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Western Wanderwaffe

Zardnaar

Zardnaar

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Wanderwaffe are usually weapons crappy regimes hype up. Some examples are the V1 and 2 weapons, King Tiger, ME262, T14 Armata and SU-57.

Western/Allies have them bit people don't really notice because they generally work and become mundane. Some examples are nukes (in 1945), mulberry harbors, F117.

Such systems don't get hyped up to much after a few years. Results speak for themselves. The USA hasn't really been defeated on the field of battle at the divisional level since Korean War. The USAF hasnt really been challenged in any significant way since Vietnam where the North Vietnamese briefly exceeded expectations with MiG21s and ground based air defense. At least temporarily.

Anyway what do you think are western wanderwaffe that don't actually get hyped up like T14 armada? Or is it also because of training and doctrines.

Some of my suggestions.

F15"s
Aircraft Carriers/supercarriers
Javelins
Microchips
 
Kyriakos said:
It is wunderwaffe, nein?

And the nazi rocket program wasn't crap - it was enough to allow a high-ranking nazi to become a director at Nasa.
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Well, the Soviets did have a share of those Nazi Rocket Scientists IIRC.
 
Kyriakos said:
It is wunderwaffe, nein?

And the nazi rocket program wasn't hyped up - it was enough to allow a high-ranking nazi to become a director at Nasa.
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Weapons were useless in WW2 and were a waste of resources.

V1 apparently was OK for the cost but useless as even if they spammed it bombing England wasn't a war winner by 1944.
 
Kyriakos said:
It's arguably better than the stupid romans killing Archimedes :)
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Someone’s been watching the latest Oversimplified video.
 
I think the freedom of action/initiative ingrained in NATO's doctrine is very advantageous both towards better engagement results and troop survival.
 
Yeekim said:
Ever read one of Capek's "Apocryphal tales" on the topic?

EDIT: Can be found here, actually:
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It was nice, thanks :)
I am not sure if the author expressed that well what supposedly Archimedes was doing, though. I am not certain that he would be occupied - by that point - with trying to use his calculus for sector of a circle's volume (he had used calculus for area of circle long before his death).
 
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I think of our “wunderwaffe” as things that usually end up over-promising and under-delivering during the initial planning stage. The example that comes first in my mind is the LCS, the littoral combat ship, was intended to be small, modular, agile, easy to maintain, and have compatible parts. Instead, it’s bulky, jack of all trades, slow, maintenance-heavy, and is made by two different shipyards.
 
Ordnael said:
I think the freedom of action/initiative ingrained in NATO's doctrine is very advantageous both towards better engagement results and troop survival.
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Difference between push-logistics and pull-logistics...
 
"wunderwaffe" are technological military advances that are supposed to be war-decisive. Save nuclear weapons, they have yet to actually ever actualize in their dreamed form. Usually they are just overengineered prototypes that look great taken in a void compared to "regular" armament, but which end up in reality as overblown and too costly/impractical/complex/whatever.

They mostly exists as a psychological argument for minds who are easily buying this fantasy of the "super-prototype changing the whole war", so they tend to appear and get hyped in dictatorship (where you just have to impress the leader) and in propaganda (because for most people, having a piece of hardware with impressive nominal stat is like unlocking a strong unit in a wargame). In actual real armies, what works is more in the reliable, easily produced, easily used department.
And the West tend to have an edge precisely because it can leverage higher technology with a doctrine that actually USE it rather than DISPLAY it (i.e. : larger part of the army dedicated to logistic, higher training to use the hardware, more independent decision-making to be able to use it on the ground, etc.).

Basically, the West doesn't rely on wunderwaffe, it relies on an average higher-tech and higher-training.
 
I don't think so. This was a wunderwaffe (though the German term doesn't need to be used) and yet failed spectacularly due to French disastrous planning in the 1870-71 war.
Another example of such weapons would obviously be "Greek fire".

I don't see any merit in arguing that the "west" doesn't rely on such. Historically it very much did. Afaik Britain went to great lengths to present the V2 missile hits as airplane bombing, exactly so as not to have fear spread of a superweapon. Germany was also thinking of hitting New York with a special type of missile (more of an unmanned airplane filled with large bombs).
 
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some 40 pages of stuff .

speaking Germans and New York in WW2 is bad practice . Automatical calls of Nazism in select places .
 

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Akka said:
"wunderwaffe" are technological military advances that are supposed to be war-decisive. Save nuclear weapons, they have yet to actually ever actualize in their dreamed form
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I'm glad someone recognized it.

Arguments against the potential effectiveness of military innovation do have to reckon with the existence of nukes.
 
Kyriakos said:
I don't think so. This was a wunderwaffe (though the German term doesn't need to be used) and yet failed spectacularly due to French disastrous planning in the 1870-71 war.
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Most military innovation is slow change. The machine gun, whose ancestry your link to, took decades of development to really shine. The same with tanks. Drones are in their infancy now but I think in 20 years they will be "wonder weapons" in common use. The atomic bomb was one "wonder weapon" that had a quick development and significant impact as soon as it was used. Rifle technology had a slow steady development: flintlocks to percussion caps to bullets to clips. WWs concept is mostly PR and terror under pinned by hope that it will be a winner. It is the nature of innovation in general. Everyone, including the military, wants to create game changing tech to make all the previous tech obsolete. It does happen, but even then such innovations usually have deep roots that are ignored to the glorification of the inventor.
 
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