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A story about planning for Desert Storm

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Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#21

Post by robonerd »

badRNG wrote: post #14
soviettankie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

BLUF: The fact that nuking Japan wasn't necessary isn't some Russian propaganda, it was a sentiment strong even among many of the top brass of the military and Truman administration. Not to start a whole debate on the utility of nuking Japanese civilians, but that "narrative" of the bombing being unjustified is nearly as old as the event itself, certainly not something that just became "popular in the last decade." -…

After the second atomic bombing, Japanese army officers tried to overthrow the Emperor to prevent the surrender. They narrowly failed, after successfully placing the Emperor under house arrest, because the surrender message was smuggled out of the palace. And this happened in Tokyo, which surely knew the horrors of war already, having been extensively firebombed for months. Had things gone a little differently, it's possible that two bombs might not have been enough.

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#22

Post by Arainach »

This seems to have flown entirely over my head:

QJM == Quantified Judgment Model. Other than what the acronym stands for, I'm still not sure what it is or why it's better, as this article never explains. The best short explanation I've found is "The QJM consists of two submodels whose interactions represent several battlefield intangibles such as leadership, morale, and training." [1]

WEI/WUV (that's one thing, not two, and if you try to search for just WEI you'll get nowhere) == Weapon effectiveness index/weighted unit value. [2]

It seems to me that this 2017 post from the same blog [3] is all but required prereading, with the problem that many of its linked sources (such as the one that might explain WEI/WUV) are dead and point to .mil domains that do not currently exist.

[1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/23101

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26553096

[3] http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/tag/wei-wuv/

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#23

Post by badRNG »

robonerd wrote: post #21
badRNG wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLUF: The fact that nuking Japan wasn't necessary isn't some Russian propaganda, it was a sentiment strong even among many of the top brass of the military and Truman administration. Not to start a whole debate on the utility of nuking Japanese civilians, but that "narrative" of the bombing being unjustified is nearly as old as the event itself, certainly not something that just became "popular in the last decade." -…

After the second atomic bombing, Japanese army officers tried to overthrow the Emperor to prevent the surrender. They narrowly failed, after successfully placing the Emperor under house arrest, because the surrender message was smuggled out of the palace. And this happened in Tokyo, which surely knew the horrors of war already, having been extensively firebombed for months. Had things gone a little differently, it's…

I think maybe either my comment was misinterpreted or I wasn't clear enough.

As I stated before, I'm not wanting to start a debate on whether nuking Japan was justified nor am I taking a position one way or the other. What my comment aims to do is to push back on specific claims made about this position (that the bombing was unjustified,) namely the claims that this position is recent, not rooted in primary sources, is a fringe out-there position to give academics a name for themselves, and originates in Russian propaganda.

It is not recent, it is rooted in primary sources, and it was a position held from the very beginning by the top brass of the US military at the time.

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#24

Post by xyzzy21 »

numlocked wrote: post #6

Wow, I have never heard this before: “Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromi…

Just google "gorbachev saddam 1991"

The answer is "pretty much true".

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#25

Post by xyzzy21 »

techdmn wrote: post #8

I'm shocked at the lack of humanity in this story. Every once in a while an "enemy" will start a war, and we'll get a bunch of coverage about orphans and mothers and fathers and horror, and I think maybe just maybe people will realize that all wars are terrible. Except when we start them, then I guess it's mostly kind of funny because our intelligence wasn't as great as it could have been?

This is what war is all about.

This is why many want cooler heads to prevail in the Russia-Ukraine war now!

Those who have lived through war know how horrific and uncontrollable it is and how sociopathic you need to become to wage it successfully.

Intelligence is the first problem. Then the model to fit it to. Then the conclusions to take from it. Each layer is HIGHLY prone to error.

Just an example: precision munitions largely eliminate the odds of NOT killing to zero but then it's the intelligence and interpretation that becomes the weak link: are you really hitting the right target for the larger purpose, or are you doing everything wrong hitting the wrong target because you are measuring success wrongly (e.g. body count - as we did in Vietnam and then returned to in Iraq and Afghanistan - simply because it was the only thing we could measure; classic "streetlight fallacy")

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

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

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#26

Post by imglorp »

dayofthedaleks wrote: post #5
jhgb wrote: post #2

Quite interesting. I though this would be about DART ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin... ), but I take it that this is more about front line stuff.

Amateurs talk about killbots. Professionals train their AIs on logistics.

I think it depends, right?

If you have a small number of high cost, high impact UAVs, you will target infra and supply columns.

If you happen to have a cargo plane full of cheap, mass produced head-popper slaughterbots which you can dump over a town, they will remove all the humans and leave you with intact buildings, vehicles, and infra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#27

Post by burnte »

gumby wrote: post #17
chasd00 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ordered the ground forces in as i recall, the air war was so devastating there wasn't much of a purpose for ground troops and when it came time to "order the ground forces in" most of the work was just walking across Kuwait. They even made a movie about how much of a let down the ground war was to the Marines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(film)

I think you mean Hollywood filmed a book written by one of those marines.

Well, he DID say "they made a movie" so yes, obviously that is exactly what he meant.

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#28

Post by chubot »

numlocked wrote: post #6

Wow, I have never heard this before: “Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromi…

I wasn't aware of that history either -- this article gives more color:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archiv...

The Iraqi invasion happened in August 1990, and America's response was in January/February 1991.

It sounds like Saddam changed his tune because he saw the buildup of American forces over that time period. If there was no threat then he probably wouldn't have agreed to any settlement.

With the ground war just days away, Mr. Gorbachev mounted a peacemaking effort. Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, arrived in Moscow on Feb. 21. Later that day, Mr. Gorbachev told Mr. Bush in a phone call that he sensed a “serious shift” in Iraq’s position, according to a transcript in the Bush Library.

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#29

Post by pmoriarty »

robonerd wrote: post #19
numlocked wrote: post #6

Wow, I have never heard this before: “Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromi…

Have you heard of the 'Highway of Death' ? Iraqi forces were retreating on that highway, on their way back to Iraq. Coalition forces did not want to permit that, and slaughtered them. Thousands of vehicles destroyed, hundreds+ soldiers killed, thousands more captured. I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here, but it does seem a tad bit vindictive.

"I can't say I feel much sympathy towards the Iraqis here"

Why wouldn't you feel sympathy for people who were killed or maimed, and their families?

Re: A story about planning for Desert Storm

#30

Post by queuebert »

chasd00 wrote: post #12
numlocked wrote: post #6

Wow, I have never heard this before: “Few people remember it, but Gorbachev was negotiating with Saddam and had successfully convinced him to pull out of Kuwait. The agreement they came up with would give the Iraqis three weeks to pull out. At this point, it had become a major goal to eliminate the Republican Guard and we didn’t want them to pull their head out of the noose, so President Bush turned down the compromi…

> ordered the ground forces in as i recall, the air war was so devastating there wasn't much of a purpose for ground troops and when it came time to "order the ground forces in" most of the work was just walking across Kuwait. They even made a movie about how much of a let down the ground war was to the Marines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(film)

Generation Kill is a great movie in a similar vein about the second invasion.
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