"Will we ever see the like of WWII era rapid advances again?" Topic

The extremely fast pace of technology change in WWII amazes me.
1) Consider there were still many bi-planes in the air at the start of the war in 1939, just 5-6 years later they were flying jets.
a. Some of the jets used in Desert Storm were 40 year old designs (improved on of course)
2) A panzer III was vary good in 1940 – and hopelessly obsolete in 1944.
a. In Desert Storm – the US was still using M60A3 – a 40-year-old design
3) There were dozens of fighter aces with over 100 kills – nobody has come anywhere close to that since.

Will we ever see the like of that again?

Hopefully, no.

I am with Winston. I hope not.

We all better hope not because the impetus for that level of state investment in technological development was a catastrophic world war.
Even if there were such a war again would any country's industry have the time to develop improved technologies without all their facilities being knocked out by precision weapons (never mind nukes)? Would a modern war proceed at a faster pace than WW2? I image it takes more time and lots more money to make a modern tank than it did to put together a T34 for instance.

The technology is here but not in use, just like in WW2. Money budget in peacetime determines weapons not really tech. Once the war is active tach advances and advantages affect weapons.

I could see the next war start with manned aviation and be the end, aviation is dominated by drone air to air combat and the use of Star Wars space weapons.

Probably, at least on the production side of things, due to computers and 3-D printing capabilities.

Yes when there is another World War

I think the Great War had far greater technological changes given the base line. Tanks, aircraft and squad level weapons

WW2 undoubtedly had it's advances in computers, electronic warfare (radar and sonar) and of course the atomic bomb

There's 60 – 75 years of technical knowledge and research, much of which hasn't been pressed into service, but may be soon, especially in the area of speedy weapons and aircraft – hypersonics.

The F-108 fighters was slated to help protect the B-70 bombers.

Not sure we'll get hypersonic escort fighters flying wing in wing with the hypersonic bombers, but there will be hypersonic recon birds and bombers, and perhaps fighters /interceptors too. Wouldn't be surprised to see some of these having orbital, or suborbital capabilities as well.

Might already be there with the X-37B and Aurora. Does B signify it is a bomber variant, or just a follow-on model of the X-37A?

Max speed = 17,430 MPH.

Working on the SR-72 (which some say has already been built, and has been flying for a while – at least a prototype of it). Think it's supposed to be Mach 5+ capable, which is the minimum definition of hypersonic speed, apparently.

The pace of combat operations was a lot slower in WWII, as well. (I think the stat I read was that a soldier would see 40-50 days of actual shooting per year, while today its something link 200-250 days per year.)

That gave production back home a chance to roll out today's gear, then design prototype and roll out tomorrow's gear, tomorrow.

Today, I think a major conflict is going to consist of rolling out everything we've got and winning or losing before either side can get to that design/ prototype/ produce cycle.

The next major change will be autonomous weapons. The only thing holding us back now is fear of their use. If a situation develops where they are really needed they will be deployed at an amazing rate.

I think it IS happening, just not in the way we expect (or are aware of). The improvements are happening in infantry equipment, drones, cyberwarfare, etc., which are the areas in which the current wars are being fought. We're also seeing improvements in space warfare tech (when such is actually made public). In other areas, not so much, as the necessity isn't there. And let us pray it never will be.

If you look at the Arab-Israeli Wars of a few decades ago, they will be back to throwing rocks in two weeks or pretty close.

Most modern high tech munitions have a very short shelf life, so no nation can afford to have large stockpiles, and the rate of expenditure in modern warfare would result in near exhaustion of conventional weapons in a couple of weeks, small arms ammunition would last a bit longer but the machinery to make it is very specialized, something that was noticed back in 1939.

Computers in the 1990's and 2000's saw a very rapid advance. The Megahertz wars you could call it. Instruction sets and speeds doubled in 18 months or so and just kept going. in 1990 you had a 486 CPUs runnung at 50mhz, by 2007 they had topped out at 2600 mhz and manufacturers were going for aditional cores to boost performance as well as offloading tasks to graphics chipsets and sound chipsets.

You could also point to smart phones that rapidly grew from the limited power of the first models to now, but again slowing down now.

So you might get some rapid advances in a specific market and technology.

Without a world crisis of some sort, I doubt that you will get a broad spectrum of rapid advances like in WW2.

Weapon systems stay in service longer today due to the ability to upgrade and modify them. The most obvious example is the B-52H. The H model is light years ahead of the B model. The entire aircraft has been rebuilt. Other than the basic shape there is really no comparison.

The M60 tank used by the Marines in Desert Storm was much more advance than when the M60 debut. The M-16 has been in service since Vietnam and it is now much more effective and advance.

Will we ever see the like of WWII era rapid advances again? We already have. Desert Storm for one. You could argue that the Arab-Israeli Wars were similar to WWII rapid advances. Might make a case for the 1975 NVA invasion of S. Vietnam would fall into that category. But nothing on the scale of Barbarossa .

Rallynow, my first thought was of desert storm as well.

One should not mistake rapid advancement for accelerated introduction, upscaling and generally throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Yes we had jet engines, but they were still immature designs, unreliable and thrown into service before they could be properly tested.

Going from a Panzer I to a Panther is not a rapid advancement it's simply upscaling. Panther's features do not differ fundamentally from that of the Panzer I, it still has the same propulsion, tracks, layout and turreted gun principle as the other tanks.

People like to point out how they went from biplanes to jets, but the basis was laid in the 1930's where advancement was almost as rapid as anything in the war, a plane built in 1930 could defeat almost any plane built during WWI and in the 1920's, but was in turn defeated by a plane built in 1935 and that same plane was obsolete by 1939.

Also some technology can mature very quickly, whereas other tech may theoretically offer a huge advantage, but can remain problematic until further technological breakthroughs. German jet engines were designed with performance in mind, but the technological limits of the day meant that their operational lifespan was measured in hours. Whittle claims he could have built a similar engine, but understood that if he built a more conservative engine it may not win records, but it would be much easier to build, maintain and operate with fewer problems than the German ones.

We see a scramble to increase the size of tanks to carry the heaviest possible armour and biggest guns, the heaviest monsters being abandoned during the war and until the 1970's tanks rarely exceeded 40 tons in many cases. It wasn't until the introduction of better engines and transmissions that some armies found room to up the game and increase the weight of their tanks and even then it would be somewhat premature, the Chieftain had many virtues, but a good engine wasn't one of them. When we look at Soviet tanks they were pretty good at keeping the weight down and still upgrade their tanks to a significant degree.

And we should never forget that for every operational jet fighter we got out of the war, we had things like the Maus, Habbakuk, and dozens of German "Luft 46" designs that may have been a designer's wet dream, but an engineer's worst nightmare.

Rapid advancement is not always a good thing. The Soviets embraced mechanized warfare like no other army in the 1930's and Stalin gave his approval to build tens of thousands of tanks, completely forgetting to invest in things like proper training, logistics, transport, infrastructure and everything needed to keep a mechanized army going. As a result the USSR may have boasted they had the largest tank pool in the world, it was utterly ineffective because the rest of the project fell by the wayside and most ended up rusting in marshaling yards until they were unfit for service, if they were ever fit to begin with …

Not all of the weapons advanced quickly in the WWII. For example the average infantryman was still armed with a bolt action rifle, many of which were based on 40 years old designs. And often he was supported by a water-cooled machine gun which could also be from the pre-WWI era. Sub-machine guns gained a lot of popularity during the war, but the major effort was not put into improving their performance, but coming up with designs that could be mass produced easily – many of the pre-war designs being rather work-intensive. Modern weapon designs included semi-automatic rifles (most succesfully introduced by US), M1 carbine and the German sturmgewehr.

On the other end of the scale there is the atomic bomb – something that really had never been done before.