New Reality Seeds

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by dcarson

I remember reading tha tone of Italy's problems was they were the first nation to realize that technology advances made WW I equipment badly obsolete. So they rearmed. Which meant they had WW I.5 equipment and couldn't afford to replace everything again.

So if they bet a war won't break out for a while and keep doing R&D and then rearm just before WW II so they are ahead of the rest they would do better.

They could still suffer from cowardly and incompetent officers, though - one of the British errors during the war was in building up a successful deception about where they were going to attack Italy's East-African colonies. They were expecting the Italian Army to build up forces in the region that they didn't want to hit first, so they could just roll over the forces that were left; instead, the Italians mostly left the area that they thought was going to be hit, and the British had 'some slight resistance' in the area that they had planned to hit (since that was where the Italian Army fled to), but won anyway (because the Italian officers in the region were really that bad, on top of having obsolete equipment).