Apropos of nothing, let me say this:
There is a saying amongst car enthusiasts that goes: Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.
Basically, the company who wins at the Daytona 500 is going to see a jump in sales over the course of the next week.
The same thing holds true for Military hardware. After Vietnam, nations lined up to buy Soviet stuff. SA2s, T55s, T62s, etc. Now, granted, the Soviet model was a lot different from the western: their "client" states were just that, and got single-sourced from Mother Russia whether they liked it or not (shut up, Romania). But it held that they bought from the big winners.
Fast forward to ODS, and now suddenly you have a _lot_ of M1 buyers, and a lot more Apache and F16 customers. Even after OIF, orders for western equipment are still pretty high. "Quantity has a quality all its own" and "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" don't matter that much any more. It's not going to be 50000 AFVs pouring through the Fulda (it never was; if we'd held on all fronts, the Soviets would have nuked us, and if they'd started to win big, we'd have nuked them, period), it's going to be armored brigades breaking up hard concentrations but long before then it's going to be JDAMs from 32000 feet - most likely dropped by 60 year old B52s.
Who wants to buy 10000 tanks - even shitty, $650,000 "upgraded" T62s and T72s - when the large majority of them are going to be smashed into scrap-metal from the air? Recent Libyan events prove this out.
But the point of my original thesis stands: we won on Sunday, we're selling on Monday. If we did (god forbid) wind up in another protracted war where lots of armor was involved, whomever won would see the bigger sales of equipment.
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