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The new nerd-sniping question is circulating on Twitter. Who would win in a war: 1939 Europe or 2026 Africa? As usual, both camps are 100% their side would win.
My bet is on 1939 Europe. As the Russo-Ukrainian and the US-Iran wars show, ammunition stockpiles run out in a couple of weeks. Africans won't have missiles for their fighter jets and shells for their MBTs, while Europeans will be cranking out bombs and strategic bombers to turn Cairo into Dresden. When German subs destroy whatever boats Africans have, French and British navies will perform naval landings, their troops armed with reverse-engineered AKs.
Here's my fantasy scenario premised on the conceit that both sides become politically centralized under a unified government in order to make this purely about military-industrial-scientific capabilities rather than political randomness.
Africa has 1.5 billion people, so they can just pool their top 150 million smartest people in some city in the interior of Africa, have them design and build warplanes and nuclear bombs for a couple of years, while funneling all the resources of Africa to that nexus and using the rest of the population as a human buffer zone for any European attempt at penetrating to that super city.
Europe's win-conditions are either to penetrate to that super city or to back-engineer advanced modern tech they capture and then scale up industrial production of it sooner than the Africans can emerge with their advanced air fleet and superweapons. Given there's a tech gap of 80 years to catch up on, fat chance of that.
Two years pass, the Africans get a bunch of untouchable modern warplanes plus a nuclear stockpile, both inventories continually being fed by production from the supercity. At that point it's game over.
The European win conditions are impossible and so they get their cities decimated by bombing raids and nuclear strikes, then the rest of Europe is mopped up as Africa improves its force projection capabilities and sends soldiers over.
Basically the Europeans would need to master jets, missiles, computers, and so forth in less time than it took the Manhattan project to run (which I think is a fair estimation of how long it would take the Africans to achieve their win condition), so it's a race of engineering and science with one side having an eighty year head start. In all fairness any modern total war scenario probably comes down entirely to nuclear weapons and strike capabilities.
I think this is the weak point here. I don't suppose this is happening. Much less within two years. Africa would need to bootstrap an industrial base to catch up to 1939 Europe, not the other way around.
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