r/NonCredibleDefense • u/-FantasticFoxx- PLAYING IN THE SAND (again) • 4d ago

Premium Propaganda OOH, I’M ‘BOUT TO ACT A FOOL

Twitter/X has recently been debating as to whether modern Africa could beat 1939 Germany in a war

…Found the hypothetical rather amusing

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u/dox2EwJn6iZh 4d ago

And the next 100? How about the next 1000? Where are Iglas manufacturered in Africa?

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u/oretah_ 3d ago

You forget that South Africa has a pretty large (even if it's shrinking) domestic military industry. They could easily CTRL+C CTRL+V their factories into other countries. They don't even have to make their most advanced tech, the stuff they made in the 90s is already leaps and bounds ahead of anything available in 1940s Europe.

Honestly, Egypt, South Africa, Algeria and Morocco for good measure, could tagteam their way from Portugal to the Urals very quickly, and everyone else just becomes occupation forces in conquered territory

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u/Ok-Reindeer-5875 3d ago

Nonono, you dont understand, Europe is allowed to expand their industry during the war but Africa is not allowed to

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u/dox2EwJn6iZh 3d ago

They're certainly allowed to but with what can be built nose to tail in Africa, without imports, it hardly moves the needle

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u/Ok-Reindeer-5875 3d ago

I mean Europe couldnt do jack shit, on their onw they have no rubber, virtually no oil, like a 10th animal feed nor much fertilizer to speak of

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u/dox2EwJn6iZh 3d ago

It really depends how you define Europe, I've always taken it to mean everything west of the Urals plus the UK, that region alone, in 1939 produced just north of 260 million barrels of oil a year, more than sufficient for their needs

Artifical fertilizer is a piece of tech from 1909 (Haber-Bosch process) and synthetic rubber production was already up and running, at least in Germany in 1939

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u/BadassMcMuffin22 9h ago

Wartime peak of Germanies synthetic rubber production was 120,000 tons a year, after five years of high-priority investment and expansion. It was no where enough to meet to meet their own needs, let alone the continent.

For comparison, WW2 USA produced just under 2mil a year, and Africa currently grows 1.5mil a year.

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u/dox2EwJn6iZh 9h ago

You're looking at german production alone, and they managed that undrr wartime conditions and blockaded by the RN, sprinkle a Lil bit of that in each country and they're building trampolines with the surplus

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u/BadassMcMuffin22 8h ago

Okay, its still going to take a hell of alot of time (it took the US 4 years to build its production up to that 2mil figure), and in the meantime Africa is going to be doing its own industrialization, without having to devote anything to synthetic rubber.

Africa has all the raw resources it needs to be an industrial powerhouse, the only reason it isn't is because it hasn't been allowed to, either directly by colonial overlords, or indirectly by perverse economic interests driven by globalization.

Remove those constraints, give them an existential, threat, and they will very quickly figure it the fuck out, especially since they would have access to the combined sum of all human engineering and construction knowledge up to 2026 via the libraries of their research and engineering institutes.