[HN Gopher] A story about planning for Desert Storm
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A story about planning for Desert Storm
Author : bibliographer
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-04-11 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dupuyinstitute.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dupuyinstitute.org)
| Arainach wrote:
| 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/
| techdmn wrote:
| 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?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The US didn't start the war that Desert Storm ended.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_invasion_of_Kuwait
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| 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
| deburo wrote:
| All wars are bad and the US doesn't go to war because it thinks
| it's funny. Unrelated people may joke about it, as usual.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Why were we in Iraq the second time?
|
| Why were we in Vietnam?
|
| Why did we stay in Afghanistan for so long?
|
| The military industrial complex does indeed find war funny.
| It's called laughing all the way to the bank.
| Animats wrote:
| This reads like an ad for the QJM model. The DePuy Institute had
| a proprietary model for figuring out who wins a battle. This was
| invented by General William DePuy, one of the leading planners of
| the US loss in Vietnam. He came up with a Quantitative Judgement
| Model for evaluating military strength. It's mostly adding up
| weapons values (sword = 1.0), although there are other features
| of the model. There are tables, now used mostly by war gamers.
| DePuy looked at a large number of historical battles, and came up
| with weights which seemed to work. The result was supposedly that
| the side with a 2:1 advantage almost always won. Within the 2:1
| range, it was a tossup.
| mandevil wrote:
| Two different people with differently spelled last names:
| General William DePuy (who was MACV C-o-S, BigRedOne-Six and
| then ran TRADOC after the war, and is considered the architect
| of the rebuilding of the Army after Vietnam) is unrelated to
| Col. Trevor Dupuy. Both of them fought in the US Army in WW2,
| and have confusingly similar names, but Dupuy is the one who
| founded the Dupuy Institute to do his numerical analysis of
| combat with all of his models and fudge factors.
| Animats wrote:
| Oh! Thanks.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| Amateurs talk about killbots. Professionals train their AIs on
| logistics.
| imglorp wrote:
| 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
| rsecora wrote:
| Parent comment was jokingly paraphrasing General Bradley
| words: "Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk
| logistics."
| jamessb wrote:
| "Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary
| equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research
| for the previous 30 years combined"
|
| Thanks for the link - someone at BBN had told me a similar
| story, but I didn't know the name of the program.
| buescher wrote:
| I didn't know about DART. Developed and deployed in eight weeks
| [edit: less optimistic sources say 23 months]! Is there a good
| retrospective somehwere with some technical detail?
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Seconding. I'd be interested in reading more into it.
| numlocked wrote:
| 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
| compromise and ordered the ground forces in."
|
| Is that true?
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| chasd00 wrote:
| > 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)
| queuebert wrote:
| Generation Kill is a great movie in a similar vein about the
| second invasion.
| cja wrote:
| It's a mini series, and yes, it's brilliant
| lmickh wrote:
| I wouldn't go so far as to say there wasn't much purpose for
| the ground troops in the context of the goal of eliminating
| Iraqi military capabilities. It involved some of the largest
| tank battles in US history such as the Battle of Norfolk and
| the Battle of the 73 Easting. While we look back at some of
| these as a steam roll in hindsight, the truth is the
| engagements were larger than most of the armor battles in WW2
| involving the US.
|
| The marine advancement in to Kuwait that was part of a larger
| multi-national push that much of the Iraqi forces were
| running from. The push by 1st Inf Div, 2nd ACR, and others on
| the west was to cut off that retreat.
|
| Combat theaters are large and it is never a good idea to take
| a narrow view of them and generalize it to the whole. The
| father of my childhood friend used to tell us how his
| deployment in Vietnam as an MP was some of the best time in
| his life. He spent his entire time on a post relatively far
| from the fighting largely killing his time trying to surf and
| eat BBQ.
| gumby wrote:
| I think you mean Hollywood filmed a book written by one of
| those marines.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I think he said what he meant. But, I think you meant "I
| know you linked a wiki that explains the film is based on a
| memoir in the first line, but you've already exposed
| yourself to the 'It was a book first!' attack, and I don't
| want to have to turn in my 'Ackchyually Guy,' membership
| card." Since we're speculating.
|
| A more charitable reading would be that you simply meant,
| "Yes, that movie is based on a book by one of those
| marines." Maybe with some added opinion on whether you
| enjoyed it or found it equally as enlightening.
| burnte wrote:
| Well, he DID say "they made a movie" so yes, obviously that
| is exactly what he meant.
| soviettankie wrote:
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It would probably be better to do a simple fact check before
| going on a dubious grand narrative :
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archiv.
| ..
|
| > After prodding by Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Hussein had offered to
| withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 21 days. But the United
| States appeared to be moving ahead with its land campaign.
| antattack wrote:
| 21 days seems like a delay tactics since it took Iraqi
| troops just two days to invade.
| waffleiron wrote:
| It probably took them longer to prepare than just 2 days.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Iraq was able to "complete" its invasion and decapitation
| of military command & control in two days because the
| Kuwaitis were massively under prepared. After that you
| then need to consolidate your position and that would be
| days if not weeks of deploying troops and their equipment
| deeper into the country.
|
| So after seven months of occupation there's probably a
| heap of logistics required to extricate and decamp your
| forces & equipment that likely isn't going to happen even
| in 10-15 days.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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."
|
| - Gen Eisenhower famously stated "It wasn't necessary to hit
| them with that awful thing."
|
| - Fleet Admiral Nimitz, Commander and Chief of the Pacific
| Fleet, stated "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for
| peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely
| military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." (Though
| Nimitz's perspective is slightly diminished from reports that
| he initially supported using atomic weapons.)
|
| - Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command (a unit of
| the Twentieth Air Force in the Mariana Islands for strategic
| bombing during World War II.), stated "The atomic bomb had
| nothing to do with the end of the war at all."
|
| - Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr, "The first atomic bomb was
| an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop
| it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try
| it out, so they dropped it."
|
| Other high ranking officials like Fleet Admiral Leahy (Truman
| Chief of Staff), are on the record stating that nuking Japan
| wasn't necessary. Now maybe even given these perspectives,
| perhaps they are all wrong. What I can say for certain is
| that this perspective isn't without "any real rooting in
| primary source materials and is pushed on a speculative basis
| by fringe academics looking to make a name with an out-there
| theory."
| robonerd wrote:
| 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.
| badRNG wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Just google "gorbachev saddam 1991"
|
| The answer is "pretty much true".
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| I took now half an hour to check sources on that and it seems
| to be pretty much the color.
|
| Curious that nobody asked to sanction the US to destroy their
| economy and to isolate them for that war... or any of the
| other wars.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Actually in the end the US went soft on Iraq. Thatcher
| wanted to roll into Baghdad and clean it out properly (or,
| she argued we'd find ourselves there again in a decade or
| 2). Bush disagreed.
| chasd00 wrote:
| the coalition built for gulf war 1 was extensive to say the
| least. I think that was one of Bush Sr's requirements, if
| anyone was going to liberate Kuwait it had to be everyone.
| You would have to sanction the entire coalition which was
| basically the entire western world.
|
| Bush Sr. convinced everyone to stop at Iraq's border and
| wouldn't push further to knock out Hussain's regime.
| Wisely, IMO for all the reasons that are clear today.
| However, lots of people think this is what cost him a
| second term and left many people at the pentagon feeling
| like there was unfinished business in Iraq. This
| "unfinished business" is what eventually led to Bush Jr's
| invasion.
| cafard wrote:
| What cost him the second term was the economy.
| [deleted]
| chubot wrote:
| 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._
| robonerd wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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?
| SubjectToChange wrote:
| Do you think the Ukrainians were in the wrong when they
| killed Russians during their withdrawal? Or are rules
| different for the underdog?
| chipsa wrote:
| They were retreating, not surrendering. They were bringing
| with them all their arms and armor (literally, bringing their
| tanks back). We stopped them because they very well could
| have regrouped to when they were back in Iraq. They were not
| 'hors de combat'.
| nautilius wrote:
| Human tragedy aside (and it absolutely is, no doubt about it,
| on all sides), it really depends on the context.
|
| Striking the retreating army is the 'easiest' way to
| 'neutralize' it, Clausewitz writes about it, and I am sure
| it's been practiced for thousand(s?) of years before that.
|
| For a timely comparison: would it be 'vindictive' when
| Ukraine strikes the retreating Russian army in the Kyiv area
| before they regroup and attack the Donbas? I don't think so.
| Seems like a good idea, actually.
| twic wrote:
| Reminds me of the sinking of the General Belgrano during
| the Falklands War. The story at the time was that the
| Belgrano, an Argentinian warship, was leaving the Falklands
| to return to Argentina, when a British submarine sunk her;
| there were many in the UK who considered this an outrage,
| on the grounds that she was no longer contributing the
| occupation of the Falklands, so should have been left
| alone.
|
| That analysis never made much sense to me, and apparently
| it later came out that the Belgrano wasn't leaving the
| Falklands anyway, and much later on the captain of the
| Belgrano said he thought that the British were quite right
| to sink it [1]!
|
| [1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-was-right-to-
| sink-th...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, it probably saved Kurdish lives to some degree.
| Remember that Iraq is a British Empire construction of
| three opposing ethnic groups (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) and Saddam
| was a Sunni oppressing the other two.
|
| Wiping out his best soldiers may have reduced his ability
| to suppress the other two ethnic groups.
|
| Or it made Shia and Kurds more active and sowed MORE
| conflict. Who can predict such things.
|
| But from realist international puppet string wannabes, it
| neutered Saddam's military and ability to threaten Kuwait
| or Saudi Arabia. The US was just a mercenary army for the
| Kuwait and Saudi royal families in this "war".
| empiko wrote:
| It is obviously a matter of context. Russian army in Kyiv
| is indeed able to regroup and attack again. Iraqi army was
| by all means a defeated force that was running for its life
| into Iraq where civil war just started. The risk of it
| attacking Kuwait again was zero.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| A defeated force can still regroup in, say, Baghdad and
| make the city much harder to take.
| joshocar wrote:
| It's how battles have been won for thousands of years. The
| two army's approach each other and take minor casualties
| until one sides moral collapses, they break, and route. 90%
| of the deaths happened after the route.
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