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Comment by jacksonkmarley | Hacker News Reader

This is a good article, and the story is certainly emotionally appealing, with the maverick who goes against the prevailing wisdom being proven correct in the end.

I wonder how this sort of story would look when put into the context of a large scale investigation into military strategy and dissenting voices. When these contrarians pop up are they usually right? Maybe there are heaps of them and 9 out of 10 times conventional military strategy is the better option?

Modern military history seems to have so many examples of leaders being wrong, including 'successful' ones, it's hard to extract a clear narrative in many cases.

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Taken from the universe of all ideas, a random contrarian idea is usually wrong. Taken from the universe of contrarian ideas pushed by domain experts and backed up by successful experiments, they're usually right. Paul Graham recently wrote an essay on this:

http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html

Ernest King (the red team commander in the second wargame) wasn't a random newbie: he eventually served as Chief of Naval Operations in WW2. And a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get. Amazingly, real-world experience is still often discounted by people in charge, which shows the power that existing paradigms and status-quo bias have on people.

> a successful wargame is about as strong evidence as you can get

Having direct experience with wargames, I have to disagree with this. Wargames are weak evidence that too often lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions from an n of 1. The adjudication of moves by blue and red teams by the white cell is more arbitrary than not, and white cell adjudicators will often rule in ways that continue to present dilemmas for the players for the purpose of extending the experiential utility of the game. Those adjudication decisions are not strictly (nor could they be) representative of reality.

Doing a well-run wargame is very difficult, and doing a sufficient number of them simultaneously in order to test a hypothesis (with an n greater than even 1-2) is almost never done.

Wargames are more experiential and exploratory, they do not generate anything close to evidence.

If leaders and strategists around the world could take one single lesson from the Covid pandemic, it should be that you must never, never underestimate the power of mental inertia and the status quo.

It leaves all but an elite few in the dust when reality suddenly changes in what's perceived to be an instant. Most normally competent people will behave as complete morons for the 6-12 months it takes them to understand the new reality. Of course, reality has been changing for a long time, but in principle there's still time to react when it becomes obvious to well-placed observers.

I'm sure that an organization that's able to internalize that lesson will have an immense strategic advantage in a conflict against a peer force. Whether that be a virus, a military adversary or a competing industrial entity.

The West could have ended the local epidemic in about 1/2 year with the help of mRNA vaccines.

While medical system is patting themselves on the shoulder, they completely missed the opportunity.

The missed actions were

a) human challenge studies to tremendously speed up the validation of efficacy and b) war time like effort to invest into vaccine production facilities.

Human challenge studies were rejected by ethical committees - like the risk of health of few tens of thousands were greater than the life of millions.

I am not sure what prevented the proper scale up of the production.

The mRNA vaccines were approved back in December and yet six months later they've only made enough doses for a couple hundred million people. What evidence do you have that a "war time like effort" could have ramped up production wildly faster than what they achieved? It isn't like there are any unused vaccine factories or production machines just lying around, and there'd certainly be no shortage of eager investors fund increasing capacity faster if that was possible

War time effort = create new vaccine factories when needed, share the know-how, do what ever necessary.

And when did they start to ramp up the production?

Moderna started ramping up back in August [0], two and a half months after they'd dosed the first stage 1 trial participant [1]. I'm just really not convinced that their scaling up was that bad that they could have done it six months faster. There are real bottlenecks involved, and some extremely specialized equipment. Not to mention that even in WW2, the United States' new naval shipyards took something like 9 months of ramping up before they launched their first ship.

[0]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... [1]: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

And they should already have started in spring or before and share the knowledge to others how to make mRNA vaccines.

These large-scale war games aren't just an opinion or a white paper though. Maybe better to ask something like how often an unconventional win in a war game could actually be replicated by an adversary in real life.

I seem to recall a similar response to massed small boats (simulating) taking out a U.S. carrier in war games a few years ago. Implying that the Persian Gulf is far more dangerous than previously understood. AIUI the Navy did nothing but cry foul. Maybe the strategy has been changed in response since.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborg...

General Van Riper used low-tech but effective techniques like using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders in a way that could not be intercepted by US ELINT/COMINT or blocked by jamming.

We are lucky Saddam did not have inventive Marine generals, because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime.

You're missing the part where those motorcycle messengers move at the speed of light, that the speed boats used were tiny commercial ones which could have never loaded let alone fired the heavy cruise missiles used and that blue force's defenses were off because the simulator otherwise would unintentionally target civilian shipping and aviation.

If the Iranians could have they would have done so already. There's a reason why they had resorted to militias and sectarian violence in Iraq instead.

> If the Iranians could have they would have done so already. There's a reason why they had resorted to militias and sectarian violence in Iraq instead.

A successful strike on a US carrier group would inevitably lead to large scale reprisals on both the attacking force and the nation launching the attack. Iran wouldn't kill a carrier just to prove they could, and would instead reserve such an attack for the event of a Carrier group attacking something of existential importance to the Iranian state.

As the old joke goes, Iran will fight America to the last Iraqi…

> because any general smart enough to be effective would have been eliminated as a potential threat to his regime.

Saved our asses in the European theater, in WWII. Hitler was an insecure micromanager.

His generals represented generations of military expertise. They were really good.

There's a number of places where Germany could have won the war, but were short-circuited by der dumkopf fuhrer

Hitler's problem, IMHO and only militarily, was that he was right more often than not in 39 and 40. He failed to figure out why, so. As a result, he thought working against military expertise was the silver bullet. That, and that there never was a real chance to win a conventional war against the allies.

Another general that comes to mind os Field Marshal Haig. He wanted a break through on the Western Front in WW1. He got a war of attrition, which worked for him and not for the Germans. So he thought going for a break through was the way to go. It worked in the end, but for the wrong reasons.

That being said, a lot of German WW2 generals are over hyped, first on their memoirs and then by anti-communist "propaganda".

I'm not sure about that. His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort. It's because they weren't capable of understanding the dire economic need for oil and were too zoned in on their domain of expertise (military engagement). Hitler for all his faults was one of the few who knew that the only important stratetic objective at that point was oil. He failed to get a number of his generals on that same understanding, and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.

That makes sense. I remember reading about that, but I guess it didn't sink in.

Oil was very important to a mechanized army.

Exactly. Most people think the Eastern front was an act of lunacy. In reality it was an act of utter necessity. Hitler's only chance of potentially winning WW2 (if there ever was a real chance) was to capture more oil in Eastern Europe. They were running on the fumes of synthetic oil created from coal at that point.

Stalin knew Hitler's objectives well because of how hard Hitler was pushing for oil in negotiations before they became foes, and strategically positioned Russia's army in a way to block Hitler's advance specifically to key oil locations, while leaving other locations relatively weaker.

> before they became foes

They were foes before they became foes. While it had the non-aggression pact, Germany could have easily persuaded Russia to give it a pass on acquiring oil by aggression in the Middle East. Germany had two reasons to not do this -- a long supply line for oil to Germany from the Middle East would have been impossible to defend if Russia wanted to sever it, and German territorial acquisitions in the Middle East would be of little value as real estate on which German people could be settled to live a prosperous Germanic lifestyle. Dictators planning world domination do not publish their enemy lists.

I think many people fail to understand that during WW2 the Wehrmacht was often forced to rely on horse carts for transporting supplies to the front. They didn't have fuel for trucks.

They didn't largely have trucks either. The 'blitzkrieg' part with tanks and motorized infantry was a small fraction of the entire army. The rest marched on foot or were transported on trains.

> and in some cases these generals sabotaged the oil effort.

This sounds interesting, do you have any sources about this?

> His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s.

My limited understanding of the eastern front is that: a, Hitler ordered the initial attack despite the warning of his generals b, forbid any (even tactical) retreat when the tides turned which eventually led to the destruction of multiple army groups.

> despite the warning of his generals

The problem here being that his generals warned against all of his other attacks earlier in the war which were amazingy succesful. I suppose he felt that he knew better by the time of the Eastern front.

Anything about Operation Barbarossa is good. There's a few YouTube videos on the channel TIK discussing the oil objective on the Eastern front that are basic and densely packed.

> His generals really screwed up the Eastern theatre in the late 1940s. Hitler knew they needed to secure the oil in the Caucasus but the generals were myopically focused on an Eastern advance and on securing useless symbolic military wins that contributed nothing towards the oil effort.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the attack on Stalingrad was a diversion for a symbolic victory ordered by Hitler. And when German forces were getting beat he ordered them to fight to the last man, and the general in charge was a rule follower and did not disobey orders.

In other words, I think you’re blaming the wrong person here. Germany’s generals were on the way to the Caucasus to do exactly what was needed (from Germany’s perspective) but Hitler stopped them because he was going crazy and wasn’t a good military commander.

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