Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> In this day and age one can only wonder how the american armed forces will deal with this problem in a scenario where the military struggles to attract and retain their talent

There is no “in this day” to it. Skill degradation has been a problem since antiquity. It’s why the best armies were those that were fighting; there is no replacement for the real deal.

View on HN

What does the army 'fighting' look like in this scenario? It seems like there's no other solution for deterrent weapons than refurbishing and replacing stock (preferably without dispatching)

> What does the army 'fighting' look like in this scenario?

Live fire with a dummy warhead. Or, more productively, turning them into launch vehicles for research purposes.

I would class that as 'training' and 'repurposing', and the former could be loosely classed as 'practice' fighting

It's a bit different since the industrial revolution, and specifically in the 20th century.

There were periods of time where technology remained relatively static for hundreds of years and all that was required as practice and the generational transfer of knowledge.

Now we can go through several revolutions in a single individuals generation with the relics of several generations past still in implementation and no one really sure of how they work/how to make them work.

Its not just skill but also knowledge. Recipe of Greek fire got lost to the ages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com