"mlcorson" wrote in message
ups.com...
| Interesting...
| I wonder how this could be used against a determined (even suicidal)
| enemy who has superior manufacturing capacities to make cheaper... lets
| say tanks for instance. Or perhaps even jets. Where they make 100 tanks
| to our one...at the same cost as one of ours. Admitadly not as good,
| but more of them. I say we'd be under equipped with very expensive and
| complex technology and no way to produce it in sufficient numbers to
| defeat the overwhelming numbers. I know of one country right now with
| the manufacturing capacity and manpower to make this a possible
| scenario.
| -Mike

The former USSR tried this approach. Took awhile before they realized
they couldn't keep it up. Of course it helped the rest of the world
understand to learn what a shooting gallery Iraq became using Russian
hardware in beginning of the first gulf war.
I can't vouch for this information, but I was told that the Soviet
quality was so bad that their turbine engines, used in tanks and aircraft
and such, was such junk that when they went south they just sent them all to
a boneyard where you could see useless junk engines stacked as far as the
eye could see. The Americans preferred to keep their repair parts supply
smaller (and logistics simpler, in the process, I suppose) by making their
engines higher quality and repairable.

So, that is just one of many arguments about quality over quantity.

If you're speaking of the Chinese, they don't need hardware. They have
enough troops alone, armed or not. I also read somewhere that they could
march a column of troops a hundred men wide into any country they want for
as long as they felt like it. Toddlers in the back of the line would be
adults by the time they got to the front.