Only transforming 5-10 per cent of their military machine may have helped the Nazis punch above their weight in sudden attacks, but arguably it left them hamstrung in retreat -- a fact I was reminded of last night by a TV programme on the Sherman tank.
These were outgunned and out-armoured by the German Tiger tank -- but when the Allies pinched off the exit from the Falaise pocket in August 1944, what struck the advancing troops were the enormous piles of dead horses mixed in with the wrecked guns, trucks, etc.
Trying to manage a retreat with transport with the great range of maximum speeds implied by horse-powered transport can't have helped the German cause.
Julian
>[This was pointed out by BuzzFlash.com, which mainly seems like a
>laundered PR arm of the Dems, but this is a gem. Rumsfeld, last
>night, to Jim Lehrer on the NewsHour.]
>
>DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I think when you say "that
>different," it's important to understand that you can -
>when the Germans transformed their armed forces into the
>Blitzkrieg, they transformed only about 5 or 10 percent of
>their force. Everything else was the same, but they
>transformed the way they used it, the connectivity between
>aircraft and forces on the ground, the concentration of it
>in a specific portion of the line, and it - one would not
>want to transform 100 percent of your forces. You only need
>to transform a portion.