The war machine bit reminds me of the predictions in the late 20s and early 30s by German fascist (non-Nazi) intellectuals, that Germany will fail in the event of war with the Soviet Union, because its reigning ideology was incapable of producing a formidable enough war machine.
Shubhendu Trivedi
As an aside: A curious side obsession in right-wing and fascist intellectuals (worth anything) of 1930s Germany was that Hitler will fail because the ideological apparatus he propagated was not capable of Total Mobilization, while the Stalinist one will succeed because it was.
