[tormeh]

Nazi Germany and Japan partly lost WW2 because the Americans and the British broke their codes. Particularly the Japanese. Had the axis known their codes were broken they would have made new ones. Intelligence gathering would have been worthless without secrecy in this case.

To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.

[Nelson69]

We won pretty handedly in Afghanistan and Iraq and we had bad intelligence. We were flat out wrong about a number of things, yet we prevailed..

I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.

Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.

[mikeash]

It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were.

In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.

[tormeh]

The US didn't have that much of an effect. By D-day, Germany was already running out of people to feed the meat grinder. The Soviet Union, Britain and France basically won the war in Europe. I'm grateful for not being born in the Soviet Union and all, but won the war, the US didn't. Also, the US is about 2.5 times as big as Japan and 4 times as big as Germany today. I don't know what the historical data is, but "order of magnitude" sounds way unrealistic.

I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.

[mikeash]

Don't forget that the US extensively supplied the Soviets and other allies for some time before officially entering the war. They mostly used their own weapons, but a huge amount of Soviet logistical support was American trucks and trains.

As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl...

The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.

[tormeh]

I knew there were some supplies coming from the US, but was it really of a war-winning magnitude? I would like to know.

GDP is not really that good a measure of a nation's war-fighting ability. Only some types of production is useful for near-total war. A nation needs solid institutions, natural resources, logistics, roads, factories and heavy equipment. The service sector goes out the window, ditto with all luxury/entertainment production and the construction business. The European Coal and Steel Community didn't focus on those two because they were good indicators of GDP, but because they were good indicators of war capabilities.

As for what the Japanese were thinking? That they were the natural rulers of the world and everyone else should tremble before them. Everyone else were worthless barbarians in their opinion.

[mikeash]

Well, just scroll down a bit and see military production numbers on that Wikipedia page. The US produced over 100,000 tanks compared to German's 67,000 and Japan's 3,700 (although the Soviet Union slightly outweighs the US here), 250,000 artillery pieces compared to 160,000 for Germany and 13,350 for Japan (the USSR once again outweighs the US here, with over 500,000), about 2.7 million machine guns compared to about a million total for Germany and Japan combined, and then the real kicker: 2.4 million military trucks, compared to 345,000 for Germany, 166,000 for Japan, and 197,000 for the USSR. Hit up the page on Lend-Lease, and it claims that American trucks made up about 2/3rds of the total truck transport for the Red Army, in addition to 2,000 train locomotives provided (no clue about how that relates to the total though).

You're right, of course, that GDP isn't by itself a good measure of war-fighting ability, but I think the US did as good a job as anyone at throwing the entire country behind that particular war.

As for war-winning magnitude, it's always hard to say, of course. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine Germany properly conquering a space as vast as the USSR. On the other hand, they sure came close to taking a lot of important places, like Moscow and Leningrad. Logistics is what wins wars, and the Soviets needed it even more than usual with their massive relocation of industry away from the invasion, and of Siberian military forces toward it.

In any case, Stalin seems to have thought that the American contribution was essential:

"Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war."

Well, he said it. Who knows what he really thought. I wouldn't necessarily put a lot of stock in his stated opinion on the matter, but I thought it was an interesting quote anyway.

[tormeh]

Thanks, that was really interesting. I had no idea that the American production assistance was so great.