The lessons of 20th century wars showed that nations that are armed to the teeth with better, more advanced weapons than their adversaries almost always win.

But the historical record also shows that mass producing very large numbers of not quite so good weapons is always far better than producing a smaller number of technically superior weapons. And care has to be taken not to exhaust or waste even large numbers of excellent weapons systems in conflicts for which they are not suited.

Critics of U.S. military procurement practices have many examples of overambitious projects that pushed technical capabilities beyond the envelope of operational practicality, or attempted to perform too many functions at the same time and ended up doing none of them well.

But this tendency to push high-tech possibilities beyond their practical limits is a universal one, and not just limited to the United States. Its fundamental cause therefore is not rooted in any one political system, but in the universal weaknesses and seductions of human nature as they can develop in any military leadership or major armaments complex.

During World War II, Albert Speer, the armaments czar of Nazi Germany, performed miracles in maximizing German industrial output. But he and his inspector general of armor, the legendary Col. Gen. Heinz Guderian, also tried to compensate for the colossal mass industrial capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union by producing bigger, more heavily armored and more heavily armed main battle tanks than the Americans or the Soviets could. Individually, the tanks Speer and Guderian wanted were the best of the war, but they could not stem the tide of mass-produced Soviet T-34s or American Shermans.

In the air, Nazi Germany followed an even more disastrous path of pursuing high-tech excellence while ignoring the dictates of mass production.

The Messerschmitt Me-262 was easily the most advanced fighter aircraft of the war -- light years beyond anything the U.S. or British aircraft industries were producing at the same time -- and an impressive 1,200 were built.

But a failure to focus production early enough on them as fighters, coupled with Adolf Hitler's disastrous obsession with wanting to develop them primarily as fighter bombers, meant that not enough of them were produced in time to significantly affect the outcome of the air war over Germany in 1944-45.

In air combat with the U.S. 8th Army Air Force, the Me-262s took disproportionate casualties from much larger numbers of North American P-51 Mustangs, even though the Mustang with its single piston engine was far slower than the swept-wing, Me-262 with its twin jet engines. Me-262s proved vulnerable to taking on swarms of P-51s at the same time. By that stage of the war, USAAF fighter pilots in the European theater were far more experienced and better trained than the young rookies the Luftwaffe had to field against them.

At sea, too, Germany at first focused far too much on producing a state-of-the-art surface fleet and neglected producing enough relatively low-tech submarines in time, giving the Allied navies the time to mass produce the destroyers, frigates, small corvettes, and very long-range aircraft they needed. So by the time Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz could throw enough submarines into the Battle of the Atlantic in early 1943, the antisubmarine warfare capabilities of the U.S., Canadian and British navies could finally match them.

Next: Attrition and mass production

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