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John D Salt

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    Risca, South Wales
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    Simulation, wargames, software eng
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    Stochastic dicrete-event simulationist

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  1. I second the recommendation for "The Mythical Man-Month". The best single book on project management I have met is "Peopleware", by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. All the best, John.
  2. It's a Crusader gun tractor, doing what Crusader gun tractors do best, towing a gun. This one seems to have build-up sides for deep wading. All the best, John.
  3. A lot of the current fashion in writing about the British Army in WW2 proceeds from the assumption that British officers are essentially chinless wonders with bad teeth, promoted on family connections instead of operational competence. This I think follows the fashion curve shown by similar attitudes towards the commanders who won WW1 at a similar remove of time, about half a century after the war, and a wave of writers who lack fundamental sympathy with their subjects and have grown up all unaware of the essential difficulty of conducting continental warfare against a first-class enemy. Monty has replaced Haig as the main hate figure, and the detestation is perhaps a trifle less virulent, but you should have no difficulty in finding "de-bunking" style books, with Ellis' "Brute Force" being a fine example. Probably the original and best "de-bunking" book would be Corelli Barnett's "The Desert Generals". A couple of books from the older school that I would encourage anyone to read, and which give a rather more favourable picture of British generalship in circumstances of scarce resources and a demanding environment, are Bryant's "The Turn of the Tide" and Slim's "Defeat into Victory". As to the question of the military efficiency of American leadership as compared to German, I would recommend van Creveld's "Fighting Power". It should, however, always be borne in mind that the American achievement in WW2 -- growing an Army of 175,000 men in 1939 to 8.2 million in 1945, and transporting it across the world's two mightiest oceans to help inflict upon the Axis powers a defeat more thorough than any since the destruction of Carthage -- would be accounted a miracle, but for the fact that it actually happened. It seems a bit silly to criticise any of these men, leaders or led, for being "unprofessional". They were what Stephen Ambrose called "Citizen Soldiers", and Shakespeare called "Warriors for the working day". As George Macdonald Fraser said about his section mates in 14th Army, "They were not professionals; they were experts". All the best, John.
  4. It looks a good deal more attractive when viewed from Saudi Arabia. All the best, John.
  5. But how do you get the smoke into the fortress? As always with chemical weapons, delivery is a much harder problem that developing a harmful agent. There were plenty of occasions when people tried using noxious chemicals in warfare before the 19th century; see http://www.cbwinfo.com/History/ancto19th.shtml for a quick sketch. I doubt that stink-pots, fire-syphons, thunder-bomb oxen and all those weird and wonderful devices that feature in WRG wargames rules could ever have been terribly effective in open warfare. While no doubt the general rejection of CW as a legitimate method of waging war is partly due to its being considered dishonourable and unsoldierly, I suspect that, then as now, a good part of the reason for rejecting it is that it is largely ineffective. The best killing technology for the medieval period was, as it has been for thousands of years, the pointed stick, whether held, hurled or shot. All the best, John.
  6. It's the whole Glencoe thing. If criminality is indeed hereditary, then it makes perfect sense that the name Campbell has been a byword for murderous treachery even longer than Macdonald has been a byword for high-fat fast food (even before Alastair Campbell added fresh tarnish to the name as Bliar's main retailer of official untruth). When I worked in KSFA, a colleague with an interesting past in US military funnies was one Charlie Campbell, and an excellent bloke he was, despite the name. He once told me that he was bimbling around some US city, let's say New York, on, ooh, let's imagine it was Jan 25th, and happened to spot somebody walking along the street in full Scots fig, kilt, dirk, sporran, hose-tops, the works. Delighted at this, he accosted the gentleman in question, expressed admiration for his rig, asked what tartan he was wearing, and declared that he was, himself, of Scots ancestry. The kiltie responded affably, and asked what name he bore. "Campbell", he said. His interlocutor at once stiffened, fixed him with a glittering eye, and, face reddened with rage, declaimed "Ye murrrdering swine!", before turning his back and storming away. Can't imagine why he doesn't change his surname to something inoffensive, like Amin, Pot, Ceaucescu, Dzhugashvili, Bokassa or Burgoyne. All the best, John.
  7. There are two common ways of slicing up these differences, which causes massive confusion among English speakers because they never know which of the teo their interlocutor is using. Information systems people tend to use "data" for the unfiltered stuff and "information" for what it is turned into; the Army, with less respect for Latin, tend to use "information" for the unfiltered stuff, and "knowledge" for what it is turned in to. I think you're right to worry about clogging up the available comms channels. But then I remember when there was only one radio in a platoon, too, and if it was a Pye Westminster then you could be pretty sure that there were no comms between platoon and company, either. All the best, John.
  8. I'm not so much worried about what people are doing in the middle of a firefight -- I'm sure bullets heading towards you will do an excellent job of winning your attention from other things -- as the moments before a firefight starts. I want my blokes to see the enemy first. The capital assumption of much of this modern "reconaissance-strike-complex" stuff (as Marshal Ogarkov called it a quarter of a century ago) is that the blokes in the rear with the beer and streaming video feeds from a swarm of drones can know what is going on in front of Corporal Mulligan better than he can himself by the clever use of Eyeball Mk 1 Mod 0. This is I think yet to be shown to be generally true; certainly not with enough confidence to replace several Corporals Mulligan with UAVs and UAV-fanciers. Of course, if you are a vast armaments corporation intent on flogging UAVs at enormous expense, you may have a different view of the matter. As to planning, I still think that needs to be done by people in the same room. You are not going to be able to distribute staff cells from a unit of formation HQ successfully with the shockingly inadequate state of collaborative working tools now, even before their performance is degraded by painting them green. And orders should still be given face-to-face as far as possible. At sub-unit level, yes, there will be a benefit from knowing what your flanking elements are up to from moment to moment, but this is more a question of synchronising execution than planning; the fast re-planning on the fly that might happen I expect would be done by recognition-primed decision-making, and I would think a position-reporting screen and a traditional all-informed voice net are all that will help here. IMNSHO a lot of what needs to be done in this field is actually nothing whatever to do with technology, it's more to do with formal language. The armed forces desperately need a battlespace description language with formally-defined semantics, capable of expressing the degree to which information is uncertain (and there are several different flavours of uncertainty). In this repect, at least, I think the German and American armies are closer to a satisfactory solution than the British, but arguably it matters less because the British Army is so small that everyone knows each other. You shouldn't send him data if it's no good to him -- at least not in action, out of action let him fill his boots (as per Slim's "information centres" for 14th Army -- but these were for morale-building purposes, nothing else). Also, you probably shouldn't send him updates too often. See Nicholas Naseem Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness", on why he looks at the stock market prices once a year instead of once a minute. All the best, John.
  9. It might have been Claude Shannon who said it originally, but I heard it first from Graham Mathieson when he said "Everbody asks who consumes information. Nobody asks what information consumes. But the answer is fairly obvious; information consumes the attention of the user." Now, do you want infantrymen head-down looking at their PBI-Pod, or head-up looking at the bad guys trying to hide behind that tree? All the best, John.
  10. Rest assured, security is such a major element in the design of this kind of system that it severely compromises performance. All the best, John.
  11. Another vital factor. If all the previous questions check out OK, then there is only one possible answer; the man was a Communist. Communists can never make a proper cup of tea. They believe that proper tea is theft. All the best, John.
  12. I suspect that this is a special festive typo, to celebrate Christmas. All the best, John.
  13. What tea was the man using? Were you in a hard water area? Was the teapot a brown betty, or something else? Did he put milk in it? Had he ever been in the Army? Was he from Yorkshire? Any of these factors may have been decisive. All the best, John.
  14. You coffee illuminati don't fool me for a minute. This is just an exercise in misdirection, to try to cover up the REAL conspiracy, which is what has prevented travellers in America getting a decent cup of tea ever since 1773. The conspirators even tried to pass the blame on to Native Americans, dammit. All the best, John.
  15. 60 yards is not a particularly untypical range for small-arms fights; and, even so, the reported shots-per-casualty rates are not far off 1,000. I don't understand the remark about "very small actions, infantry is essentially defenceless". I understand that the rounds fired per hit for US Police Officers using handguns is something like 6 -- also a much poorer performance than one might think from first principles, and at ranges so close that you'd think halitosis would be effective, but only about one order of magnitude worse than range shooting instead of the two that British OR folks regard as normal for combat. What was that you were just saying about "you cannot scale it"? When discussing CM, it is the "single firefight" case that is the applicable one. It should be tolerably obvious that the number of rounds consumed divided by the number of losses suffered over a whole campaign is going to tell you next to nothing about the likely hitting rate of rifleman Kowalsky engaging attacking infantry at 300 metres. I suspect that there are not many after-action reports where one has an accurate accounting of SAA expenditure and casualties inflicted and a reasonable chance of untangling the small-arms rom the other casualty-causing agents. It would be nice to know of any such that people might have lying around. The "technologically focused" should perhaps explore the exciting possibilities offered by a useful battlecraft skill called "hiding". Sorry, my eyes must have glazed over and I missed that part of the thread. In the days before people stopped going outdoors, I would have suggested taking a bunch of energetic friends, and practicing this "hiding" and "stalking" stuff on one another in a piece of countryside near you. Yeah -- John Hill was a brilliant game designer, and Hal Hock wasn't. However, SPI's "Firefight" takes a crazily techno-centric approach and produces a great game, while AH's "Firepower" takes a supposedly motivation-centred approach and sucked like an Avon in reheat -- because Jim Dunnigan and Irad B Hardy could design good games, and S Craig Taylor couldn't. Except for "Machiavelli". All the best, John.
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