"[A]s Britain's wartime record demonstrates and the contemporaneous surveys of postwar export prospects grimly concluded, here was no industrial equivalent of a panzer striking force, superbly equipped with the best of modern technology, its troops brought to a high pitch of morale and tactical training, and blessed with dynamic leadership from the high command down to junior officers and NCOs. Rather, Britain as an industrial society in 1945 more resembled the French Army of 1940 – its equipment (including infrastructure such as ports, roads and railways) largely old and outmoded; its tactical doctrines out of date; the standard of training of its regimental officers (in other words, line and shop-floor managers) often lamentable; its NCO corps (trade union conveners and shop-stewards) more devoted to thwarting the officers than obeying them; the morale and motivation of its ill-educated rank and file low, even to the point of recurrent local mutiny; and its generals (boards and top management) largely too timid, too torpid, too set in the ways of the past to measure up to the exacting role of planning and conducting a war of conquest for world markets."