Even though I realize I'm not exactly arguing with anyone, here, I just can't leave well enough alone if I feel I haven't fully articulated my point... (probably the root cause of all my tl;dr)
Let's tell a story...
In the days before World War I, the population of Europe had been exploding ever since the Industrial Revolution. Imported fertilizers, including sea gull guano (yes, poo) from as far away as Chile were mined and brought back to the European motherlands because they were an absolutely critical resource for two reasons: 1. They were necessary to fertilize the fields for the intensive agriculture of the limited land Europe had for feeding its booming population and 2. those same guano nitrates that made fertilizer were also used in the creation of gunpowder and other explosives, critical for defending the nation from attack.
During World War I, the war was really decided in the first year or so of fighting when the British simply blockaded the German and Ottoman fleets from being able to get to their sources of nitrates. Their ability to feed themselves and resupply their ammo denied to them, Germany and its allies could basically just be bottled up while the other bloc of European powers waited for them to be starved into submission.
All the pointless trench warfare that followed was nothing more than a sideshow to appease the superstition that wars are won with soldiers, rather than a nation's ability to absorb losses and birth, feed, arm, and train new soldiers to replace the dead ones.
An arguable degree of oversimplification? Yes. But a necessary shock to the system for some people.
Oh, and the professor who taught pretty much this exact lesson in class to me was a retired US Army Colonel who focused on 20th century military history. Historians debate, of course, but I'm not just pulling this out of my ass.
There was, however, one hope for the German people, in their scientists, as Germany enjoyed a massive advantage in the sciences at that time, and a scientist named
Fritz Haber had invented the
Haber Process. The Haber process is a means of getting nitrates (for generating food and ammunition) out of the inert nitrogen in the air, which is in functionally limitless supply. All they needed was to build the factories and power plants it would take to perform the industrial manufacture (and supply the power for that industrialization) to produce all the fertilizers and ammunition they needed.
There was a problem, however, in that the Haber Process was discovered too late. There wasn't enough time to build enough factories to supply enough nitrogen to both feed the starving German people and supply its armies with ammunition.
Haber tried getting the army to use gas and chemical attacks instead of regular explosive ammo for the artillary barrages, which got him and Germany in general the condemnation of the world for War Crimes, but it still wasn't enough, Germany was still shooting all the nitrogen it could produce with the Haber Process instead of using it to farm.
Germany's fields by this time were desolate and overtaxed. All the food that was produced was sent to the soldiers, along with the ammunition from all the nitrogen that was produced. Everything was given to the military, nothing was given to the citizenry, in the hopes of holding out just long enough to strike a better peace treaty.
Then the German people snapped - they had been literally raiding garbage dumps for potato peels that had been discarded years ago because that was the only thing remotely like food left before they just flat-out resorted to cannibalism. They demanded peace on any terms, just to end the starvation. So Germany accepted peace on positively humiliating terms.
The utter devastation caused to the German nation, plus the fact that many of the soldiers never realized how bad it was getting, and thought that the humiliating peace treaty had been forced upon them by traitors from within, plus the lack of any economic recovery thanks to the unrelated Great Depression were what set the stage for the radicalism of the 1930s. We all know how that one turned out.
That was the consequence of the German leadership's choice to throw everything they had to the military, and nothing to their domestic production. The war may well have been unwinnable either way, but they wouldn't have gone down nearly so hard had they made other decisions.
Someone who looks at military history only through the lens of troop movements is only reading half that history... in fact, they're looking at far less than half. There's a gestalt effect to these systems - the decisions about whether to focus upon military or domestic production were not made in complete vacuum, the decision only had meaning
because they had to choose one over the other, and chose poorly.
These are complex, real decisions with massive consequences, even if you're only focused upon military matters. To completely cut out the mention of industrial capacity from a conversation about the military power of nations is to completely cut out some of its most meaningful context and its most far-ranging decisions and their impacts. That's a far cry from "micromanagement as a means of fake difficulty".
If you're playing a wargame without industrial capacity or a nation's ability to sustain casualties modeled,
you're not playing a simulation of war, you're playing Risk.