Germany is actually a very illustrative example. They started remilitarization in earnest in 1933, Britain and France started around 1936, and those few years of head start let Germany trounce everyone around for the first few years of WWII despite their inferior industrial base.
That's ignoring the Free Corps, though. There was a lot of staffing up via paramilitaries. (Sort of like piling all your armies into Australia in Risk ;)
And I think it's worth calling out that Britain and France deliberately slowed down as a result of appeasement policies, not because they missed that Germany was rearming. That's what I meant in the GP post when I said "people willing to stand by and ignore obviously bad actors"
The Freikorps were not a useful force for conflict with peer states. The long-lead-time rearmament that Germany started early was gearing up industry and producing equipment. The Weimar efforts at deniable weapons development was nowhere near the open military work of Britain or France.
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