The general rule is something like militaries fight to win the previous war.
However, technological and social changes cause tactics to change, and this changes how much central planning matters and how much more vs. less central planning is a help or hindrance.
So to me the interesting question is not why was WWII centrally planned (answer: people figured based on the Great War that’s what would help them win) but is central planning being used efficiently to maximize outcomes across a complex multidimensional space?
Sometimes the answer is going to be that, say perhaps in the case of WWII, less central planning would have resulted in more deaths, and so the deaths due to central planning were an acceptable tradeoff.
The general rule is something like militaries fight to win the previous war.
However, technological and social changes cause tactics to change, and this changes how much central planning matters and how much more vs. less central planning is a help or hindrance.
So to me the interesting question is not why was WWII centrally planned (answer: people figured based on the Great War that’s what would help them win) but is central planning being used efficiently to maximize outcomes across a complex multidimensional space?
Sometimes the answer is going to be that, say perhaps in the case of WWII, less central planning would have resulted in more deaths, and so the deaths due to central planning were an acceptable tradeoff.