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Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

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Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#141

Post by trashtester »

denton-scratch wrote: post #99
mcv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern militaries don't seem to enjoy the freedom to act and maneuver that a classic general enjoyed in the field (for good reasons). Modern requirements for transparency and democracy I think modern democracies do a much better job of separating military and civilian leadership than dictatorships do. Putin seems to be too personally involved in micromanaging his war, insisting on conquests that are simply not poss…

> And he believed the West to be weak (or at least divided and disorganised), so he attacked. That makes it sound as if Putin attacked because an opportunity presented itself. I don't think that's why he attacked. I think he attacked because he felt he had no choice. Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rum…

> I think he attacked because he felt he had no choice.

The feeling of having no choice tends to be influenced by incentives, though. Had NATO mobilized 5 million soldiers in eastern Poland in late 2021, with the clear message that they would send those forces into Ukraine if Putin attacked, he would probably feel differently.

Personally, I think he may have felt "it's now or never". It appears he started preparing directly after the 2020 election, and he may have misjudged Biden, thinking him too weak to respond.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#142

Post by shakow »

Razengan wrote: post #91
shakow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the president is also the top military commander It's also true in quite some other countries, and it is to ensure that the military remains subordinated to the civil government, after the many examples of military coups in History.

As if they can't just ignore the civilian commander if they really wanted to?

They can, of course, but it's harder for coup-ing superior officers to make dozen of thousands of 20y.o. Grunty McGruntFace follow them to overthrow the government when the very oath they swore was to that government, and that this oath explicitly states they don't have to follow General von Teufel orders in this case.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#143

Post by mcv »

sofixa wrote: post #107
mcv wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations. There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

> For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all. This seems to imply that money will win you wars, which is not the case. You don't need "money" to get foreign military aid, nor to manufacture small arms in your own factories, especially if you use slaves for that (like the Nazis did).

Money on its own won't win you wars, but you need money to even be able to fight. Sure, you may be able to replace some of the money with slave labour, levies/conscription, but you still need enormous amounts of food, materials, supplies and people, and a lot of that does require money, unless you've managed to completely eradicate money from your society.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#145

Post by jrm4 »

_0ffh wrote: post #74
chaostheory wrote: post #43

I’m not sure how Sun Tzu is complete garbage when his strategies were vague and often not specific, so you can adapt them according to the situation To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.

> like the study of economics [...] There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations. For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole…

Is this satire? I'm sorry, I legitimately cannot tell anymore.

Anyway, if it isn't -- no, there are no universal economic laws, for the very simple reason that "humans are not always rational" and economics is fundamentally about human behavior, in groups, no less.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#146

Post by sofixa »

denton-scratch wrote: post #130
sofixa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not because NATO was crowding into his borderlands, which is Putin's story; but because following the collapse of Soviet communism and the USSR, the rump Russia was clearly a state dependent mainly on resource-extraction, which desn't promise a great independent future. Especially with Europe's increasing development of non-fossil energy, earnings from fossil fuel exports could be expected to diminish rapidly. "Rap…

> I really don't think this excuse works. I guess you're right, it doesn't. I don't know what I'm talking about; I'm just someone who enjoys strategy games. I'm also extremely interested in trying to figure out what Putin was thinking when he attacked, and why he didn't just pull back when his initial blitzkrieg failed. I happen to think his own utterances and writings are a largely-accurate presentation of what he r…

> And regarding the Baltic states: they weren't in NATO

They have been in NATO since 2004. Narva in Estonia is > I'm also extremely interested in trying to figure out what Putin was thinking when he attacked, and why he didn't just pull back when his initial blitzkrieg failed.

> I think you can understand his thinking by listening to what he says. I think he really believes "there's no such thing as Ukraine".

I guess we'll never really know about his actual reasons, but as to why he didn't pull back - he's a strongman dictator, his whole persona is a tough guy. If he gets his nose bloodied and loses massive amounts of troops, that will be a huge blow to his reputation in Russia, which he can't really afford, lest someone near him things they can do a better job.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#147

Post by js2 »

SamBam wrote: post #100
Razengan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if they can't just ignore the civilian commander if they really wanted to?

They can, but you have over a million members of the military who have all sworn an oath that they will "obey the orders of the President of the United States." If they had all sworn an oath that they will "obey the orders of General McEvilFace," it would be a lot easier to maneuver all your coup pawns into place even over the protestations of the president, even without those soldiers needing to fully realize that a…

I just want to point out that their oath is first to uphold the Constitution, then to the President, then to their officers above them.

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/swearing-in-for-m...

Americans disagree about a lot, including how to interpret the Constitution and which parts of it are more or less important. But I would really hope that myself and any other random American can at least agree that our Constitution is the rule book that we must all live by and that it is ultimately what binds us as a nation.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#148

Post by _0ffh »

snapcaster wrote: post #103
_0ffh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like the study of economics [...] There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations. For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole…

Like what? can you name one? If this is true, how come the people that study this aren't rich?

The law of diminishing marginal utility for example can be logically proven using this method. Alas, knowing it won't make you rich, the world is not that simple.

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#149

Post by michaelt »

t43562 wrote: post #78
mcv wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations. There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

Guerillas need money too. Weapons are not free and guerillas need to eat too.

As long as you've got some bootstrap weapons, you can always steal more from whatever force it is you're fighting against. In WW2 the US proposed sending resistance fighters a million single-shot handguns [1], allowing them to kill occupation forces and take their weapons.

And while men with guns very often get shot, they never starve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

Re: Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019)

#150

Post by knodi123 »

hackernewds wrote: post #106
bruce511 wrote: post #11

As with all advice, context matters. It is good to know the rules, the best practices, the proven strategies. But it is also good to understand the context of those strategies to understand when the context has changed. SQL is clearly the right way to store large quantities of data (some would say the only way.) Until some folk realised their context was different, and NoSql was born. Strategy is hard because it play…

I do not understand the NoSQL example. Would you mind please elaborating?

Around the time NoSQL took off, the default choice for any kind of data storage scenario was a traditional relational database. Choosing anything else would have raised eyebrows. But once the concept of NoSQL spread, it became an acceptable alternative and no longer a big deal.

And sure, while the basic concept of NoSQL for data storage is not new, the core concepts were not widely known until the 2010s.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n...

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