One of the things I learned in the Dark Ages
was that there is no perfect TOE, no perfect piece of equipment, no perfectly trained forces and no way to determine what the effects of Mission, Enemy, Time, Terrain, Troops available and local population and infrastructure will have on ones organization and plans. That's a long way of saying that any attempt to 'study' or rationalize the question(s) at hand is going to fail because the parameters are entirely too many and varied.
So Armies blunder around and sustain some losses and achieve some successes and the key parameter is generally competent leadership and good, smart and intuitive commanders.
As I've grown older, I've watched literally dozens of pseudo scientific approaches to the amelioration of those problems and virtually all have seemed at least somewhat successful in the laboratory, testing ground or conference room while foundering badly when exposed to actual combat.
Penalty of trying to turn an art in to a science, I suspect.
Great in theory but the harsh reality is
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Originally Posted by
Timothy OConnor
Great in theory but the harsh reality is that at some point a congressman puts into place an appropriation for a weapon system, etc. and you end up with APCs that can't carry a squad or VTOLs that approach an LZ with the grace of a commerical airliner...
actually that the Congress Critter in most cases is merely concerned with any tangible benefit to his or her District. Were that not the case, they'd be willing to double the training budget instead of forcing buys of expensive equipment that too many administrations over the years, too many service chiefs have not wanted.
That APC you mentioned and that VTOL are examples of that. They are also examples of systems effectively desired by the services for specific missions -- missions that got changed by those METT-T factors I cited. The Bradley was not great but was fairly good for its initially designed theater and mission (among other things, it needed to be able to be transported on European railways, thus its size constraint). It is not great for other theaters and missions; thus the flaw is not that no one thought about what was needed. They did and they did a good job -- they just assumed that the world situation would remain static and it does not.
Your efforts will be doomed by the same phenomenon; your product will work for the here and now but is unlikely to be able to cope with the dynamics of change. That's a people thing.
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...All of that blundering from policy and doctrine determination to training and procurement and finally to action on the battlefield results in guys at Walter Reed missing limbs or losing their lives.
All of that blundering is from human fallibility. You got a cure for that?
I've been around the world and back in both directions due to policy and doctrinal blunders, seen poor training and flawed equipment and seen a lot of bodies that didn't need to be dead. The majority of those errors were also due to human fallibility -- and a number of the humans involved tried to institute a more 'scientific' approach to policy, equipment design, procurement, doctrine, training and / or a lot of other things. When you come up with a methodology that will correct for the inability of metrics and other such inappropriate considerations to compensate for human flaws, you may be on to something.
All of the questions you raised in your 1651 post are valid -- they can be scientifically sorted and answered today and today's likely scenarios and locales. Will those answers still be appropriate in 15 year or 20 years in an unforeseen scenario in a locale not even dreamed of being a problem location?
As an aside, you also in that post said that wm's theoretical situation was absurd -- it wasn't, I have seen near replicas of those attack and defend situations on more than one occasion.
Back to my 15-20 years hence question; until then, as you said:
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Like I wrote, you can never, ever have perfect solutions because the requirements are so varied relative to cost and available resources....
However, you left out the all important "multivaried terms and locales of application," in front of the word 'cost.'
Realize that real cure for your 'problem' is significantly improved training because better trained people will not get tunnel vision, will not fixate on one theater or form of warfare and will design organizations and specify equipment that will better do the job in most places most of the time -- we will never design such that will always do the job everywhere and to waste time and effort attempting to do so is, of course, your prerogative.
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...And precisely because it's not a science and rather an art teasing out assumptions and opinions is absolutely critical since unchallenged opinions have killed a lot of people.
No, attempting to convert art in to science sullies and lessens both while unchallenged opinions never killed anyone -- misjudgments, failure or inability to adapt and incompetence have killed millions.