Chapter 1110: Chapter 119: The Third Five-Year Plan

The War on the Pirate Coast was just a minor episode for East Africa, although the East African Army did not perform well, it was within the expectations of the East African Government.

Since the South African War, the East African Army had not seen combat for almost twenty years, and fighting in the desert across nearly tens of thousands of square kilometers made it unrealistic to control the situation with just a few thousand troops.

In fact, East Africa ultimately secured the local situation through its old method of migration, relocating nearly two thousand people from the Somali region, along with more than ten thousand immigrants from the Far East, to re-establish a governance framework in the Beibu Gulf territory and relying on these immigrants to sustain the stability of late-war supplies.

The primary focus was on replacing the oases, villages, and water sources controlled by the indigenous populace, with the water source issue being the most critical. Before East Africa cleared out the indigenous residents, these inhabitants would use every means possible to assist the guerrillas, including poisoning the water sources of the East African Army.

This forced the early East African troops to deploy forces to guard wells and other water sources. Once the residents were replaced with their own people, East Africa drastically accelerated its local control.

As for the original indigenous residents, they naturally faced retaliation from the East African Government, either being annihilated along with resistance organizations or being displaced and integrating into other countries and regions.

The conquest war on the Pirate Coast relieved the British, as, despite the advantages in weaponry and troop strength, the East African Army did not demonstrate its expected superiority, which alleviated British concerns about East Africa posing threats to British colonies like Qatar and Bahrain.

In this war, the British provided only trivial support to the natives on the Pirate Coast, yet East Africa fared as it did, and the poor performance of the East African Army provided the British with a "reassurance pill."

Of course, Ernst himself considered the performance of the East African Army to be satisfactory, given that this was an operation in a foreign land without intelligence superiority, and guerrilla tactics are inherently troublesome. East Africa managed to stabilize the Beibu Gulf region within half a year, which was enough to satisfy Ernst.

Furthermore, Ernst believed that East Africa’s swift resolution was mainly due to the sparse local population. Any country with a population over a million and a certain level of civilization necessitated serious consideration by East Africa.

Additionally, the troops dispatched to the Beibu Gulf were elite forces from the Northwest Military District. However, under the broader backdrop of East African military reform, these pure infantry and traditional cavalry units were marginalized within the East African Army. To avoid showing their inadequacies, East Africa refrained from dispatching armored and mechanized infantry units, which might have intimidated the nearby Qatar British.

Lastly, and most importantly, this conquest war on the Pirate Coast was itself an unjust war. As an imperialist state, East Africa’s blatant invasion of the Pirate Coast was inherently on the wrong side of the moral spectrum. Yet, by leveraging imperialists’ overbearing nature, East Africa achieved its goals with relatively low losses, which was itself a cause for celebration by East Africa.

Of course, Ernst’s satisfaction with the war outcome and process did not represent the military’s stance, especially the participating units of the Western Military District. It is conceivable that the East African Military would initiate a trend of self-examination and correction, summarizing experiences from this war and reshaping the internal organizational structure of the East African Army, as well as responding to the war situation.

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While East Africa was conducting war in the Persian Gulf Region, the country’s third five-year plan was concurrently underway. With prior accumulation and the boost from the first two five-year plans, domestic industry in East Africa achieved significant progress, surpassing many former industrial giants, keeping the enthusiasm for the third five-year plan at unprecedented levels within the country.

During the period of the third five-year plan, East Africa officially prioritized the development of light industry. Despite notable improvements during the second five-year plan, light industry, as East Africa’s industrial weak point, still lagged behind other industrial nations in terms of both quality and quantity.

One major reason for the thaw in East African-British relations was the industrial disparity between the two, mainly referring to East Africa’s lack of proficiency in light industry, resulting in its relatively slow development, something East Africa could not accept.

In developing light industry, East Africa faced a serious issue: its plan could not perfectly resolve the market’s diverse product demands.

Given people’s varying needs, even with basic light industrial products, a single skirt, regardless of the same material, could be differentiated into hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of products by cutting style, color, thickness, length, width, and other characteristics to meet individual needs.

Domestically in East Africa, individual demands could temporarily be suppressed, but on the international market, foreign consumers did not abide by the East African Government’s approach, and the monotonous range of products struggled to compete with those of peers.

One cause of this situation was the East African Government’s lack of computational power. Even with all the mathematicians and statisticians nationwide on board, this workload would be unmanageable, let alone East Africa’s deficiency in advanced and efficient computational machinery.

Thus, developing light industry during the third five-year plan necessitated some economic policy shifts in East Africa, to moderately loosen the economy and allow the market to address this segment issue.

As a monarchy, East Africa initially did not repulse the market approach. The reason for strictly coordinating the national economy by plan was essentially for efficiency, aiming to elevate the national industrial level in a short time, inevitably overlooking some issues.

Of course, such economic policy adjustments in East Africa still required a gradual approach, not implementing change all at once, similar to experiments conducted before East Africa adopted a fully planned economy in the 1990s, with the period from 1896 to 1900 even referred to as a "quasi-planned economy era."

At the same time, East Africa’s current economic policy adjustment was also intended to align with foreign investment, aiming to gain more benefits from potential outbreak of World War I, thus necessitating alignment with the international market.

Moreover, as industrial quality improved, East Africa needed to open its doors wider, allowing some of its already relatively strong industrial sectors to compete directly with other industrial nations. This would also instigate competition within existing East African industries, preventing companies from resting on their laurels and relying on past achievements.

A typical example is why the civilian shipbuilding industry in the former United States struggled to develop over the long term, partly linked to the Jones Act enacted by the United States. After World War I, in 1920, the U.S. Congress officially passed the Jones Act, also known as the "Merchant Marine Act."

This act stipulated that ships navigating within the United States must be built in the United States and registered there, or at least 75% of the ship’s ownership must be by U.S. citizens, and the crew must be U.S. citizens. This act, by overprotecting the U.S. shipbuilding industry, turned its civilian shipbuilding into a greenhouse flower, completely losing its global competitiveness.

Of course, the inability of the former U.S. civilian shipbuilding industry to develop cannot be solely attributed to deindustrialization and high labor costs, but these are common issues in many developed countries of the previous era.

The problem is, apart from the sailing battleship era, outside of special periods like World War I and World War II, the U.S. civilian shipbuilding industry struggled to compete with other countries for most of the time.

As of now, for example, while the United Kingdom is undoubtedly the most developed country in the world, and despite the United Kingdom’s heavy focus on developing the financial industry which has left its industrial sector lagging behind the United States and Germany, its shipbuilding costs are much lower than those of the U.S. and Germany, monopolizing a large part of the civilian ship market.

Therefore, the existence of competition is crucial for motivating domestic enterprises to actively reform and upgrade. Naturally, even if East Africa opens up competition in certain industrial sectors, it will still be extremely limited, as East Africa’s current light industry is excessively weak, necessitating continued policy support, and only once light industry develops to the same level as East Africa’s current heavy industry can further market liberation be discussed.