Good enough and plenty of it*

I want to highlight a recent blog post over at Defense and Freedom.

Paraphrasing for the purpose of compactness, the author laments that historians who focus on the air war in WWII spend disproportionate amounts of time focusing on the whiz-bang stuff that appeared near the end of the war.

The author's contention is that those weapons did not win or lose the war. They were not deployed in sufficient numbers to make a difference. The war had already been decided. In retrospect, it had become a mopping-up operation.

The planes that fought the deciding battles were not, for the most part (the Japanese Zero being the exception), the planes and power-plants the major forces had entered the war with but they were the planes that represented the lion's share of the production after the contestants had converted their economies to wartime production.

For those of us who like to be prepared, it is a stark reminder.

We fight, and win or lose, our battles with the equipment that has been deployed in quantity.

We may lust for ARs and monometal projectiles but the battle in the trenches will be decided with 10/22s, Marlin 795 semi-autos and bulk packed .22LR ammo and Mossberg 500 pump shotguns.




*Good enough and plenty of it is a motto I first encountered over at Remus's Woodpile Report. The concept resonates with me.