Sim Desert
Readers on war games in Iraq.
Good Evening, Professor Falken: exsailor, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the Canadian Armed Forces, offers his own War Games scenario – an engaging choose-your-own-adventure riddle of sorts that underscores his feeling that These men have more than enough education, experience, and intelligence to take care of this problem if only people (especially journalists), quit presuming to have the credentials to second-guess them…don't be pessimistic. A whole lot of money has been put into this well-led, well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated military. Voluntary service, monetary and other incentives, steady modernization and excellent support have attracted excellent and well-motivated people. Appropriating exsailor's form, UBLaw91 answers here, prompting exsailor to clarify that while "I am totally against the war…My post concerned the strategy, which has been under attack by the media." A case of disagreeing with the message, but empathizing with the messenger. Pearl of Wisdom: mahndrsn, referring to Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept, draws the parallel between the Japanese war games that tested the Pearl Harbor raid (flexible and varied) and those for the Battle of Midway (pre-ordained).Conspiracy Theorists in the Fray should note that mahndrsn places no credence into the FDR-in-the-know school. Statisticians and those who love them will find the phrase "the force multiplier for defending urban terrain is a factor of three" in Quercus's response here. We Had Reservations for Last Night's War: Citing another example of when "military bureaucracies routinely fail to adapt to new ideas, and insist, as one observer put it, on 'fighting the last war'," Thrasymachus posts The Royal Navy, prior to World War II, would not allow British submarines to participate in wargames after dark, because it was too difficult for the British destroyers to find them. The exercises were scripted to allow the Royal Navy to believe they had the German submarine problem entirely under control. Of course, they didn't. And curiously enough, the German U-Boat commanders weren't gracious enough to withdraw from combat after dark. Ripping Van Riper: Yankee assails Van Riper for not understanding that war games, by their very nature, are "not an 'experiment' in the scientific sense. Van Riper, as a Marine Lieutenant General, should make that distinction, play only for the sake of 'exercise' and replace the whining attitude with the win/win outcome such exercises are designed to engender." Betty_The_Crow: gets loose in the Fray, jumping on Donald Rumsfeld in a potent post-Sunday-Morning-roundtable rant here. A sampling: He has either bought into various optimistic fabrications or engaged in a psychological warfare campaign that backfired…Either way he screwed up, and when people started noticing the disconnect between what he said and what seemed actually to be happening, he dumped responsibility for a plan that hasn't gone far awry militarily but only politically, squarely on Tommy Franks…War games are based largely on intelligence estimates, and by all accounts Rumsfeld and company have done more to distort the interpretation of raw intelligence than a triple dose of Mr. Natural acid could…So in addition to coming under pressure to conduct the war in a fashion…more to Rumsfeld's liking, the military planners were hampered by intelligence estimates that ranged from overly optimistic to hallucinatory. No sources have surfaced to confirm the Natty Acid tip…7:30 a.m.
Friday, Mar. 28, 2003
The seat of memory: Bradford McKee objects to the planned site for the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial, but most in the Fray think that if the victims' families want it that way, that is all that need be said. lindquest points out that
You can see the Pentagon and the impact site from Arlington Cemetery. I know because I know someone who witnessed the crash on Sept 11th from the cemetery. Maybe you can't read their names or read all the statistics about it. But you probably can see all the benches facing the Pentagon and all the ones pointing in the opposite direction. That is all I will ever need as a Memorial.
mrhwolf points out that the Oklahoma City memorial has many of the same siting problems, which prompts dougg to ask:
Do you think the proposed Pentagon memorial takes away from the OKC one in that it is essentially a "copy" - all except for the 9:01 gate?
(dougg does.) andkathleen isn’t thrilled with the rash of sitting memorials
I dislike this tendency to use seating to represent each of the dead, but if that's what they want, then why don't they install a metal airplane seat for each of the passengers killed on the flight, and a metal office chair for each of the Pentagon workers killed? It would be as unsubtle as it is possible to get, which seems to be the goal.
(zyzzyg worries the benches, as designed, will be " skate board heaven.") mrachmuth-2 thinks a plaque would be sufficient:
It sometimes seems to me that all of the recent "grand memorializing" serves more to puff up the egos and emotions of the living than to honor and remember the dead, or the reason that they died …
