William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

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I sense a bit of sniffing disapproval there.

Emotion is a rather important thing when dealing with human motivation, especially motivation of people fighting in wars since the war will get a lot of those doing the fighting killed. The people know that and yet very often they kept on going up that hill, running toward the Japanese battleships or land at Kham Duc anyway. The reasons they do that are many and I think, remember I'm an always a civilian, the most important ones are emotional when the steel can be seen or it is flying through the air so fast as to be invisible. So I very much see a place for referencing emotion in back and forths like this.

No sniffing disapproval. In a later post responding to AP, I believe I suggested leaders' need for both quantitative intelligence and emotional intelligence.

To this civilian defending excel spreadsheets as a military decision making tool is...silly. The great leaders of the past didn't need them and there were a lot of great leaders in the past. If they had them they still would be who they were and if McClellan had excel that wouldn't have made him Grant. The problem is for the military to find those Grants and I fear that if proficiency with excel is valued the next incarnation of Bill Slim (sorry British, we're taking your man) who happened to be a computer klutz will be lost to us. That is not a good thing.

Please do not confuse the tool with the skill. Excel is a tool that provides data for decision makers. Grant most assuredly had data presented to him that helped him decide what to do. McClellan may have had too much attachment to data, producing a species of the paralysis of analysis. I would suggest that Viscount Slim shares my view. On page 194 of his book Defeat into Victory, he says

From start to finish they [the men of the Fourteenth Army] had only two items of equipment that were never in short supply: their brains and their courage.

Most people don't think of it like this but to my knowledge all the ships of the USN have mixed sex crews and when the next big sea fight comes we will be conducting an experiment that has never before been conducted in the history of the humans, mixed sex crews in fighting ships in combat (and I mean real fighting the IJN in the Slot at night type combat, not firing a cruise missile at a third world nation). We'll see if this experiment works. I hope so because the price foe defeat will be very high.

US Army tactical SIGINT/Electronic warfare teams have had women in them since at least the mid-70s. These teams deploy well forward on the battlefield, farther forward in fact than most of the infantry, armor, and artillery soldiers. They will even be found either with or in advance of the cavalry units that are the advanced scouts of the US Army.
BTW, I doubt that we will see ship to ship fighting of the type you described between the USN and IJN around Guadalcanal. I suspect future naval combat to be like the action that took place at the Battle of Midway, with a significant portion of the manned aircraft replaced by missiles of various kinds. Instead of a picture of muzzle flashes as destroyers and cruisers slug it out with cannon fire in the Slot, a more likely better image might be the sight of an Exocet slamming into the HMS Sheffield off the Falkland Islands, fired from a delivery platform completely out of the range of the ship's organic weapons.