William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[carl]

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 am not. That was exactly my point. Grant was Grant because he had what it took. Excel had nothing to do with it. Written and verbal messages did the trick. He also didn't have a TOC with lots of individual monitors and some really big TV screens in the front. He had a horse, a camp stool, a tent, a table, paper, pens and that new fangled telegraph, which produced written messages.

As I said, what concerns me is that nowadays proficiency with excel spreadsheet making may shade the actual fighting and leading ability. Sort of like "Promote Capt. R.S. MacKenzie? No, he can't even do the simplest spreadsheet."

I would suggest that Viscount Slim shares my view. On page 194 of his book Defeat into Victory, he says

Oh geesh WM. That's like saying "I think Jim Thorpe would agree with me that good athletes have strength and endurance."

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.

Oh. Right up there with the Iron Brigade and the Forrest's Cavalry. There, that is my smart aleck comment for the morning.

The point is referencing small units that aren't fighting units in a time without a big war isn't a convincing argument for much of anything.

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.

Never say never when it comes to ship fighting because you never know. At any rate ASW will probably involve ship to ship fighting.

But if you don't like the Slot, how about the picket destroyers north of Okinawa? In either case, men drowned, were rent limb from limb or were burned up or all three, over and over and over. The point was we haven't seen any serious naval fighting since WWII.