Stalemated industry

Stalemated Industry - there are very few potential competitive advantages, and those available are small. In the steel industry, for example, it is hard to differentiate the product or decrease the manufacturing cost. Companies can attempt to hire better marketing staff, and can entertain more lavishly, but these are small advantages. Profitability is usually unrelated to market share. 

The Germans began in 1915 to use poison gas on the battlefield, hoping to use their superiority in the industry to break a stalemate on the front. The British and French of course responded in kind. The first poison gas was chlorine soon after, both sides began developing new toxic agents such as mustard gas and chloropicrin. 

Everyone at first expected it to be all over by Christmas 1914, of course. But the unexpected halt of the Germans at the Marne, and subsequent stalemate on the Russian, Alpine and Western Fronts, brought university academics, professional societies, and manufacturers, as well as workers in agriculture, industry, health, communication and transportation, to respond to King and Kaiser with a crusading sense of national purpose which the major powers of Europe had not seen for a hundred years. 

Unprecedented destruction was an inevitable result of this new war of materiel. By the end of November 1914, the war had seen the end of pre-war sttategic assumptions based on men and mobility. The Western Front had become a warren of trenches and obstacles, with armies reduced to deadlock and stalemate. Innovations in weapons were driven by tactical necessities. New weapons systems dominated the terrain. Above all, there was the artillery, as Strachan has put it, In the First World War, the artillery was the agent of industrial and social mobilization . While... 

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