> consider the german advance of operation barbarossa for instance. impressive statistics of over 200 german and allied divisions sweeping into the soviet union and destroying vast formations and capturing millions of prisoners, hide a simple truth. the germans sent two armies into russia. one was a highly trained and superbly equipped mechanised army of about thirty divisions. the other was a vast and largely unskilled force of badly equipped and horse mobile infantry, which trailed along to try and perform the role of garrison troops. the successes and headlines came from the former, while the failure to win was almost entirely due to the inadequacies of the latter. (though hitler can personally claim a lot of the credit for destroying the chances that the former almost did have to succeed.) > incompetent scholars  and that includes most politicians  might ask whether germany would have been better investing the same resources in another thirty mechanised divisions instead of 170 infantry divisions. well, yes duh! which completely misses the point. if germany had been able to, she would. she couldnt, and therefore she had to make up the difference with as many inferior substitutes as she could get her hands on. for the germans, those thirty high value divisions were of greater value than the other 170 - a point particularly obvious when many of them had to be sent to the med or the west. (it may not sound much to transfer a mere 18 divisions to other fronts, but if they amount to more than half of your high tech strikeforce, sheer numbers become irrelevant). by the end of the war it was the soviet troops who had the mechanised edge  thanks largely to lavish supplies of american trucks (blitzkriegs are stopped by lack of supplies, not lack of tanks). the same applies everywhere else.
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