Ordnance board always sucks, no matter nationality.They are always focused on the last war. That is their experience.Truke?
When they focus on the last war, the results are usually clunky and inefficient but ultimately serviceable. When they try to focus on the next war, the results usually don't work at all or are completely unsuited for what the next war actually ends up being.
>>65091442This. When Ordnance Boards, procurement officers, and engineers start thinking about the next war you get things like the Interwar Tank phase. Mad shit, great fun for people looking back at it (and probably for the engineers), but utterly useless bullshit that just gets soldiers killed.
>>65091391They are establishment and therefore usually don't make radical changes. Actual innovation has to happen outside the army and government using innovators own money.
>>65091391Kinda inevitable. Nobody wants to work in Ordinance so you tend to stick your worst officers on the Ordinance Board. They're bitter and unimaginative by nature.
>>65094665>>65092933>>65091998>>65091442>>65091391All of these takes are bullshit survivorship bias. The overwhelming majority of ordnance board stuff is fine whether it was for the last war or the next war. A small group of things totally suck and get remembered, and another group are "serviceably but clunky" or "interwar tanks that are total bullshit", usually because whatever they're making isn't understood by anyone properly yet, so no one knows how to use it or make it properly and everyone is just guessing. For every MK14 torpedo story there are a dozen 5 inch DP gun stories, but Ordnance Board doesn't get a mention in the latter stories despite being the main character in both. When they do their job properly, no one notices, which is completely fine, it's just how bureaucracies work.
>>65091998Retarded take. When Germany invaded France, their tanks were inferior to British and French tanks. What was superior is how they used them. They used them in groups. British and French would use a single tank surrounded by infantry. This means despite being better armored and armed, a single British or French tank would be flanked and destroyed by multiple PzII's. Or mobility killed. This idea that everybody did nothing but big tanks to 'cross trenches' is retarded. There were always a mix of vehicles. Germany advanced due to novel tactics and new ways of fighting. You say they should concentrate on 'future' but have you seen what 'future' ideas looked like in the 80s? They don't look like now.
>>65094707>their tanks were inferior to British and French tanksEh no, their tanks had radios and a radio operator, brits and french had signal flags. Thats a major technological advantage.
>>65094730>Eh no, their tanks had radios and a radio operator, brits and french had signal flags. Thats a major technological advantage.You have no clue at all what you're talking about. The absence of radios was true for light tanks only, and was basically true on both sides. The Panzer I, for example, only has a radio receiver other than on command variants. The French equivalent to the PzKpf 1 and 2, the R35, had radios during the battle of France. Only France's WWI tanks that were still in service were totally without them. France had more radios than Germany, both in and out of tanks.The Battle of France was largely decided by France's ridiculous Methodical Battle doctrine being comically unfit for 1940, causing a cascade of command failures and lost battles. Overworked crew played a role with double or tripple hatted commander/gunner/loadeds, but having a dedicated radio operator also never played out in the future either. Overall, Germany didn't win because they had more radios or better tanks, they won because they had decision superiority, because France didn't even know what that was yet.
