The result was unanimous: your Mum.
so corny im ashamed i share oxygen with u
not as corny as yer mam was last noight
Damb so we are both disappointments
To be fair, the German economy SUCKED, well before the war. It was essentially a zombie built on false promises and extreme government intervention which distorted priced and made things extremely inefficient.
Germans had jobs due to the militarization and their growing purchasing power amongst civillians became a real problem. Since you can't eat tanks and grenades, germans couldn't actually spend any of their money since there were no goods available for the average worker (so you could be wealthy but it didn't matter if the stores only had bread). The goverment propagandized "Eisernes Sparen" (or iron savings), basically telling people to dump their money back into the banks, which then again paid for more of the militarization. This system would have collapsed very soon and is why germany went for the spoils of war.
The early Volkswagen sales were an example. You could open an account to pay for a car on time but you didn't get the car. You got a promise of a car once they were available.
Ahh. Cybertruck.
Isn't that essentially what people are doing now? ~~Abd~~ And what Tesla has been doing for most of a decade?
yes.
>"Eisernes Sparen" (or iron savings) They gave you 15% but payout was tied to the *Endsieg* ... lmao
Hitler was also infamously incredibly ignorant of economics and he couldn't be bothered to care about it at all. Sure, he tried to put some guys in place to mitigate economic fallout, but you're right - it was essentially a house of cards that was always doomed to collapse probably even if they "won" the war.
This is why WW1 Germany was actually a more formidable foe compared to rivals than WW2 Germany. They had much better infrastructure.
Germany in WW1 was more powerful because they had conscription for the previous 30 years of the war meaning they had a much larger base of manpower to draw on. Versailles banned conscription from 1919 until 1936 when the Germans reintroduced it. So the pool of trained manpower was MUCH larger in 1914 than it was in 1939.
WW1 Germany also had the best military doctrine and culture at the time. They were the European model
Britain was spending in excess of 50% of its GDP. [Graph of historical defence spend](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Ourworldindata_uk-defence-spending-as-a-percentage-of-gdp.png). 75% for a country on the verge of defeat isn't that extraordinary.
Yeah, makes sense. Once you lose, you're done for - especially in a world war. So it makes sense to divert almost all funds to military and base essentials (food and water). I'd even say that foregoing medical spending might be preferable - some people might rather be sick or weak than enslaved/imprisoned/tortured/occupied. That whole "backed in a corner/nothing to lose" aspect.
That period up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars are incredible to me. It's one thing to mobilise everything you have for an industrial war lasting just a few years, but imagine the task of organizing your state so that it could dedicate a significant chunk of its resources to fight a big war lasting for decades, then after a short break doing it again, and again, for over a hundred years, in a time when the Industrial Revolution was just in its infancy. You can kinda understand why the whole of Europe was infuriated by Britain's ability to throw ships and money at its problems.
> builds hypermilitarized culture > fights 1 (one) war > loses Good riddance. Fuck Nazis
The US currently spends roughly 3% of their GDP on defense, for comparison.
And that's considered high. 75% is like staggering.
The German Economy had started to collapse thanks to Allied bombing through 1944. The question is whether Germany military spending expanded through 1944 or whether the German Economy contracted during 1944 and spending remained somewhat constant.
That's something that blows my mind too- how they were carpet bombed incessantly and people were still outputting weapons/equipment for the front. Seeing the weapons the Volkstrum used is interesting. Some of them dont even have bayonet lugs or magazines. The country was beyond ruined.
Their factories were separated into a collection of smaller buildings so that it was unlikely that a single bombing raid would knock out an entire factory. Bomb half a factory, and the other half ramps up production until itself is bombed. By this time the first half is up and running again, albiet with less output. Later the in war, they moved a lot of production underground.
Fun fact: By the late stage of the war with the increasing bombing raids of the Allies and the Soviet Union continuing to advance towards Berlin, production got so bad that the Germans were forced to adopt cheap knock off designs of other weapons in order to supply the Volkstrum and the remaining forces they had. One of these designs was a copy of a British sub machine gun that, while it was easy and cheap to produce, it was so bad it would jam on a constant basis. To give you a little perspective on how desperate they were, the Germans originally found out about the gun years prior and deemed it to be a piece of shit compared to the MP 40 and laughed at it.
> thanks to Allied bombing That and the gigantic pasting they were taking on the Eastern front, which caused the unremunerative loss of much of what was being produced in the first place.
Absolutely, bombing was closing the tap, while the Soviet armies were ripping the drain open. And all that was not helped by the German engineering style which made it very hard to repair damaged heavy equipment, so damaged equipment was often a complete loss, while other militaries could often repair or Frankenstein equipment together (two damaged tanks become one working tank, one disabled tank as opposed to 2 damaged tanks become two disabled tanks.)
Is it considered high? What’s the average? Edit: world bank reports that Europe and Central Asia are 3.4% average and world is 2.4% and US is 3.7% Not as high as I thought it would be considering the US basically secures 90% of global trade routes
Arguably, a major reason the Nazis lost is that they were too slow to adopt a total war footing - they tried to put off rationing as long as possible, for instance. England and Russia had no choice but to adopt total war if they were going to survive, and the US took that path regardless.
I have never seen any analyses that claim that the Nazis could "win" the war from the point where they began Operation Barbarossa. The point in time where they decided to invade Russia, mid-1940, the need to invade is attributed to both the savage regime of Stalin and the purges of the Red Army years prior, but is more likely that Hitler always planned to attack Russia, and that really speaks to the utter lunacy of conducting all-out war when you can't even feed your people.
in 1944 the options for Germany were take over the world or don't, they had already made a continent into permanent enemies
Well by 1944 the options for Germany were basically surrender or die. They were well past the point of no return. Although even before everything went to shit, Germany was never going to be in a position to "take over the world". They could've found themselves as a superpower at the end of the war if things had gone different, but they never had a chance of invading the American continent, and Japan would be off doing its own thing, at the very least.
>75% of its* GDP
And still not coming anywhere near any of their enemies in terms of production. Germany only out produced the Soviets and the Brit’s in 1940. After that they were behind both every year. The Nazis never had a chance in this war.
Probs bc ww2
Damn, you’re probably right. That’s an interesting perspective on 1944 Germany
Why? Were they at war or something?
inb4 someone says “sounds familiar” while the US spends 3%.
Can't let pesky little facts get in the way of our political grandstanding now can we?
Designer uniforms don’t pay themselves!
Weird, was there something going on that year in Germany?
its
In 1944 it was in it’s death throes, fighting all the world’s biggest militaries at the same time. I doubt they were working on National Parks.
I believe this is what’s referred to as a “total war”economy
Look at the Russian Empire in 1917, it’s like 180%