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This is a good article, and the story is certainly emotionally appealing, with the maverick who goes against the prevailing wisdom being proven correct in the e

This is a good article, and the story is certainly emotionally appealing, with the maverick who goes against the prevailing wisdom being proven correct in the end. I wonder how this sort of story would look when put into the context of a large scale investigation into military strategy and dissenting voices. When these contrarians pop up are they usually right? Maybe there are heaps of them and 9 out of 10 times conventional military strategy is the better option? Modern military history seems to have so many examples of leaders being wrong, including 'successful' ones, it's hard to extract a clear narrative in many cases.

nostrademons 5y ago
Taken from the universe of all ideas, a random contrarian idea is usually wrong. Taken from the universe of contrarian ideas pushed by domain experts and backed up by successful experiments, they're usually right. Paul Graham recently wrote an essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html Ernest King (the red team commander in the second wargame) wasn't a random newbie: he eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations in WW2. And a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get. Amazingly, real-world experience is still often discounted by people in charge, which shows the power that existing paradigms and status-quo bias have on people.
- marvin 5y ago
  If leaders and strategists around the world could take one single lesson from the Covid pandemic, it should be that you must never, never underestimate the power of mental inertia and the status quo. It leaves all but an elite few in the dust when reality suddenly changes in what's perceived to be an instant. Most normally competent people will behave as complete morons for the 6-12 months it takes them to understand the new reality. Of course, reality has been changing for a long time, but in principle there's still time to react when it becomes obvious to well-placed observers. I'm sure that an organization that's able to internalize that lesson will have an immense strategic advantage in a conflict against a peer force. Whether that be a virus, a military adversary or a competing industrial entity.
  - nojokes 5y ago
    The West could have ended the local epidemic in about 1/2 year with the help of mRNA vaccines. While medical system is patting themselves on the shoulder, they completely missed the opportunity. The missed actions were a) human challenge studies to tremendously speed up the validation of efficacy and b) war time like effort to invest into vaccine production facilities. Human challenge studies were rejected by ethical committees - like the risk of health of few tens of thousands were greater than the life of millions. I am not sure what prevented the proper scale up of the production.
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      The mRNA vaccines were approved back in December and yet six months later they've only made enough doses for a couple hundred million people. What evidence do you have that a "war time like effort" could have ramped up production wildly faster than what they achieved? It isn't like there are any unused vaccine factories or production machines just lying around, and there'd certainly be no shortage of eager investors fund increasing capacity faster if that was possible
      - nojokes 5y ago
        War time effort = create new vaccine factories when needed, share the know-how, do what ever necessary. And when did they start to ramp up the production?
        seoaeu 5y ago
        Moderna started ramping up back in August [0], two and a half months after they'd dosed the first stage 1 trial participant [1]. I'm just really not convinced that their scaling up was that bad that they could have done it six months faster. There are real bottlenecks involved, and some extremely specialized equipment. Not to mention that even in WW2, the United States' new naval shipyards took something like 9 months of ramping up before they launched their first ship. [0]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-supply-agreement-us-government-initial-100 https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... [1]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-completes-enrollment-phase-2-study-its-mrna-vaccine https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
- Perceval 5y ago
  > a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get Having direct experience with wargames, I have to disagree with this. Wargames are weak evidence that too often lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions from an n of 1. The adjudication of moves by blue and red teams by the white cell is more arbitrary than not, and white cell adjudicators will often rule in ways that continue to present dilemmas for the players for the purpose of extending the experiential utility of the game. Those adjudication decisions are not strictly (nor could they be) representative of reality. Doing a well-run wargame is very difficult, and doing a sufficient number of them simultaneously in order to test a hypothesis (with an n greater than even 1-2) is almost never done. Wargames are more experiential and exploratory, they do not generate anything close to evidence.
rm445 5y ago
These large-scale war games aren't just an opinion or a white paper though. Maybe better to ask something like how often an unconventional win in a war game could actually be replicated by an adversary in real life. I seem to recall a similar response to massed small boats (simulating) taking out a U.S. carrier in war games a few years ago. Implying that the Persian Gulf is far more dangerous than previously understood. AIUI the Navy did nothing but cry foul. Maybe the strategy has been changed in response since.
- fmajid 5y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborg... General Van Riper used low-tech but effective techniques like using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders in a way that could not be intercepted by US ELINT/COMINT or blocked by jamming. We are lucky Saddam did not have inventive Marine generals, because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime. Saved our asses in the European theater, in WWII. Hitler was an insecure micromanager. His generals represented generations of military expertise. They were really good. There's a number of places where Germany could have won the war, but were short-circuited by der dumkopf fuhrer
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      I'm not sure about that. His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort. It's because they weren't capable of understanding the dire economic need for oil and were too zoned in on their domain of expertise (military engagement). Hitler for all his faults was one of the few who knew that the only important stratetic objective at that point was oil. He failed to get a number of his generals on that same understanding, and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.

nostrademons 5y ago

Taken from the universe of all ideas, a random contrarian idea is usually wrong. Taken from the universe of contrarian ideas pushed by domain experts and backed up by successful experiments, they're usually right. Paul Graham recently wrote an essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html Ernest King (the red team commander in the second wargame) wasn't a random newbie: he eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations in WW2. And a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get. Amazingly, real-world experience is still often discounted by people in charge, which shows the power that existing paradigms and status-quo bias have on people.

marvin 5y ago
If leaders and strategists around the world could take one single lesson from the Covid pandemic, it should be that you must never, never underestimate the power of mental inertia and the status quo. It leaves all but an elite few in the dust when reality suddenly changes in what's perceived to be an instant. Most normally competent people will behave as complete morons for the 6-12 months it takes them to understand the new reality. Of course, reality has been changing for a long time, but in principle there's still time to react when it becomes obvious to well-placed observers. I'm sure that an organization that's able to internalize that lesson will have an immense strategic advantage in a conflict against a peer force. Whether that be a virus, a military adversary or a competing industrial entity.
- nojokes 5y ago
  The West could have ended the local epidemic in about 1/2 year with the help of mRNA vaccines. While medical system is patting themselves on the shoulder, they completely missed the opportunity. The missed actions were a) human challenge studies to tremendously speed up the validation of efficacy and b) war time like effort to invest into vaccine production facilities. Human challenge studies were rejected by ethical committees - like the risk of health of few tens of thousands were greater than the life of millions. I am not sure what prevented the proper scale up of the production.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    The mRNA vaccines were approved back in December and yet six months later they've only made enough doses for a couple hundred million people. What evidence do you have that a "war time like effort" could have ramped up production wildly faster than what they achieved? It isn't like there are any unused vaccine factories or production machines just lying around, and there'd certainly be no shortage of eager investors fund increasing capacity faster if that was possible
    - nojokes 5y ago
      War time effort = create new vaccine factories when needed, share the know-how, do what ever necessary. And when did they start to ramp up the production?
      - seoaeu 5y ago
        Moderna started ramping up back in August [0], two and a half months after they'd dosed the first stage 1 trial participant [1]. I'm just really not convinced that their scaling up was that bad that they could have done it six months faster. There are real bottlenecks involved, and some extremely specialized equipment. Not to mention that even in WW2, the United States' new naval shipyards took something like 9 months of ramping up before they launched their first ship. [0]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-supply-agreement-us-government-initial-100 https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... [1]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-completes-enrollment-phase-2-study-its-mrna-vaccine https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
Perceval 5y ago
> a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get Having direct experience with wargames, I have to disagree with this. Wargames are weak evidence that too often lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions from an n of 1. The adjudication of moves by blue and red teams by the white cell is more arbitrary than not, and white cell adjudicators will often rule in ways that continue to present dilemmas for the players for the purpose of extending the experiential utility of the game. Those adjudication decisions are not strictly (nor could they be) representative of reality. Doing a well-run wargame is very difficult, and doing a sufficient number of them simultaneously in order to test a hypothesis (with an n greater than even 1-2) is almost never done. Wargames are more experiential and exploratory, they do not generate anything close to evidence.

rm445 5y ago

These large-scale war games aren't just an opinion or a white paper though. Maybe better to ask something like how often an unconventional win in a war game could actually be replicated by an adversary in real life. I seem to recall a similar response to massed small boats (simulating) taking out a U.S. carrier in war games a few years ago. Implying that the Persian Gulf is far more dangerous than previously understood. AIUI the Navy did nothing but cry foul. Maybe the strategy has been changed in response since.

fmajid 5y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborg... General Van Riper used low-tech but effective techniques like using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders in a way that could not be intercepted by US ELINT/COMINT or blocked by jamming. We are lucky Saddam did not have inventive Marine generals, because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime. Saved our asses in the European theater, in WWII. Hitler was an insecure micromanager. His generals represented generations of military expertise. They were really good. There's a number of places where Germany could have won the war, but were short-circuited by der dumkopf fuhrer
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that. His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort. It's because they weren't capable of understanding the dire economic need for oil and were too zoned in on their domain of expertise (military engagement). Hitler for all his faults was one of the few who knew that the only important stratetic objective at that point was oil. He failed to get a number of his generals on that same understanding, and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.