Quote Originally Posted by Presley Cannady View Post
Falling in love with your own research is dangerous, definitely, but more often than not we're talking about people applying other people's innovations incorrectly--often disasterously...
I think that's a risk we take whenever we give up our faculties to authority, whether to math or to experience. To take a model and blindly apply it, without examining the math, its underlying assumptions, the facts on the ground, etc., is about as insane as trusting in the experience of someone simply because somebody told you he was good...
Therin lies the rub as they say...

In war -- not just in combat but in preparation as well -- the skills to do that rudimentary analysis may not be in the right place at the right time. Time will always be detrimental to a reasoned analysis. I totally agree that the most common problem is misapplication of data or models but my point is that war will force such errors far more often than not. Therefor considerable caution in their development and use should be taken -- and it is not...
I do not, however, agree that modelers arrive at different conclusions based on the same data. That's not a matter of faith, it's a mathematical fact. Given some data, there's a finite number of functions describing them. Those functions have to be homomorphic. If they weren't, then the data underlying them has to be different. That the data concerns human behavior is irrelevant.
Ah yes, I'm reminded of the famous Lancet study of Iraqi deaths in the war...

Not precisley the same thing but misuse of numbers is not unknown, deliberate or inadvertant. Trust but verify is good -- if you have time...

The problem, BTW, with that study was impeccable math was skewed terribly by very poor and dishonest data collection and thus GIGO occurred.
Furthermore, I do believe (or should say I have no reason to disbelieve the notion that) human behavior can be quantified. ... They will almost certainly be probabilistic. This is not a problem for me.
Understand and agree but it can create problems with the carelessly accepting and less numerate or aware.
Would you say this was the case at all scales of combat? And what time frame are we talking about for these observations? I was under the impression the modeling's been used fairly frequently in campaign analysis in recent decades. I'm not privy to the results of exercises, and data on conventional land-air operations is infrequent.
Up to the operational level for a great many, for virtually all at Tactical levels up to and including Division. All during the period 1949 until I retired in 1995 for the second time.
But the general aphorism that "people and numbers" don't mix well is disproven, once again, by a most obvious example: the medical profession.
Heh. We are two modelers presented roughly the same data and arriving at different conclusions.