Very neat! But slight nit, I think he's wrong about one detail. Specifically this part: > The reason the governments needed to economize even on the cheapest

Very neat! But slight nit, I think he's wrong about one detail. Specifically this part: > The reason the governments needed to economize even on the cheapest materials (hence the disgusting military uniforms of the 20th century) is that millions of ordinary people were drafted into the armies, where they perished by millions in the machine-gun crossfire, displaying their gut on the barbed wire. This, of course, is the heritance of the glorious French Revolution with its achievement of citizens at arms: the nation-states engaged into the war of mutual annihilation in the name of the higher goals. The war became total... The reason war was able to scale so violently was due to the Haber process, which is absolutely amazing in its own right. Says Wiki: > Fertilizer generated from ammonia produced by the Haber process is estimated to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population. It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process; the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea. Massive ammonia production that made guarding saltpeter reserves less critical. Germany (and others) were then able to create enormous stockpiles of munitions very quickly. Thus war became (more) total. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process