Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
Equally nice is the appeal to emotion found in a You Tube extract from a Hollywood production.
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.

Now back to the general fray.

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.

As far as women in combat goes, I figure way back when before the dawn of email and before even writing the humans did try mixed sex groups in combat. I think people tried everything way back when. It wasn't tried too much after that because the ones who thought that was a good idea lost their fights and they all got killed. The reason I figure that is because humans are very pragmatic and if mixed sex groups had worked in battle, people would have kept on doing it because winning is a good thing. Even people who couldn't read could figure that out. So the idea died and lay dead for so long that people forgot why it was so, it just seemed the natural thing. Then PC came along and it looks as of we may have to learn that lesson all over again.

And we will. 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.