We Have Reserves in real life.
Military — In General
- In keeping with the Gallows Humor that is a staple of the services, in all branches of the US military a senior NCO who finds a private/seaman/airman doing something stupid can be counted on to invoke this trope with something along the lines of “Idiots like you are easy to replace, but damn it, that gear you were issued costs money!”
- This is, of course, mere humor. That idiot may be carrying tens of thousands in gear, but he costs a quarter of a million to recruit and train and probably has a government-issued life insurance policy to boot.
Military — Pre-20th Century
- Demetrios the Besieger would throw his men at the walls of enemy cities, not out of necessity, but out of anger or thirst for glory. When his own son pointed out how his men were dying for nothing, Demetrios lashed out at him, saying "Why so distraught? Are rations due from you to the dead?"
- An attitude similar to this served the Romans well during their expansion. While they were perhaps not as callous about it as many other examples of this trope, they were willing and able to sustain casualties that would cripple any rival state. It didn't work so well against the Germanic tribes, though.note
- King Pyrrhus won several battles over the Romans but found his army getting weaker whereas the Romans were able to use their manpower to bring their armies back up to full strength.
- The Roman reaction to the disastrous battle of Cannae, the bloodiest day in Roman history to that point, with virtually the entire Roman army annihilated. They raised another army and outlawed even speaking the word pax (peace). Interestingly, Hannibal, the winner of Cannae, knew it, and his entire strategy in the Second Punic War was a well-thought attempt at working around this: knowing that the Romans' numerical superiority mostly came from the troops provided by their allies in Italy, he invaded Italy with a small but well-trained and magnificently led army and started inflicting crushing defeats after crushing defeats in the attempt to scare and impress the Italian population in defecting to his side, thus stealing away Rome's numerical superiority. While partially effective, this strategy didn't cause enough defections, to the point that, right after Cannae, the Romans could effectively keep six armies in the field: one facing Hannibal and launching raids to slowly destroy his army, one in Northern Italy facing his Gaulish allies, one in Southern Italy facing the Samnites and the other populations who had defected from the alliance with Rome (this one would also occasionally fight Hannibal because most of the time he was in the area), one in Spain to attack Hannibal's base of operation, one in the Balkans to face the Macedons (who had entered the war because, after Cannae, they had figured the Romans were too weak to defend their allies in Greece), and the survivors of Cannae destroying the Sicilian cities that had defected to Hannibal. His situation only grew worse from that: the Carthaginians managed to destroy the army deployed in Spain, but by that point Hannibal's allies in Sicily had been destroyed or cowed into defecting back to Rome, the Gauls were broken as an effective fighting force and the Macedons had realized what was happening and sued for peace, meaning the survivors of Cannae could go to Spain and finish the job, the army of Northern Italy could pick off the Carthaginian troops that had escaped Spain and were trying to join Hannibal, and the forces of the army of the Balkans had been divided between the Northern and the Southern Italy armies to allow them to finish their job faster. Then the survivors of Cannae raised reinforcements in Spain and Sicily and invaded Africa, where they successfully stole Carthage's main ally.
- This really can't be emphasised enough; Cannae was the third crushing victory Hannibal won over the Romans in as many years, following on from the battles of Trebia and Lake Trasimene, the latter of which saw twenty-five thousand Romans killed, drowned, or captured. Three times as many Romans were killed or captured at Cannae. These were the sorts of losses that, had they been sustained by literally any other state at that time, would have resulted not only in the surrender of that state but probably its total absorption by the enemy. What does Rome do, by contrast? They just. Raise. More. Armies.
- Even before Hannibal, the Romans were so well-versed in manouver they could pull this on armies that outnumbered them: their frontline and rear-guard troops would switch position mid-battle, allowing their soldiers to stay relatively fresh while the enemy grew tired and felt like the Romans were outnumbering them until they either broke and were massacred during the escape (because the Romans were still fresher and would catch up to them) or were all chopped down in battle.
- During their civil wars, this bit them back in the ass: as both sides would pull this, unless one of the commanders was significantly better or got lucky the armies would suffer grevious losses, resulting in a greater weakening of the Roman military than it would be for other armies.
- King Goujian of Yue, a pre-Imperial Chinese ruler, would terrorise his opponents by having his front line march out to the middle of the field and decapitate themselves (or, in some accounts, slit their own throats, which makes more sense).
- Seriously averted by, of all people, Genghis Khan. When your forces are usually a fraction of what your opposition can muster in you need to preserve those forces. They never engaged in hand-to-hand when they didn't have to, and leaving wounded men on the field was grounds for a commander's execution. Overly aggressive types tended not to get promoted because of the casualties they would take. Also, Genghis was known for a Father to His Men approach—at least to his own people.
- At the Battle of Crecy in 1346, the French king Philip VI opened the battle by deploying Genoese mercenary crossbowmen and ordered them to begin firing on the English encamped at the top of the hill. The Genoese commander informed Philip that his troops were very fatigued from marching through rain and mud, did not have their pavises (large, anti-arrow shields
◊ that were particularly useful for when the crossbowmen needed to reload) and that their bowstrings were wet from rain, which reduced their range. Philip insisted that they attack anyway, which predictably ended in a catastrophe against the better positioned, fast-firing English archers, especially since the crossbowmen didn't have any cover against the return fire. Annoyed that his mercenaries had the audacity to die and/or flee the certain death that resulted from his idiotic orders, Philip reached the high point of his stupidity and brutality by ordering his cavalry to charge through the Genoese to get to the English. The French knights deliberately chopped their way through their own crossbowmen to try and attack the English... and the result was that the longbowmen promptly shot all of the knights too. - During the battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution, Lord Cornwallis's forces were on the verge of a devastating defeat. Out of desperation, he ordered his remaining artillery to fire grapeshot into the mass of men on the plain, regular and rebel alike. The rebels were forced back, but at a staggering cost to Cornwallis's troops.
- Revolutionary France, according to historian Eugen Weber, was the first Western power to recruit conscripts in large numbers. The traditional file of well-trained soldiers went out in favor of massive columns of ill-trained soldiers, and French generals did not hesitate to throw them at the enemy under heavy fire, beginning what Weber called "The Gun Fodder Era." When you have a whole country of potential conscripts as your reserves, you can afford to lose many more soldiers than those that have to pay a professional army.
- From the same era, one way Napoléon Bonaparte earned the ire of his fellow commanders prior to his declaring himself Emperor was because he was known to brag about the number of men he could lose in a single battle and still win it.
- In the US Civil War, Union General Grant was accused of this, being given the appellation "Butcher" Grant by some on the Union side after his high-casualty battles in Virginia. But he didn't spend his men needlessly (and deeply mourned the battle of Cold Harbor, the one high-casualty battle that was genuinely pointless), and was distinguished from previous Union generals by advancing after high-casualty battles rather than retreating, something which made the men happy because they could see they were actually making progress.
- A lot of that was because he was lined up against Lee. In the West he could fairly often outmaneuver his opponents, such his Siege of Vicksburg where he finessed a spectacular and relatively low-cost victory that happened at around the same time, and was arguably more important than, the battle of Gettysburg. In addition, he was fighting in the Eastern Theater, where there simply wasn't space to maneuver or to bring the Union's superior numbers to bear. In the West, there was such space.
- Even more for Lee than Grant. Lee acted as if he had unlimited reserves; he lost more men than his opponent in the 2nd Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, and even Chancellorsville. In each case, he took extreme casualties in an offensive or counteroffensive. He may have won at 2nd Bull Run and Chancellorsville, but it cost him more than the enemy, and he lost more men than any other general, North or South, even though he was on the defensive and led fewer men in the field at any given time than Grant. The CSA were already outnumbered and had to be careful with their reserves, but Lee effectively bled the South white.
Military — World War I
- The point of the WWI strategy of attrition warfare was "we have more reserves than them!" It ended up backfiring on the Germans, who lost a lot of their best men at the Somme and Verdun, while the British Army was continuing to expand and (slowly) getting qualitatively better. The tendency for British attacks on the Somme to be ham-fisted was counterbalanced by a German doctrine of immediately retaking lost ground regardless of cost, to the point where the Germans eventually quit much of the ground they had been trying to defend and pulled back to stronger positions, hoping not to have to go through that again and admitting (if only to themselves) that the high quality of their army had been gutted by the experience.
- It has been argued that America's greatest contribution to the war was just the threat that the Americans could provide the Allies with fresh reserves while the other powers in the war were beginning to run out of men fit to fight, pushing Germany to make a desperation attack in the Spring to knock the French and British out before the Americans could arrive in mass.
- Some WWI commanders would shoot those attempting to retreat without orders, or who refused to go over the trenches. It was a sort of preemptive punishment for treason. Although the number of men shot is grossly over-exaggerated, there were men who were under two suspended sentences of death for desertion or sleeping at their posts.
- Luigi Cadorna's controversial strategy for the Italian Army was based on this: knowing that his army was underequipped but most of the Austro-Hungarian forces were tied up fighting the Russians, he launched assault after pointless assault on the Isonzo (There were twelve Battles of the Isonzo River ) to drain the enemy reserves while Italy's industry produced enough guns to properly equip his troops. Eventually he succeeded in draining the Austro-Hungarian reserves, but before he could break through the Russians collapsed and the newly freed enemy forces were redeployed to Italy with some German reinforcements, resulting in the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. In the end he was sacked but still somewhat succeeded, as the Austro-Hungarians still had no reserves left while Italy could use their last reserves to fill the losses of the battle and then some, now led well by Cadorna's replacement Armando Diaz and properly equipped, with Italy's shortage of machine guns filled in large part by American and French supplies.
- Though it's worth noting from a strategic perspective this makes little sense, given the Italian army was smaller and worse equipped than the Austro-Hungarian army at the outset of the war, and Cadorna cared more for capturing Trieste, a town that based the Austro-Hungarian fleet, a fleet that did basically nothing, and was not captured by Italy until after the war. Cadorna seems to have successfully pulled off this strategy by accident by most accounts, having executed and convicted more of his men than any other WWI commander and having inflicted more casualties than he took in two of the twelve battles of on the Isonzo, and by margins that nowhere near made up for the other ten. The only reason his successor was able to successfully call up and equip those reserves was due to Ferdinand Foch sending six divisions to prevent Venice from being captured, with Cadorna fired as a condition. As well, Italy lost over 2,500 pieces of artillery in the retreat, more than ten times the 180(!) they started with. The damage to Italian morale, social fabric, unity, and treasure is often cited as a major contributing factor to the rise of Fascism.
- Then there's Aylmer Hunter-Weston, a British divisional commander during the Gallipoli Campaign. When a staff officer remarked on the heavy casualties his men incurred at the Battle of Krithia, Hunter-Weston asked "Casualties? What do I care for casualties?"
Military — World War II
Used by both sides in World War 2.The Allies
- Both sides had reserves, but the Allies - in particular the Americans - had better reserves because of their policy of rotating their experienced pilots, tank crews, sailors and soldiers back to the States and serving as the Drill Sergeant Nasty for fresh recruits; this meant that they were able to transfer their skills and experiences over to the recruits and produce a better quality of replacement to be sent to the front lines. Meanwhile, the German and Japanese militaries suffered greatly from losing this experience by leaving their experienced soldiers, sailors and aviators on the frontlines and limiting their ability to pass on their knowledge to their immediate colleagues rather than class after class of New Meat. That they later transferred what trainers to the frontlines made the quality of their replacements plummet further.
- The US did a kind of this in WWII where they sent out stupid amounts of ships, as quoted "the US built more ships than Japan could sink" which was meant literally. The sailors would be pulled out of the water and sent to crew new ships. This variant of the trope was less reprehensible than others, though many sailors of course did die. Of course, the US and its allies certainly did not neglect defending those ships as best as they could from enemy attack while they were at this, which included also building fighting ships as fast as they could to do so.
- There was a similar example with the M4 Sherman tanks; there were a lot of Shermans, and its use of sloped armor put its frontal durability close to that of German Tigers while its 75mm gun was excellent at the anti-fortification work it was regularly used for. Another benefit was that the Shermans were very mechanically reliable (because the manufacturers knew that they were going to be shipped across an ocean and not just a few hundred kilometers down a train track as the Germans were able to) and produced in far greater numbers than German tanks: even when knocked out the Shermans were easy to escape from with plenty of easy-to-open spring loaded hatches, and the much harder to replace crews were able to be re-fielded quickly in a fresh tank. The Shermans themselves could be either repaired or replaced almost instantly due to the American factories not suffering from constant day-and-night bombing campaigns. Things got even better once the more durable M 4 A 3 and 'Jumbo' variants were deployed, as well as the British Firefly variantnote .
- The cargo carrying Liberty ships were the best example of this. Designed to be built fast and in huge numbers, it was said if one carried a single load of war material across the Atlantic it had paid for itself. So much emphasis was put on building them quickly (the record for building a liberty ship was a staggering 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes). That being said, they suffered for it: it wasn't unheard of for welds in the hulls (welding was used in place of riveting because it was faster) to split open in bad weather even without the aid of the enemy. It was calculated the lifespan of a Liberty ship would be 20 Atlantic crossings, so once having made one she had paid herself and the rest 19 would be net profits. Amazingly, many Liberty ships still served in revenue transportation in the 1970's. Two of them are still functional as museum/training ships.
- Similarly to the Liberty Ships were the Boring, but Practical Escort Carriers; small, cheap aircraft carriers that could be built in mass quantities. The US built over 120 of these ships, which were used for various duties (anti-sub patrol, convoy escort, air support for amphibious forces, etc.) to free up the less numerous and far more capable Fleet Carriers such as the Essex class (of which the US fielded "only" 24 of the class) to focus on more 'important' things such as hunting down the dwindling numbers of Japanese carriers. For the Escort Carriers, ruggedness was not a high priority, earning them the nickname "Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable" in reference to their "CVE" hull classification.
- There were also the surviving American battleships. The USS Texas was built before WWI and quite slow when compared to the newer fast battleships like the four Iowa-class. She did quite well and is now a museum ship and the only pre-WWI dreadnaught still afloat.
- Not to mention the Liberty Ship's equivalents on rails, the many US built steam locomotives pushed into service during the war. The USATC S160 locomotive had 2,120 examples built, and were shipped to all allied fronts of the war. There were some issues particularly when British rail crews not familiar with American water glasses accidentally caused a few of the engines to explode during service. Despite this the engines ended up in Africa, Europe, Asia; with some returning to the Americas as well. While the S160 is perhaps the most successful of the classes, others such as the S100 or the narrow gauge S118 also bolstered wartime rail efforts.
- The British equivalent the War Department Austerity 2-8-0 had 935 examples built, not as many as the US equivalents or the German ones; but still a rather large class of locomotives for what was mostly British domestic use.
- When the bombings of Berlin escalated, the allied forces did all they could to provoke the Luftwaffe into attacking them. This caused large losses for both sides, but while the allies could replace the lost planes and crews fairly easily the Germans could not - German air crews that weren't killed were usually parachuting into British territory and became POWs as a result. It was one of the factors that eventually allowed the allies to gain air superiority first and air supremacy later.
- The American daylight bombing campaign proved to be staggeringly expensive in terms of human lives lost. The Eighth Air Force, which gets most of the spotlight for the air war over Europe, suffered 46,000 casualties, including more than 26,000 airmen killed in action (more lives lost than the entire US Marine Corps in that war, although in contrast to the Airmen, the Marines didn't charge en mass into enemy artillery fire as a matter of course). In addition to the 8th AF, the less-famous Fifteenth Air Force, operating out of Italy, also suffered severe casualties pressing their daylight bombing campaign in Southern and Eastern Europe throughout the war.
- Royal Air Force Bomber Command in WWII. Air Marshall Arthur Harris had nickname "Butcher" amongst the RAF bomber crews.
- In 1943 and early 1944, Soviet tanks suffered terrible losses from German Panzers and assault guns with a few rare exceptions. Soviet commanders had to rely on "quantity over quality" tactics until the refined T-34-85 tanks, IS tank family and SU series self-propelld tank destroyers were ready in 1944.
- Soviet penal battalions "Shtrafbats", consisted mostly of troops accused of crimes or cowardice. Сrimes could be redeemed by expiring the term of punishment (usually 3 months), receiving a combat injury or performing especially heroically in battle. In reality shtrafbats were largely just treated as existing for this trope's purposes - such as, attempting to break especially stubborn defenses.
- In general during this period, while the notion of mass producing tanks and planes of inferior quality was an effective strategy for a few years, it simply could not be sustained with manpower losses, because while producing hardware like tanks and planes is simple and quick, recruiting and training men with the sort of skill required to handle even simple equipment was a significantly more lengthy process. As was shown in the case of Germany and Japan, while they were in fact capable of continuing to put out more then enough military hardware to meet their needs, they were chronically short of the experienced crews required to man them. Germany had lost many of its best pilots trying to defend its skies, while Japan lost all of its finest Carrier aircraft pilots either at Midway or during the Solomon Islands campaign; while both nations were able to make good their losses of aircraft, they simply could never train pilots with the sort of skill to match their predecessors in a short time. So the lesson that could be learned from this is that while machines are expendable, the men who know how to use those machines are not. America, Russia, and Britain were quick to learn this lesson upon taking stock of their losses after WWII and realized that while quantity over quality had managed to win them the war, it had left them severely weakened with significantly lowered reserves of trained crews at the end of WWII. This may have been a key contributing factor in why the Cold War didn't kick off into full blown war after WWII, as both sides had to train an entire new generation of crews to replace those lost in the war, which took time. Then just a few years after the war ended Russia successfully developed nuclear weapons and suddenly there were very good reasons why neither the US or USSR wanted to directly fight each other.
- Well, that, and even the Allies had run out of even low-skill reserves by that point. The British were disbanding entire ground units to keep other units at full strength, the US had maxed out its manpower without dipping into reserves needed to run industry, and the Soviets not only only had enough men coming online to keep up their strength rather than replace losses, American Lend-Lease constituted enough of their logistical base that its loss would mean the immediate disbanding of formations to get them back on the farms and factories.
- The resources the United States was able to marshal for the Manhattan Project even while fighting WWII on multiple fronts is an industrial version of this on steroids. The US Treasury loaned 14,700 TONS of silver from their literal reserves, just for the Manhattan Project to make wire. Over 130,000 people were employed, including over two dozen current or future Nobel Prize winners and 500 full-time mathematicians.
- An anecdote relates this is how one German officer realized the war was lost. An American Private POW was sent a cake by his mother in Kansas through the Red Cross. Not only did the Americans have enough sugar, eggs, etc. for luxury food such as a birthday cake for a mere Private, the Americans could waste fuel getting it to him from thousands of kilometers back home.
- One German general actually stated that Allies would have never gained air superiority had Germany not spent too much resources on strategic bombers. But Allies also spent large amount of resources on strategic bombers, which means that both sides basically sent crews of strategic bombers to die for little military value, while actually harming their own ability to fight the war. In fact, USSBS has shown that German military production reached its peak at actual peak of US strategic bombardment campaign, and only started to slow down after the US re-focused on destroying Oil production and storage facilities over industrial production. It didn't help that the British Night Bombing campaign was instead focused on using the cover of night for petty terror bombing in retaliation for earlier luftwaffe bombing of Britain.
- This gave rise to the abandonment of Going Down with the Ship for officers that lose a battle. We Have Reserves of equipment, but a trained officer can't be replaced so easily. The Death Before Dishonor mentality instilled by Japanese officer training meant the Japanese officer corps kept getting worse, while the American and British officer corps kept getting better.
The Axis
- By the end of the war, Germany itself would resort to similar tactics. Because spare parts were in such short supply, it wasn't uncommon for entire tanks to be shipped to units for cannibalizing into parts. Panzer Brigades were organized with large numbers of the newly-produced tanks and Panzergrenadiers, but severely lacking in anti-aircraft guns, armored recovery vehicles and the general logistics that made German armor effective. Poorly-trained crews were often lost to seasoned American tank veterans. Sabotage from slave labor, less available resources and the constant bombing sharply drove down quality - post-war tests conducted by the Soviets determined armor plate on Panthers would frequently fall apart when struck with rounds theoretically rated to protect against. Ball-bearings for turret traverse mechanisms and hard, durable metals needed for transmissions were in extremely short supply.
- Hitler gave orders amounting to no retreat and no surrender to Army Group North, Center, A, B, and North Africa - ordering them all to fight to the last man. A common interpretation is that the apparent success of 'no retreat' in the winter of '41-42 - in the face of an over-ambitious Soviet counter-offensive that failed to encircle and annihilate Army Group Center due to command-inexperience and weak logistics - convinced him that German troops were superior (man-for-man) to their Soviet counterparts and needed only the moral courage to keep fighting for them to prevail. At no point did he ever seem to appreciate the importance of mobile reserves and operational/campaign-level withdrawals to a successful strategic defense-in-depth - the Wehrmacht basically had nothing of the former left after the Ukrainian autumn-winter campaigns of '43-44, which annihilated the country's stock of experienced Panzer-crews, and he increasingly forbade the latter and began routinely firing Generals who refused to follow those orders - even the most talented and indispensable of them, such as Manstein and Runstedt.
- In fact, this mentality was one of many reasons why the Germans lost the Battle of Stalingrad and, later, the entire Eastern Front of the European Theater.
- Also applies to the German U-boat service. By the end of the war, they had suffered a permanent casualty rate of over 70%. Yet, they kept being sent out on what were effectively suicide missions.
- The entire concept of Kamikaze attacks were based on these, where Japan hoped that it would have more pilots and hardware to outlast their opponents. One Japanese General noted that they were "like bees" in that they swarm to sting the opponent, but died as they done so. Japan would seriously underestimate their reserves, however, and with adapted tactics by the Allies, Kamikazes became less and less effectivenote .
- Kamikaze pilots also had very little training; usually given the bare basics on how to fly the plane (a literal "Crash Course" if you will) then sent on their way. This made them easy to shoot down for both US pilots and antiaircraft gunners, since they didn't know how to maneuver or angle their runs to evade the worst defense fire. They also often didn't understand the relative importance of different classes of ships or where to hit different types of ships for maximum effect. They often simply tried to dive straight into the first ship they saw, which proved to be much harder than you would think since the ships were taking evasive maneuvers and swinging around like tipsy drunks.
- The effectiveness of Kamikaze attacks was diminished by another factor. By 1945, the US navy was so large that damaged ships could be detached for repairs without harming the fleet's operational capability. The only ships that were lost to Kamikaze attacks were destroyers and other small ships that couldn't take heavy damage, and could quickly be replaced anyhow.
- The European Axis forces relied on the German built Kriegslokomotive classes, which had over 7700 produced in the most popular class alone. The Kriegsloks were so heavily produced some of them are still in service in 2022, switching coal mines in Bosnia.
Military — Cold War to present day
- During the Iran–Iraq War, Iran had millions more in population and feverous morale, which led to the Iranians recruiting large amounts of young and old in Human-Wave attacks against the Iraqi Forces. Of course, this was mostly due to the fact that Iran was being heavily sanctioned by both the Russians and the Americans, and as a result couldn't manage to utilize better tactics of equipment due to post-revolutionary purges against elements deemed traitorous to the new regime.
- The official policy of Egypt in the War of Attrition 1967-1970, after they lost the Six Day War. Egypt had over ten times Israel's population and more weapons than they knew what to do with thanks to Soviet support. As said by President Gamal Abdel Nasser:"If the enemy succeeds in inflicting fifty-thousand casualties in this campaign, we can go on fighting nevertheless, because we have manpower reserves. If we succeed in inflicting ten-thousand casualties, he will unavoidably find himself compelled to stop fighting, because he has no manpower reserves."
- The Israelis tried to counter since they could do the math just as well and decided to bomb Cairo from the air, directly and indirectly threatening the Nasser regime itself. However, it turned out, they could not sustain a deep penetration bombing campaign either.note
- During the First Gulf War, the United States' one-time Cold War ally-turned-enemy Saddam Hussein believed that a lesson from the Vietnam War was that the US (who formed the backbone of the U.N. taskforce to force him back from the Kingdom Of Kuwait) wouldn't support a war that would cost them 10,000 casualties. He, meanwhile had hundreds of thousands to spare and none of his subjects could protest the attrition. For one thing he thought that the U.N. would obey the letter of international law and seek to only engage him in Kuwait (they attacked Iraq itself, outflanking his forces and trapping them in Kuwait). For another, he seems to have forgotten the basics of force multipliers - i.e. his troops were catastrophically outmatched, so the enemy could be expected to take minimal losses (the greater the enemy's advantage, the fewer their losses). Thus, while the U.N. killed some 30k Iraqi troops they only lost 392 people.
- About the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." Due to the great technological and economic gap between the U.S.-led coalition and North Vietnamese-led one, Ho didn't have much alternative. It should also be noted that his definition of 'winning' differed from that of the Americans. In the end, per both sides' internal records, the Americans lost 58,000 dead, the South Vietnamese 254,000, and the North Vietnamese 849,000; if the South and North Vietnamese roughly broken even with each other then that would, in fact, mean the Americans killed 10 North Vietnamese troops for every 1 American.
- The United States themselves persisted in the war partially to invoke this trope. Not the soldiers themselves or even the commanders, but the government officials and multiple then-presidents who perpetuated the war under the assumption they just had too many potential soldiers (AKA male citizens) for the PAVN and Viet Cong* to handle. They were wrong.
- A rather cold-hearted take on this is sometimes cited by more bellicose Indian generals in response to the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction in the event of a nuclear war with Pakistan, arguing that it doesn't apply, since if an Indian strike takes out 200 million Pakistanis, it has exterminated the country, whereas if a Pakistani strike takes out 200 million Indians, they still have over a billion left.
- Similarly, Mao Zedong has gone on record as referring to nukes as a paper tiger, saying (to a Yugoslav visitor in 1957) "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left."
Non-military
- In nature, reproductive strategies are split between animals that have a small number of young and raise them carefully (K-selection), and ones that have lots of young (or, typically, lay lots of eggs) and don't care for them at all, trusting that there are enough that some will survive (r-selection). The latter strategy is a lot less energy-intensive and is generally used by more basic and short-lived species, while the former is particularly common among some birds and nearly all the larger mammals. Some kinds of rodents have and raise frequent large litters, leading to exponential population growth over a very short time if conditions are favorable.
- Eusocial insects like ants, termites, and bees use this strategy to defend their nests. Dozens or even hundreds of non-breeding workers and soldiers can be sacrificed when a predator attacks. So long as the queen is protected, she can replace them with her prodigious egg-laying.
- The human body is like this. It creates millions of white blood cells to fight infections and continues to create them until the infection is defeated. It works most of the time, except against diseases that attack the immune system itself or autoimmune disorders (when they go nuts and attack the tissues they're supposed to defend).
- In a non human killing way, situations or countries that have (more than) enough of a certain resource can act like that. Iceland for example has a lot of geothermal and hydropower resources; much more than a country of a bit over 300 000 people could ever use for domestic consumption and there is no way to export any sizable quantity of it directly, so while electricity is not quite "too cheap to meter", some of the energy uses tend to be rather wasteful. The famous "Blue Lagoon" for instance is basically wastewater of a geothermal power plant that is still warm enough to swim in the Icelandic winter. Most other countries would probably use it to heat homes, but there is just so much of it that this is what is left over even after all needs are met. Iceland has started quite a big aluminum industry because converting bauxite into aluminum requires a huge amount of electric energy and Iceland has a lot of it.
- Similarly the GDR had a When All You Have Is a Hammer… approach to Lignite. It was (and still is) the only natural resource found in any appreciable quantities in the area and while most of its uses are horribly inefficient and/or polluting,note it was still cheaper than buying other resources or technology to increase efficiency. In subsidized housing in the GDR people would regulate the temperature by opening the window as the heating could not be shut off and was paid for anyway. It's almost hard to believe the GDR eventually ran out of money.
- The US Federal Government and the Constitution have this in regards to the Presidency. If the President dies or is incapable of fulfilling the duties of the position of President, then the Vice-President takes power. This is one reason they don't typically travel together. If both President and Vice-President are no longer capable, then the duty and position falls to the Speaker of the House, thanks to the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The line of Presidential succession in case of emergencies is such that during any major get together of the President, Vice-President, and Congress, there might be one member of the President's Cabinet, and one member of each part of Congress secluded away in different locations, just in the event something incapacitates or kills the current body of the US Government, there will be people to immediately step into the positions of President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Pro Temp.
- The 'Designated Survivor' is We Have Reserves mixed with You Are in Command Now applied to the US government; in situations where a large portion of the US Government has to convene, an individual in the line of succession is shoved in a bunker just in case the event suffers from Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
- The Pædo Hunt can be this way in that harming children is such a monstrous act that innocent people have been set upon, targeted, assaulted, arrested and killed and some believe for the sake of protecting any child, such collateral damage is considered acceptable losses.
- Predatory pricing is a business version of this. Basically, a large company with smaller local competition will lower its prices in an area to the point it actively loses money, dragging away customers from the local competition or forcing the local competitors to lose money trying to keep up. Then when the local competition has all gone out of business, the large company will be a monopoly that can raise prices.
