Culture battle: Selective use of history should not be used to justify the status quo

[Mark O'Neill]

Hi WM,

I do not share you enthusiasm for endorsement of the good Colonel's surety of future vision regarding future conflicts.

If he (or any anyone else here) is that good at being certain about predicting future events, I wish that he would tell us who will win the next Kentucky Derby - that way we can all put a bet on, and help Dave out with the site sponsorship!

I believe that Colin S. Gray is correct in his new book Fighting Maxims with maxim # 38 : " The future is not foreseeable: Nothing dates so rapidly as today's tomorrow".

An aside - during my service in Africa I met a few Sangomas ('Witch Doctors') - none of these 'magic men' felt as certain about predicting the future as many of the earnest military sages that occasionally predict on these pages and in the spread of literature that most of us here read.
I guess that the locals did not regard these guys as 'wise men' for no reason...


Regarding another aspect discussed by Tom,

I have always thought that the MDMP was the military equivalent of the old adage that " enough monkeys with typewriters, given enough time, will eventually write Shakespeare".

I think the MDMP is almost the ultimate expression of the military training ideal - that even the lowest common denominator can be trained to do just about anything.

My time as a 'tactics instructor' (not sure that is a good label) proved to me that you cannot teach tactical smarts. People either get it or are ultimately just adequate (but in any new or unfamiliar scenario that requires original thought, as opposed to rote responses, they are catastrophes waiting to happen).

I have seen plenty of clowns who can recite verbatim every step and process of the MDMP - and use it in 'school', but could not find their a#$e in the dark, let alone resolve the dynamics of movement, friction, fires and terrain out on the ground - let alone what the enemy might be doing.

The MDMP satisfies the military's love of process , and in the absence of a real enemy 'vote' to sort out who is a fool or a failure in peacetime, provides yet another perfectly pointless measure with which we can we can sort out degrees of excellence for OER and other reporting and assessment.