5 ms·

> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of ind

> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare? I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack. One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy. One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict. One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles. One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks. How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?

distortedsignal 3y ago
How do you know which conflict you're going to fight next? Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict. Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required. I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now. TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan
munificent 3y ago
Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.
- tomxor 3y ago
  I think "can't profile" is probably the most accurate in summary. Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    The thing about benchmarking and profiling is that you need a target scenario. Even if you can simulate a generic representation of a given workload, you might have different workload, or your specific environment might differ from the norm. One could imagine an armed force that actually was well attuned to fight a near-peer power in a border conflict, but wasn't well setup to fight battle a continent away against guerrilla forces. This is a peril all benchmarking has, even when correct, it is still limited to its own assumptions and context.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gsatic 3y ago
It doesn't matter in the military. People aren't machines. And when you throw them into high stress, chaotic, unpredictable environments, the expections of performance arent like what you see in the movies.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  If everyone had a helper in ear with birdseye view from drone or sattelite that would clear up lots of unneccesary fog of war. I've seen footage where the squad leader has an audio feed with a drone operator fro ukraine
  - mlry 3y ago
    It might. But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation. You need to find or create a space and time where you focus on that input while you and your team are under threat. And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation. As I understand it (or surmise), the trick is that the drone operator sees your squad and its surroundings. So he can give you a shout, “Yo! People in the bushes forward to your left, eighty metres!”. You as the squad commander aren't doing the filtering on that channel, it's self-prioritizing. > And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you. Hmmyeah, sounds familiar... Aliens, with the Lt. back in the ship[1] directing his Space Marines and Ripley, right? ___ [1]: Or was he in the ground vehicle, that long low truck(ish) thingy with the ridiculously non-existent ground clearance? Been too long and I'm too old, can't remember.
DubiousPusher 3y ago
> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another. But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success. Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example. The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?
erikerikson 3y ago
Isn't this the problem we've been having? "Here are the parts of a full solution, pick a favorite to the exclusion of others." So... Probably the one that despite a specialty has the greatest strength in all the others. Certainly one who appreciates all the others as well as the other aspects you didn't mention
13of40 3y ago
Remember how the US went into Afghanistan with HMMWVs (aluminum bodied cars with canvas doors) and M16a2s (full length battle rifles with iron sights) and left with MRAPs and A4s. You learn stuff when you switch from training to combat.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  America didn't learn it forgot. Many people wrote about counter insurgency warfare in the 70s after Vietnam. Mind you much of it was political: "we're about to occupy a country where 20 million people want to kill us" would have sounded pretty awful at the State of the Union.
  - roarcher 3y ago
    The military took many lessons from Vietnam that didn't work in the Middle East. As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked well. The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up. There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".
    - dvt 3y ago
      Super cool insight, I wonder what the turnaround or bureaucratic process is of fundamentally changing an SOP. It can't just be generals mandating these things (or is it?). Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.
      - roarcher 3y ago
LandStander 3y ago
Paintball.
bratbag 3y ago
None of those things. The one who is most flexible and has the best ooda loop when under pressure.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Wait, isn't the point of teaching the OODA loop to avoid maintaining a legible OODA loop? As I've been taught it, OODA loops are a means of modeling and interfering with adversaries, not a tool for organizing yourself.
  - chiph 3y ago
    Both sides have their own OODA loops. The phrase you hear a lot (Hollywood loves it) is: "get inside their OODA loop", which means to execute your loop faster than theirs so you are responding & acting to your observations before they can respond & act to theirs. It may be that one side's OODA loop is dysfunctional - perhaps they have to wait on higher headquarters to respond, or has an indecisive leader - before acting and that introduces a delay that an opponent can take advantage of. How to get a tighter OODA loop? Practice. And modeling/war-gaming in advance any potential actions so your responses become automatic. Or at least "good enough".
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Probably not his point tho.
pfdietz 3y ago
You can wargame and simulate. It's not perfect, but it can give very useful pointers, especially at the strategic level. The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").
- jcranmer 3y ago
  The Youtube channel Drachinifel covers those war games, and the lessons the US learned (and didn't learn) from them in pretty extensive detail here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMK9a-vDE5zEmzgruoWAyMV1YijyWX-IR https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMK9a-vDE5zEmzgruoWAy...
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    That's a different set of games. The Fleet Problems were LARPing with ships. This could be invaluable for understanding (some) tactical issues but could not apply to understanding prolonged campaigns (that would be too costly). For that, the Naval War College did tabletop/paper games, lasting up to months, that covered multiple engagements. Fascinating free book that motivated these comments: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publications-by-subject/winning-a-future-war.html https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publicati... "Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that won a two-ocean war. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how that was accomplished. This book argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution." A whole string of vital lessons were learned during the gaming, which I can go into if you like (or you can read the book.)
    - jacobr1 3y ago
      One take from that historical episode that might be applicable to those on HN: the real value came from building the organizational muscle around metaproblems. How do we adopt the organization to a changing environment? How do we introduce feedback loops? How do we get good data and test assumptions? How do we continuously improve? Building that mindset and capability was potentially as important as any specific lesson on logistics or whatever.
akira2501 3y ago
It's entirely possible. They did it.. and, it went exactly how you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
credit_guy 3y ago
> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. I think that's correct. And I have 2 examples, one that proves it, and one that disproves it. The first example is the Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century. The master of the seas. In the absence of any real competitor, how was it supposed to stay in shape? Well, it was hard, it was little by little metamorphosing into a paper tiger. Admiral George Tryon [1] tried to reshape it again into a Nelsonian navy, but he died in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893 [2], one of the most consequential events in the history of the world. And one of the most unknown. With Tryon dead, the Royal Navy promoted people like John Jellicoe or David Beatty, one a perfectly competent officer with all the right technical knowledge, but with roughly zero fighting spirit, and the other a raging lion of a man, but too good to bother with the details of how to actually command a fleet. But how would the Royal Navy create an organization where the right people would get promoted, if there was noone to "keep them honest" ? My second example, or counterexample is the pair that was the exact opposite of Jellicoe/Beatty. It was King/Nimitz. I would argue that this was the most fortunate pair of boss/subordinate in the history of naval warfare. King was as aggressive as Beatty, or more. The ultimate no-nonsense guy, hated by many because he was so frank and intolerant to fools. We owe King the decision to follow Midway with Guadalcanal, and then to keep Japan on the ropes from that point on until the end of the war. But of course, nobody remembers Ernest King today, because one thing is to have the idea, another one is to execute. And Nimitz was the one who executed flawlessly. In my book, Midway is well ahead of Trafalgar or Tsushima. At both Trafalgar and Tsushima you had a better fleet obliterating the worse one. But at Midway, it was the underdog that won. And won because Nimitz put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place ahead of time. Replace Nimitz with Nelson, or Togo, or Yamamoto, and the US loses at Midway. But Nimitz did it, and with it basically won the war in the Pacific. My puzzle is this: how was it possible for a nation at peace to create an organization like the US Navy that promoted Ernest King and Chester Nimitz (and Spruance, and Halsey)? I don't have an answer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  I think it largely comes down to staff quality: - US flew quite a number of sorties that weren’t directly effective, at high casualties, to delay and “stuff up” the Japanese fleet - US use of kamikaze attack rattled the Japanese command - Miles Browning wrote a paper about exactly the tactic used at Midway against the Japanese [1] You can (and the US did) shuffle commanders as needed — but you can’t suddenly create enlisted to do the dirty work or experts with the right ideas. Those require existing culture. Similarly, with a robust industrial base, you can pivot your manufacturing efforts (eg, battleships to carriers) — but you can’t build entirely new factories of skilled workers very quickly (eg, US struggles to build shells for Ukraine). Perhaps this is a simplistic view, but I don’t think you can have the right military at the start of a conflict; you can only develop a robust, rapidly adaptable military base. That is, you can only make the military anti-fragile. My advice would be to ignore the admirals (since you can always get new ones), and instead focus on quality NCOs, junior officers, and economics: they’re the backbone/framework of any future victory. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning
photochemsyn 3y ago
Well, in the next war the first casualties will most likey be Moscow and Washington, probably at least a 20-mile radius from initial ground zero, so there'll be plenty of room for promotion. After that, it'll be back to leading charges of soldiers equipped with sticks and stones. I imagine any idiot will be able to figure that out.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Promote whichever one of those guys has 9000 hours in Arma III and is a respected clan leader in the game
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

distortedsignal 3y ago

How do you know which conflict you're going to fight next? Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict. Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required. I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now. TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan

munificent 3y ago

Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.

tomxor 3y ago
I think "can't profile" is probably the most accurate in summary. Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.
- jacobr1 3y ago
  The thing about benchmarking and profiling is that you need a target scenario. Even if you can simulate a generic representation of a given workload, you might have different workload, or your specific environment might differ from the norm. One could imagine an armed force that actually was well attuned to fight a near-peer power in a border conflict, but wasn't well setup to fight battle a continent away against guerrilla forces. This is a peril all benchmarking has, even when correct, it is still limited to its own assumptions and context.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gsatic 3y ago

It doesn't matter in the military. People aren't machines. And when you throw them into high stress, chaotic, unpredictable environments, the expections of performance arent like what you see in the movies.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
If everyone had a helper in ear with birdseye view from drone or sattelite that would clear up lots of unneccesary fog of war. I've seen footage where the squad leader has an audio feed with a drone operator fro ukraine
- mlry 3y ago
  It might. But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation. You need to find or create a space and time where you focus on that input while you and your team are under threat. And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation. As I understand it (or surmise), the trick is that the drone operator sees your squad and its surroundings. So he can give you a shout, “Yo! People in the bushes forward to your left, eighty metres!”. You as the squad commander aren't doing the filtering on that channel, it's self-prioritizing. > And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you. Hmmyeah, sounds familiar... Aliens, with the Lt. back in the ship[1] directing his Space Marines and Ripley, right? ___ [1]: Or was he in the ground vehicle, that long low truck(ish) thingy with the ridiculously non-existent ground clearance? Been too long and I'm too old, can't remember.

DubiousPusher 3y ago

> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another. But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success. Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example. The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?

erikerikson 3y ago

Isn't this the problem we've been having? "Here are the parts of a full solution, pick a favorite to the exclusion of others." So... Probably the one that despite a specialty has the greatest strength in all the others. Certainly one who appreciates all the others as well as the other aspects you didn't mention

13of40 3y ago

Remember how the US went into Afghanistan with HMMWVs (aluminum bodied cars with canvas doors) and M16a2s (full length battle rifles with iron sights) and left with MRAPs and A4s. You learn stuff when you switch from training to combat.

WeylandYutani 3y ago
America didn't learn it forgot. Many people wrote about counter insurgency warfare in the 70s after Vietnam. Mind you much of it was political: "we're about to occupy a country where 20 million people want to kill us" would have sounded pretty awful at the State of the Union.
- roarcher 3y ago
  The military took many lessons from Vietnam that didn't work in the Middle East. As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked well. The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up. There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".
  - dvt 3y ago
    Super cool insight, I wonder what the turnaround or bureaucratic process is of fundamentally changing an SOP. It can't just be generals mandating these things (or is it?). Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.
    - roarcher 3y ago

LandStander 3y ago

Paintball.

bratbag 3y ago

None of those things. The one who is most flexible and has the best ooda loop when under pressure.

cosmojg 3y ago
Wait, isn't the point of teaching the OODA loop to avoid maintaining a legible OODA loop? As I've been taught it, OODA loops are a means of modeling and interfering with adversaries, not a tool for organizing yourself.
- chiph 3y ago
  Both sides have their own OODA loops. The phrase you hear a lot (Hollywood loves it) is: "get inside their OODA loop", which means to execute your loop faster than theirs so you are responding & acting to your observations before they can respond & act to theirs. It may be that one side's OODA loop is dysfunctional - perhaps they have to wait on higher headquarters to respond, or has an indecisive leader - before acting and that introduces a delay that an opponent can take advantage of. How to get a tighter OODA loop? Practice. And modeling/war-gaming in advance any potential actions so your responses become automatic. Or at least "good enough".
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Probably not his point tho.

pfdietz 3y ago

You can wargame and simulate. It's not perfect, but it can give very useful pointers, especially at the strategic level. The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").

jcranmer 3y ago
The Youtube channel Drachinifel covers those war games, and the lessons the US learned (and didn't learn) from them in pretty extensive detail here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMK9a-vDE5zEmzgruoWAyMV1YijyWX-IR https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMK9a-vDE5zEmzgruoWAy...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  That's a different set of games. The Fleet Problems were LARPing with ships. This could be invaluable for understanding (some) tactical issues but could not apply to understanding prolonged campaigns (that would be too costly). For that, the Naval War College did tabletop/paper games, lasting up to months, that covered multiple engagements. Fascinating free book that motivated these comments: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publications-by-subject/winning-a-future-war.html https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publicati... "Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that won a two-ocean war. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how that was accomplished. This book argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution." A whole string of vital lessons were learned during the gaming, which I can go into if you like (or you can read the book.)
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    One take from that historical episode that might be applicable to those on HN: the real value came from building the organizational muscle around metaproblems. How do we adopt the organization to a changing environment? How do we introduce feedback loops? How do we get good data and test assumptions? How do we continuously improve? Building that mindset and capability was potentially as important as any specific lesson on logistics or whatever.

akira2501 3y ago

It's entirely possible. They did it.. and, it went exactly how you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

credit_guy 3y ago

> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. I think that's correct. And I have 2 examples, one that proves it, and one that disproves it. The first example is the Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century. The master of the seas. In the absence of any real competitor, how was it supposed to stay in shape? Well, it was hard, it was little by little metamorphosing into a paper tiger. Admiral George Tryon [1] tried to reshape it again into a Nelsonian navy, but he died in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893 [2], one of the most consequential events in the history of the world. And one of the most unknown. With Tryon dead, the Royal Navy promoted people like John Jellicoe or David Beatty, one a perfectly competent officer with all the right technical knowledge, but with roughly zero fighting spirit, and the other a raging lion of a man, but too good to bother with the details of how to actually command a fleet. But how would the Royal Navy create an organization where the right people would get promoted, if there was noone to "keep them honest" ? My second example, or counterexample is the pair that was the exact opposite of Jellicoe/Beatty. It was King/Nimitz. I would argue that this was the most fortunate pair of boss/subordinate in the history of naval warfare. King was as aggressive as Beatty, or more. The ultimate no-nonsense guy, hated by many because he was so frank and intolerant to fools. We owe King the decision to follow Midway with Guadalcanal, and then to keep Japan on the ropes from that point on until the end of the war. But of course, nobody remembers Ernest King today, because one thing is to have the idea, another one is to execute. And Nimitz was the one who executed flawlessly. In my book, Midway is well ahead of Trafalgar or Tsushima. At both Trafalgar and Tsushima you had a better fleet obliterating the worse one. But at Midway, it was the underdog that won. And won because Nimitz put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place ahead of time. Replace Nimitz with Nelson, or Togo, or Yamamoto, and the US loses at Midway. But Nimitz did it, and with it basically won the war in the Pacific. My puzzle is this: how was it possible for a nation at peace to create an organization like the US Navy that promoted Ernest King and Chester Nimitz (and Spruance, and Halsey)? I don't have an answer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria

zmgsabst 3y ago
I think it largely comes down to staff quality: - US flew quite a number of sorties that weren’t directly effective, at high casualties, to delay and “stuff up” the Japanese fleet - US use of kamikaze attack rattled the Japanese command - Miles Browning wrote a paper about exactly the tactic used at Midway against the Japanese [1] You can (and the US did) shuffle commanders as needed — but you can’t suddenly create enlisted to do the dirty work or experts with the right ideas. Those require existing culture. Similarly, with a robust industrial base, you can pivot your manufacturing efforts (eg, battleships to carriers) — but you can’t build entirely new factories of skilled workers very quickly (eg, US struggles to build shells for Ukraine). Perhaps this is a simplistic view, but I don’t think you can have the right military at the start of a conflict; you can only develop a robust, rapidly adaptable military base. That is, you can only make the military anti-fragile. My advice would be to ignore the admirals (since you can always get new ones), and instead focus on quality NCOs, junior officers, and economics: they’re the backbone/framework of any future victory. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning

photochemsyn 3y ago

Well, in the next war the first casualties will most likey be Moscow and Washington, probably at least a 20-mile radius from initial ground zero, so there'll be plenty of room for promotion. After that, it'll be back to leading charges of soldiers equipped with sticks and stones. I imagine any idiot will be able to figure that out.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Promote whichever one of those guys has 9000 hours in Arma III and is a respected clan leader in the game

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]