"William Little" <wlit0613@postoffice.uri.edu> wrote:
You know, the logistics of ninja wars in anime settings has always
somewhat bothered me. They must be fundamentally different from any war
ever fought on earth.
Let's look at Naruto. Even in times of peace, it must be hard to grow
the number of ninja in a village. Assuming Naruto's year as typical
rather than exceptional, the leaf would have to lose less than 9 ninja
(of all ranks) a year for their ranks to grow. Yet the Chuunin exams
alone look likely to take a team or two a year, and the missions above D
level are explicitly rather dangerous. Otherwise they wouldn't need
ninja.
Actually I've always thought of this as being a historical reference, but
to the 20th century.
http://rwebs.net/dispatch/output.asp?ArticleID=50
Pre-war Japanese naval flight training, especially for the enlisted men,
emphasized quality over quantity, and has been called by some quick and
brutal. Of 1,500 sailors who applied as pilot trainees in early 1937,
only 70 were admitted, and only 25 graduated as naval aviators. Officer
trainees received more training and flying time, about 400 flight hours,
before graduating from "Basic Aviation Training," while enlisted pilots
graduated with only about 260 hours of flight training. For their
advanced training, new IJN pilots were posted to operational air units to
learn gunnery, combat tactics and carrier operations in what was termed
"Joint Aviation Training."
The weakness of this style was not exposed until the elite aircrews who
had trained in peacetime and gained combat experience in China began to
suffer heavy losses in early 1942. Failure to use experienced combat
pilots to expand the training schools, plus the dependence on combat
units to provide advanced flight training proved to be disastrous for the
IJN.
So Ninja villages have elite training programs that work very well in
peacetime and they have procedures to avoid all out wars between villages.
It's when these diplomatic procedures break down that the villages quickly
run out of ninjas and tend to get wiped out.