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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Now that is a useful insight.

It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacing the CEO.

This has come up a few times in military history. "L'audace, toujours l'audace" was a WWI French slogan. It took a huge number of casualties before high command got it that charging into machine guns does not work. Courage does not help. In WWII, a big change was discovering that battleships are not useful once the enemy has torpedo bombers. The resistance of the battleship admirals was overcome by Congress, not the Navy. Congress ordered that the captains of aircraft carriers must be qualified to fly aircraft. Sidelining the "Gun Club" took major political effort.

Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia", which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10.

View on HN

Probably that can be a useful insight in some specific circumstances as you describe, but it falls flat as a generalization. Allow me a snark: maybe a group of venture capitalists (many of whom call themselves "angels") might not admit a mistake. But many groups (not as grandiose as the military, though) jolly well admit and own up non-trivial mistakes.

I participate in several open source projects over 13 years now. And as jancsika mentions in this thread, various times I've seen mature groups of contributors and maintainers admit, and articulate, really difficult mistakes in public. Granted, these are small groups ranging from six to twenty-ish. Still, it takes courage and wisdom to do it gracefully.

I think what separates the two camps is a positive incentive to admit failure, which is where the rarity comes in, as highlighted by other posters. If the group's incentive is integrity and trust, or loyalty and retention, it makes sense as there's a capital (political, monetary, etc.) incentive in doing so.

That's where I think the insight cleanly falls apart and yet holds up pretty well for the vast majority of situations. Rarely are groups actually positively incentivized to admit failure, and therefore they do not, as a cohesive unit, actually admit failure as there's a greater incentive not to, barring force.

Groups can get a life of their own, like a virus. Those who do admit fault can be replaced with others who are vocal about not admitting fault.

The more polarizing, non falsifiable the beliefs of the group, the harder the change.

I have yet to make a mistake, but when I do I plan on publicly admitting it.

> I have yet to make a mistake

For some carefully chosen definition of mistake.

I believe that was humor, my friend

I think that might’ve also been humor? Some dry, mathy humor

The post you replied to was also humor, btw.

It's getting dangerously reddit in this thread.

HN has been Reddit for a while now, there's no functional difference.

As far as I'm concerned there's not much reason to care either.

It seems to miss the mark in other regions, but here in Denmark that is considered a bullseye joke :)

Admitting mistakes is one thing. Admitting that what the organization has set out to do is unachievable is another.

> I've seen mature groups of contributors and maintainers admit, and articulate, really difficult mistakes in public.

And do it right here on HN. Just the other day a member of the Python core team said the Python2 to Python3 transition was be a never to be repeated mistake.

> Granted, these are small groups ranging from six to twenty-ish.

And big groups do it too, apparently. In community groups I'm in saying things like "we tried this but it didn't work" is a regular occurrence. They make for entertaining, self depreciating war stories, letting newbies know things aren't judged too harshly around here.

In fact it happens so often, I wondering if all the posts here saying "of yes - that's right" is some sort of group confirmation bias at work. I wonder if it will be self correcting - and the group later come to the conclusion it was wrong.

> And do it right here on HN [...] And big groups do it too, apparently [...]

Indeed; all this is old news for anyone who has worked in open source communities for a decent chunk of time (say, six years at least). It's the "angels" that are disconnected from real world that tend to stretch a small observation into a sweeping generalization, in the name of "insight". The cynic in me says, "they're doing it for the clicks and brand-building."

I think the essay is strongly written — never is a strong word — but it resonated with me because of a personal experience.

In that experience part of the problem was that those who disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or because they were driven away, or something in between. So there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "surviving" sort of meant staying with the group.

It's interesting to think about how this applies to your WWI examples, where the people in the position of admitting mistake are still alive, and there's a very literal survivorship bias with regard to group membership.

Anyway, when you have an entity that can change in composition, it affects what is involved in admitting to mistakes, because the people making the mistakes might be different from those who would admit to them.

Indeed - my personal experience of this was at my business - I would admit my and our mistakes to the extent that the perception became that I was the source of all of our failures.

My partner was and is a person who is never wrong, never fails, never makes a mistake - it’s always someone else who stymied his ambitions, or circumstance, or just bad luck. Never an error.

I left, after a decade. It was partly of my own volition, but the moment I voiced the possibility he, and our investor, couldn’t show me the door quickly enough.

Now, here’s the rub.

I’ve been gone for nearly six years. In that time their revenue has fallen by 80%, their core product has been axed, and I am still the scapegoat.

Even when they ultimately fail completely, which they will, and soon, as none of the issues I identified have been addressed, I am certain that they will go down crying “damn you, madaxe_again”.

Reality, commercial or not, is purely a matter of perception.

You sound like a great person to work with and for. And I applaud your healthy look on the situation. Which can’t always have been / be, easy. But you’re wearing that scapegoat mantle with pride, and a touch of compassion. Some people just never learn. Best to stay clear of them and accept the way they think of you. You know better. You did the right thing.

Reality is not a matter of perception, but humans' reaction to it is.

Until reality is inescapable.

Reality is a bitch, and when it hits, it hits hard. Also, the later it hits, the harder it does so.

"Reality is what you can't change" (Bazon Brock, Philosopher)

I have the same mindset but I don't think you appreciate the effect it has on the broader team. Yes you might have a specific individual that avoids taking responsibility but in my experience everyone picks up on this. People have a very strong intuitive smell for this kind of stuff.

So in the longterm all someone does is burn leadership capital trying to pretend they're perfect. This isn't a viable strategy for succeeding in your career.

My father incites me to apologize often for saying true things that aren’t nice. There are two approaches, and I believe you are pointing something correct. If you apologize on any aspect, it is a well-known effect that you entirely revoke your legitimacy from the group. In the woke culture for example, the first who apologize has to also quit and lose its career entirely, it’s a recurring problem. The second approach is never to apologize. It’s annoying, but it keeps people in check. It’s an attribute of real power: making huge visible mistakes and not having to say something about it. And this is what wins in our current culture. People will accept your authority and you will avoid being the scapegoat, people will criticize a bit but much less (and that it the surprising effect) than if you say “I’m sorry”. The looks of an apology seems to trigger a reaction of entire reject from the group, even if your words were carefully measured and balanced.

I empathize that you’ve lost your business to this. I sounded like you would instill an awesome culture where people recognize mistakes…

"If you apologize on any aspect, it is a well-known effect that you entirely revoke your legitimacy from the group"

Modern approach to civil conflict. Maybe there should be a focus-group that teaches employees to acknowledge ("to own", as they preach) their mistakes?

It's not about how they do it but about what are the consequences.

That happens all the time. I think I am slowly getting the point of the story about Casandra. People that realize issues, voice them and raise them be properly addressed are almost never heard. Especially when these issues go against whatever group think narrative is in place. Those people also are the scapegoats when the bad things they predicted actually do happen. Because, hey, they knew it. So why didn't they do something about it?

I feel you, usually I am one of the people to raise those issues. Now I am trying a different approach, being very careful how I voice that stuff, and making sure I do it indirectly wherever possible in those rare occasions I do. The rest of the time, I just try to keep my mouth shut.

Kudos so for sticking around for 10 years.

I ended up with an almighty Cassandra complex, and by the time I left I was almost prepared to believe that I was the source of the issues I flagged.

Hindsight, however, is everything - most of the engineering team left in my wake, and all that remains is a hollowed out core of sycophantic middle management. They went from an improbable 0% client churn to a revolving door of unhappy customers.

Truly, it was a shame - and remains so - for my sake, however, my departure was the best thing I could have done, as it saved what precious threads of sanity I had remaining. I still hope for the sake of the once-friend I started the business with that he yet learns something.

How does it go? For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'.

This pretty much sums up the last two years of fighting COVID.

Governments/media/academics: we will solve the problem by doing X.

Sceptics: that won't work / isn't working / hasn't worked.

Governments/media/academics: it isn't working because of the unbelievers.

Academics mostly got it right, media thrived on conflict and false-balance while politics, especially German politics, were more concerned about elections than anything else.

How'd you figure that? Academics have been wrong about this from the start, I'd say. Their models are a byword for joke pseudo-science. But I guess your reference to "false balance" means we can infer what your beliefs are here. Groups never admit failure and one way they don't admit it, is by finding clever sounding excuses to not listen to those who were right.

Well, the RKI models pretty much predicted the German Wave Four. Case rates, hospitalization and so on was predicted pretty well. They missed the timeline by roughly two weeks so, if memory serves well. Little matter, since they first modelled that in summer.

They predicted a huge wave even after a vaccination programme? Really? When exactly did they "predict" this wave - can you cite that? Or is this one of those cases where modellers "predicted" something that was already happening.

Would you say, in hindsight, that your partner was the wrong fit for you?

As the business developed, certainly - however in the early days our mutual antagonism served us well - every decision was challenged, and his ying to my yang meant that we got off to a roaring start. Unfortunately in latter years, this became more of an impediment than a boon, as I ended up spending a majority of my time disentangling situations he refused to even acknowledge the existence of. I can fight an uphill battle with gusto, but when it was against my own ally, it became utterly demoralising.

In extreme cases you have evaporative heating of groups where after some major setback all the more moderate members leave and the remainder are on average more attached to the group and more fanatical. This is pretty common to see when religious cults have prophesies that fail to pan out.

The WSJ had a piece many years ago about this happening to the Muslim Brotherhood as the moderate members, who were more visible and accessible, were arrested forcing the group to become more fundamentalist. Found that interesting. "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems..."

I never did validate if that claim about the Muslim Brotherhood stood the test of time but I found the thing interesting in the moment.

the new vintage of Hamas, brought to you by Israeli intelligence

Isn't Hamas an example of the opposite dynamic--of becoming less fanatical? Yes, Hamas leads violent, armed protests from the Gaza Strip. But there's arguably been less violence compared to the armed conflicts they induced on and across the Lebanese border. Once they began to independently govern (not withstanding lack of Israeli recognition) the Gaza Strip they had to soften their stance somewhat, similar to the PLO, which is an even better example.

This points in the direction of another commenter who mentioned that it's a matter of incentives. Yes, many groups are seemingly defined by their particular disposition on certain issues. But toss some strong incentives into the mix and some of those groups turn out to not be quite as intransigent as thought. Although the Hamas and PLO duo shows the limits to that--Hamas responded to incentive, but definitely not as strongly as the PLO did, perhaps precisely because the PLO holds the more moderate ground, and Hamas as a group distinguishes itself from the PLO in that way. I'd wager that if you could magically extinguish the PLO, then it's likely Hamas would either become more moderate or split in order to fill that vacuum.

> not withstanding lack of Israeli recognition

Israel recognizes Gaza (as something else than Israel at least.)

It is mostly journalists (and internet forums) that conflates Gaza with an open air prison.

I think the OP meant that Israel doesn't officially recognize Hamas rule over Gaza (because Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it also doesn't recognize Israel). But Hamas de facto rules over Gaza, and as a result they have (slightly) moderated their behavior.

It's true that Israel does not consider Gaza to be Israeli territory, nor does it want to annex Gaza. And it hasn't actually occupied Gaza since Ariel Sharon as PM ordered the IDF to unilaterally withdraw, although Israel and Egypt do maintain a shared blockade of Gaza.

Thanks, you wrote it in a very clear way.

I think we should note though that the Egyptian blockade of Gaza seems far stricter than the Israeli one (which just seems to control that weapons and things that can easily be used to create weaponry or tunnels aren't brought in).

> things that can easily be used to create weaponry

Just to be clear, this means items like food, paper and any and all electronics.

Israel maintains a strict calorie limitation on Gaza, because Hamas turns any excess into rockets. Of course, this doesn't actually deter Hamas that much, because they care about shooting at Israel more than they care about the health of the population, and so a huge portion of the population of Gaza is chronically malnourished.

> Just to be clear, this means items like food, paper and any and all electronics.

You'll find that if you look behind Hamas approved sources (not Israeli propaganda, but local sources in Gaza) you might get a mlre nuanced view.

> and so a huge portion of the population of Gaza is chronically malnourished.

The problem in Gaza does not seem to be the supply of food but the distribution. Hamas is notoriously corrupt and evil as written about in length by their own. To them I guess it is even beneficial if their people us malnourished when journalists and UN officials arrive.

Besides: Hamas needs only to start behave civilized, start imprisoning the violent ones instead of sending grants to martyrs and you will probably find Israelis a lot more cooperative vs now when they openly say they want to destroy Israel.

We're talking about the 80s here, when they wanted the PLO to be taken down a notch

Hamas used to be worse - at least to Israelis. They are still as far as I know foul to their own people, but of that we don't know too much on the outside.

There is a reason these walls etc exist now and that is because when I was younger, reading about buses getting bombed or civilians machine gunned in Israel was totally unsurprising.

Or they accomplish their goal and everyone who isn't an extremist says it's mission accomplished and starts caring about other things leaving only extremists to chart the group's direction. MADD is a good example.

*Evaporative cooling

I think he meant to write heating. Because the moderate (slow) parts leave, keeping the 'hot' members.

He meant to write cooling; the moderate (warmer) parts leave, leaving the fanatical 'cold' members. I agree that 'fanatical=cold/moderate=warm' seems a little backwards, but it's that way and not the other because it's an analogy to a real physical process, while evaporative warming doesn't exist.

From 2007: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooling_(atomic_ph...

Distillation may be a more appropriate analogy. The unwanted part evaporates away, leaving the more concentrated solution behind.

In distillation, the whole input liquid is evaporated by heating, then condensed by cooling and collected.

That depends on whether you want the more volatile or less volatile liquid at the end.

Perfect description. I also see this happening in newly formed political parties over here in Europe, political parties that were marketing themselves at the beginning as "anti-system" (i.e. different compared to the old, established political parties) and such.

Initially they were attracting quite a diverse bunch, which is good imo, as political parties should represent swathes of the population as large as possible, but as the time progressed and as the disillusions started to show up their ranks got thinner and the only people left were the "more fanatical" ones, as you well put it. Unfortunately doing politics with "fanatical" people is very unproductive and border-line dangerous for the fabric of society.

Not sure if there's a way out of situations like these.

> I think the essay is strongly written — never is a strong word — but it resonated with me because of a personal experience.

I struggle to hear someone use "never" and other absolutist language—as the author does—and imagine they are likely to admit a mistake as well. I think it can depend on how certain a group is, or as you mention, how the certain ones drive the less certain ones out of the group. I can imagine if there are people in a group who say "always" "never" "the best" "the worst" a lot, then yes, the more doubtful ones may leave and the group may become even more convicted in their rightness.

However, I don't think every group follows that path, possibly not having such people clinging to certainty or even if they do, the ones with more humility working together to downgrade the hubris.

Secondly, if you can't tell, I can feel quite frustrated when people speak with such certainty, and I'm grateful and impressed that you seemed able to look past that in the author's writing.

Just like it takes time for probabilites to flow from one atomic orbital to another, I would assume this could form basis for the analogy for why it takes time for groups to change their mind.

Atomic Orbitals, Visualized Dynamically - https://youtu.be/BPkcDWLBsrI?t=412

Similar to the "Gun Club" (and also in the U.S. in the WWII era) was the Bomber Mafia - convinced that lots of long-range heavy bombers could win any war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia

They were profoundly resistant to reality (such as sustained "unsustainable" loss rates in un-escorted daytime bomber attacks on Germany), or even ideological compromises (such as long-range fighter escorts for those bombers)...up to the point where the en-mass sacking of mafia members, or massive "de-emphasis" of their branch of the armed forces were clear and present dangers.

The astonishing thing was that the UK had just sustained a massive bombing campaign by Germany whixh had veeu obviously and singularly failed to break the civilain spirit and make the UK sue for peace.

So, obviously, the UK airforce proposed that a massive bombing campaign would clearly break the German civilian spirit and force Germany to sue for peace.

The allied bombing of civilian targets in Germany officially never happened. They were 'military' or 'industrial' targets. It's commonly understood that they were retaliatory as opposed to strategic.

Really? Was Dresden a military target? Most major German cities were reduced to rubble.

Cities are major industrial centers. In the twisted logic of the generals at the time, destroying them wholesale was a legitimate way to strike at the military-industrial strength of a country

Countervalue was a thing in nuclear planning too - tie down enemy AA/missile defense defending cities

Theoretically yes, because it was "a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort".

It's worth remembering that at this time precision munitions didn't exist. Attempting to bomb a factory was largely worthless, especially at night and under enemy fire. It was really just about dropping as many bombs as possible over a wide area and hoping that somehow, some of them would get kinda near the actual targets. The fact that most wouldn't was taken for granted.

Well yes, but the Blitz was never all that effective. London was never burned like Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. In any case, the aim was absolute destruction of production, not civilian demoralization.

The bombing of Dresden was very late in the war. Those making decisions in 1942 would not have had the insight to see how the bombing would (fail to) break the civilian spirit. On the contrary, in fact, for the Germans Dresden was as much of a propaganda win as are dead children for Hamas today, even when Hamas kills the children themselves.

> the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10

Its really a popularity problem in that there is a doctrine of "we need something survivable in BVR and active ADA" but we don't like talking about that situation as much as pew-pew A-10s are cool and we always plan to fight the last war where there was no BVR or ADA threat (not after the first few days...)

Inevitably we will someday go up against an opponent that is willing to take BVR RoE risks and is capable and willing to do ADA (anti-aircraft guns and missiles). At that point the drones and A-10s are simply out of the fight, in fact the entire Air Force is out of the fight until either another procurement cycle or hope that the ground Army, despite having no air support at all, somehow knocks out the opfor so our undefended planes can fly again.

That's why we have a doctrine, however uncool to talk about, of keeping BVR-proof and ADA-proof weapons systems around, there is a situation where they're quite useful.

Really its not even ADA-proof, its more generically "capable of operating in an environment where we do not already have total utter complete air supremacy".

There is a logistical theory that air supremacy is so expensive that nobody but the USA can sustain it, although it goes guarantee huge USA losses until supremacy is lost, so that's not really politically viable. "They're going to wipe our ground forces out by air and there's nothing we can do about it until they run out of armament" is something that's supposed to happen to other nations, not the US, so its a very hard sell politically.

BVR = Beyond Visual Range (37+ km missile)

ADA = Air Defence Artillery (anti-aircraft weapons).

what are "BVR-proof and ADA-proof weapons systems". Are there planes that can survive being shot at by air defence? Or can evade missiles ? (Is this "stealth" as the answer? If so it seems the war is based on the targetting / anti-targetting arms race?)

I am not trolling - just asking as it does seem that all the advantages are with cheap missiles hunting expensive planes (a very similar situation to naval warfare I believe)

I think I am asking for a good primer on modern warfare ... I suspect it is a contentious subject.

Nothing is completely invulnerable to a modern integrated air defense system, but the F-22 and F-35 are specifically designed to have at least a chance to survive. They have low observability which makes them difficult to target, good sensors for avoiding SAM radars, and high power-to-weight ratios that give pretty good odds of evading missiles.

If those 5th-generation fighters are able to successfully suppress the air defenses then A-10s and other obsolete fighters can come in later for strike and air support missions. But against an intact IADS they would take extremely high casualties.

The survivability onion: https://i.redd.it/33lz51812ko31.jpg

Gun anti-air(AA) is basically useless against jets at this point (they fly too high and fast). For missiles, you can't really evade them if you're in their kill zone (they can accelerate way faster and turn way tighter than a human can survive). Your hope to survive a missile is to either not be "seen" in the first place (whether that's radar, or at somewhat less far distances IR), or to be far enough away that you can run away from the missile until it runs out of energy (aka don't be in it's kill zone and have enough speed/energy to flee. Speed is energy is life in air combat, turning hasn't really mattered since the 60s and dogfighting is a meme since turning kills your energy which makes you even more susceptible to missiles).

Ground based AA has big problems with actually seeing planes from far enough away at this point due to the horizon, and the ability of planes to shoot anti-radar and/or loitering munitions from over the horizon against ground based AA. Plane based AA is obviously better due to being higher so the horizon is pushed further out, and not having to be immobile (think cruise missile saturation attack against a ground based AA site), but if you have inferior planes or munitions (eg. Russia vs US/NATO), then investing more heavily into ground based AA makes sense as you'd never be able to reliably have air superiority to protect your ground troops if you relied on plane based AA.

Stealth (low observability is a better term) plays a huge role at essentially reducing a radar's effective range (iirc estimates I've seen are that the F-35's stealth reduces the S400's effective range from ~140km against regular jets to ~35km against an F-35).

This has all ignored the datalink/networking going on between all these different systems to eg. extend radar coverage, or how afaik SAMs are usually run in "passive mode" and are constantly relocating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition#Initial_rol... is a good primer on how planes vs ground based AA can actually be planes with "cheap" missiles hunting SAMs). Also, in a peer/near peer conflict A-10s wouldn't be used even after achieving air superiority and destroying all the SAM sites, because they're too vulnerable to even cheap manpads or gun AA and can only be flown in areas with 0 anti air threat (which is why the airforce wants to drop them and get Super Tucanos that can do the same job of dropping a laser guided bomb at ~1/10 the flight cost).

I cannot help, when looking at the peer-v-peer model, to be reminded of acoup.blog's excellent analysis of WWI stalemate. The concepts put forward of "knocking out the opponents SAM capability and achieving air dominance" might not work so well when the opponent is trying to do exactly the same thing. This is just a uneducated thought so please comment but it interests me.

Its unlikely either side will throw 100% of its air assets into the mix to achieve complete dominance, so there is always some planes / batteries around, and we end up with "we dominate that area, you dominate this". At that point, no-one has air dominance, and there is a "no mans land" over which some aircraft might be yours, or theirs, but you have to go through that part.

As soon as we have that situation, there will be discussions on "break out" - land forces getting through the contested area, but when you do, guess what, you have broken into the are where their air is dominant.

It seems you either have air dominance, or you fight in the air till you do have. But committing all air assets to do that risks losing them all, so stalemate seems inevitable...

Yeah, the problem is, IMHO, that modern AA capabilities are way cheaper then the air dominance hardware you to throw at the AA to break it. That's why stealth is so important, because you can get close. As is saturation with, e.g., drones. I always wondered how often the USAF would throw multi-billion dollar worth of hardware and multi-millions and multi-decades worth of training at a specific target. Especially over enemy air space, where you won't recover personnel or hardware. I always feared that if anything in a hot war between nuclear powers one side might be tempted, or forced, to resort to tactical nukes. Or powers decide to just not do it for financial reasons.

Joke was that Red Baron style wood and cloths bi-planes would be an alternative once the top notch hardware is expended. Easy to build, easy to maintain and pilot training is faster and cheaper as well.

Last time I talked with people heavily involved in future air combat, the scenarios were as follows:

Stealth vs. stealth -> most likely to end in a dog fight, fighters wont be able to engage each other at longer distances

Stealth vs. conventional -> most likely stealth gets a shot from BVR on the conventional aircraft, AVACS and the conventional fighter running under EMCOn change that, as soon as the stealth fighters fired the first shots, any surviving conventional fighters will engage again in dog fights

Conventional vs. conventional -> pretty much the same as above, only that both sides will get some shots before distances are closed

If anything, I understood dog fights will become again more prevalent due to stealth.

After a large organization is structured, it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors ("winning", or a change in the context that required the objective in the first place).

I would expect an adage about this to already exist – if it doesn't, I'm claiming it. :)

This very topic is covered in Eric Hoffer's book, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".

He's talking more about religious and political movements than companies but, with the way many companies today want people to believe in their mission, there are strong parallels.

> it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors

Yes, and also the furtherance of the careers of the top people.

And the less actual stuff said organization has to do, the worse it gets.

The better is gets - more time for career manoeuvring

And without the need of any domain knowledge or any other skills!

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

-- https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I never worked directly for an official bureaucracy, just indirectly. I have to say so, you find the same kind of people in all organizations being large enough to need more than one pizza to feed everyone.

The March of Dimes is an interesting counter-example. They went from a Polio cause to a premature infant one post-Salk.

Can we apply this to Google-sized megacorps, when the original goal 'make money' has been overachieved?

Pournelle's "Iron law of bureaucracy" comes close...

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

I love the A-10, but it is really only useful in places like Afghanistan where you have air superiority, combined arms, artillery, mobile infantry, and the enemy is farm boys with AK-47s.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think we should discontinue it, because man we do a lot of oppression of teenagers with AK-47s in the last 50 years. Really the US Military should have an "occupation and oppression" service branch if they were honest, with the counter insurgency, A-10s, helicopters, urban warfare infantry, snipers, drones, etc. It could be equipment that is 10 years old, or simply very cheap versions of more expensive stuff used by the branches that presumably exist to fight a peer state.

This post was brought to you in the spirit of "the war nerd".

But they'd never be that honest.

> "occupation and oppression" service branch

The USMC is planned to become that, no? No tanks or artillery anymore and very few jets, but instead lots of helos and drones and mortars and MRAP cars and landing equipment for suppressing insurgents anywhere in the world.

(Not even kidding...)

> It took a huge number of casualties before high command got it that charging into machine guns does not work.

Well, there was a nice posting here (hopefully someone will find it) about WWI and that 1) stasis was effectively inevitable and 2) you do have to charge the enemy occasionally or you can't maintain your stasis (it prevents them from moving their artillery forward).

Edit: Thank you, malcomwhite. https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-...

> hopefully someone will find it

https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-...

It goes further than that. Charging into machine guns does work! It works fine. Offense won a little over 50% of the time, making it better than defense.

The problem, as identified in the post, is that although your charge usually succeeds, you end up taking ground that your pre-charge offensive barrage has made impossible to hold. And then you lose that ground.

You take more losses and run out of manpower - its a finite resource

More losses than what? Again, offense was slightly favored over defense, which is the only relevant comparison if you're trying to evaluate the claim "charging into machine guns doesn't work".

The only relevant comparison is manpower losses of the two sides, and every assault cost a lot more men to the attacker than the defender. The attacker has to have a massive concentration of manpower and numerical superiority.

If this were not true, no one would setup defences.

> The only relevant comparison is manpower losses of the two sides, and every assault cost a lot more men to the attacker than the defender.

OK, we've established that you're eager to declaim on a subject you never actually bothered learning anything about:

>> Consider: at the Somme (1916), the British and French attacked and the Germans defended; the allies took 620,000 losses, inflicted 445,000 (a ratio of about 4:3 favoring the defender) and got basically nowhere.

>> At Verdun (also 1916), the Germans attacked and the French defended; the Germans took 355,000 losses to the French’s 400,000 (a ratio of 7:8 favoring the attacker) and got basically nowhere.

>> Over the whole of the German Spring Offensives (1918), the Germans took 688,341 casualties and inflicted 863,374 (a ratio of about 3:4, again favoring the attacker), knocked huge salients in the allied lines, didn’t break through and thereby lost the war.

>> I think here it is worth really noting how high the defender’s casualties are in these battles; I keep noting this but I want to stress: defenders suffered high casualties in trench warfare. Being on the defensive operationally did not save you any more than being tactically on the defensive did. You were just as likely to be killed in your trench by an enemy shell or grenade as you were on the offense machine-gunned trying to cross no man’s land. If the latter holds a larger place in the Anglophone consciousness (e.g. 1917 and Gallipoli) that has more to do with the British and Commonwealth forces being more often on the attack than the defense, not on the casualty implications of attacking or defending.

It is a myth that attackers lose more people

It's also a myth that losing more people is what matters. Wars are won and lost on morale. Losses have their effect through their impact on morale long before they start to restrict your fundamental capabilities.

Compare the quote attributed to Ho Chi Minh:

You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.

He won and we lost. It's not because we took more casualties.

the A-10 is actually the perfect "fighter mafia" plane aside from its weight.

the fighter mafia basically wanted more maneuverability, cheaper planes and CAS than interdiction bombing. A-10 is all of those except light.

they were vehemently opposed to optimizing planes for beyond visual range (BVR) combat like by improving sensors or stealth because they considered it "a fantasy."

problem is missiles fired 100 miles away don't care what you consider fantastical.

the A-10 is actually a giant hunk of junk outside of COIN operations. it has no stealth, it's slow and its gun is useless against modern armor. against terrorists in flipflops with AKs it can be useful but that's only because they don't have any sort of AA. even stingers are a huge problem. and in an uncontested airspace you may as well bring in a plane with even more firepower and loiter time like an ac-130.

so basically the a-10 in this day and age is a solution in search of a problem. it's big, slow, heavy and would be shot out of the sky in a peer confrontation before you could even blink. its gun is useless against modern tanks and an f-35 can carry a similar amount of munitions.

The only reason A-10 is still flying is gun fetishism of certain senators.

I'd go the opposite direction, that an A-10 is a great plane for the kinds of wars America has fought for the past few decades. Until your enemies are BVR, it doesn't make sense for you to have a really sweet BVR plane. It's a flying infantry support tank, and it being scary and loud as it flies by after wreaking havoc as a psychological weapon is half the point.

Yeah, maybe a low flying AC-130 hits the same niche, but we only about twenty or so AC-130s versus almost 300 A-10s in active service.

it's a flying tank, not a fighter. it shouldn't even belong in the air force. ground troops love it, it should fly for the army with AF doing what AF usually does, which is flying fast, high and stealthy if possible.

The A-10 is too slow even for COIN operations, it can't get to where it is needed fast enough. The most effective smart bomb truck right now is the B-1B. It is fast, has long endurance, large payload and can designate targets itself.

Usefulness of the A-10? The aircraft that was pulled from the early stages of the Gulf war for getting shot up too many times, is notorious for blue on blue, and immediately dies in the presence of any modern Anti Air?

Sure, but US is was not facing modern anti-air in Iraq and Afghanistan regular Iraq forces were destroyed in 2003. On the other hand, a Reaper drone is perfect to bomb a wedding that’s not protected by AAA

It is the same old thing, they became successful doing X and that works great until X isn't the optimal thing. However, after 50 years doing the same thing, they are a one trick pony.

Also, the A-10 is one heck of a plane and always my favorite. Largest caliber nose cannon and the ability to limp back to base on one engine and one rudder is so freaking cool. There is a National Guard base nearby and it is so cool watching them do flybys on the small mountains.

> There is a National Guard base nearby and it is so cool watching them do flybys on the small mountains.

I'm near a different A-10 base. I've noted that they've stepped up training flights during the last two weeks. I'm wondering if it's related to the Russian build up on the Ukrainian frontier. Have you noticed more flights?

I actually have moved since I saw them all time. I'm not far away but not on their flight path anymore. :(

>Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia", which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10.

Duuuuude, the Fighter Mafia was active in like the '60s and '70s, and some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft). Do you have any evidence that current USAF strategic policy is dictated by the fighter community? Fighter pilots have lamented the loss of "l'audace" for decades, but despite their bravado I don't think any of them really believe that they deserve absolute strategic primacy.

There was a recent story about the Air Force trying to kill off one of their most cost effective aircraft, whether that's evidence of a "fighter mafia" or not is debatable, but it does show the USAF's proclivity for expensive high-tech over cost effective platforms.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-reaper-drone-retir...

The MQ-9 Reaper is cost effective for counter insurgency missions but it requires reliable high-bandwidth remote control data links to operate. In any conflict with a peer adversary they will shoot down the communications satellites and jam other links, making such drones mostly useless.

Which is why they will become autonomous…

Perhaps someday, but for now that's science fiction. Autonomous vehicles can only perform a very narrow range of missions.

Autonomous drones will be either useless, or equally dangerous to everyone. FoF is gonna be a crapshoot

They have enough rockets equipped with ASAT weapons to destroy the Starlink satellites ? All 40 000 of them (planned, about 2500 already in orbit)?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/12/spacex-prepares-for-air-forc...

Shooting down just a few dozen satellites will produce kessler syndrome, there will be no satellites or spacecraft for anyone for decades.

Also, you don't even have to shoot them, there is jamming

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft).

That was John Boyd, the fighter jock's fighter jock. He pushed for both the F-16, for air-to-air combat, and the A-10, for after the F-16 has cleared the sky.

people have a hard time realizing when the technology they've spent their lives learning and perfecting is no longer applicable

People have an equally hard time realizing that there is very little genuinely 'new' under the Sun, and today's 'wizbang' was yesterday's 'vozalm' with a superficial change to it.

Only in the last few centuries. Progress is not forever.

You had me till "A-10", which has become completely useless except against adversaries like ISIS that none of the modern military powers like.

Actually I think any organism or group that can balance certainty and observation is peak.

The more the change is forced from the outside - either through someone who has them by the purse strings, or by existential threat of death (complete military defeat in the field), the more at stake and the more it is fought. It isn’t impossible however.

But it isn’t like Hitler was waving a white flag and being contrite. I can’t say he was wrong that death was the easy way out with the situation that he had made.

In my experience, the more negative the communication/power style, the more all or nothing the internal politics of the organization tend to be, and the less likely ‘gentle’ change can happen.

Admitting an error in a leader even in most considered positive medium to large organizations is considered a complete failure requiring their removal. At the nation state level, very few countries let a national leader even bow out without the next in line trying to throw them in jail or execute them.

Good luck having a productive shift in policy in that case instead of ‘we WILL make it work’ - including lining people against the wall if they don’t agree.

The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/10/why-nothing-even-the-air...

Meanwhile corporates are groups and when they fail we call it creative destruction in Schumpeter's words or nowadays disruption.

> The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

No.

Care to elaborate?

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-air-force-has-do...

FTA

> The billion-dollar question here is really whether or not developing another new fighter could result in an overall reduction in cost without creating a reduction in capability.

Since this is HN your bullcrap-meter should be going off here just as if somebody told you throwing away the the Linux kernel and rewriting it in Rust would improve performance, while reducing the number of CVEs - oh and this whole business would only take a year or two while maintaining ABI compatibility with existing packages.

> Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

From what I read, the F-22 is the hangar queen. F-35 can do several supersonic missions per day and is not afraid of rain. It is overpriced, though.

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