I became aware of this today and thought the 'Polis' project looked quite interesting, so I put up a statement that (in theory!) people could debate and discuss...and TBF I am genuinely interested in the theory behind Dupuy's work, so I thought, why not? This is a link to the actual post.
This might stir up debate!
ReplyDeleteWe shall see! I hope so because it genuinely feels like a debate that should happen in the military/history/gaming community. And there are some resonations into popular history - in unacknowledged and slightly garbled form, I have seen it "in the wild" in Max Hastings' and Anthony Beevor's books...with some rejections of them by other historians, but no engagement with the underlying arguments.
DeletePlus I am usually up for engaging with nifty new community tools...
DeleteThat was quite interesting, thanks. Did you design the Qs yourself? There was an amusing commentary about how some of the commanders of the original divisions in the Dupuy study reacted to the rating of their units, particularly the US 88th Div.
ReplyDeleteYes, the comments on there at the moment are all me; the platform reckons you should put 10-25 'seed comments' on there to start things off and should be a mixture of different positions, radical stuff, 'common sense' stuff. I read the summary of it by Lawrence and Zetterling in the back of Normandy (and went on to read 'Draftee Division' too on the back of it); the main objection to Dupuy's numbers was actually that he should use different numbers to get a different result...but that to me concedes the argument, we are then just talking about the details.
DeleteTbh, I'm utterly baffled by the idea that unit effectiveness CAN'T be quantified as numbers (at least at battalion level upwards). What do people think operations researchers and defence analysts do all day? Everything can be quantified as numbers, that is how the universe works.
DeleteI agree....but I think there are lots of people who recoil strongly from that idea. My half-informed guess is that a reaction against McNamara from Vietnam entered strongly into elite European culture (that bit of it concerned with strategy, anyway) innoculated it against attempts to express knowledge in a more numerical way. Plus some straightforward gatekeeping a la Moneyball.
DeleteI was a defence analyst (now I'm a foreign policy analyst) and never quantified unit effectiveness by numbers.
DeleteThanks Owen. Did anyone ever mention doing so?
DeleteYes, DSTL did. I didn't work with them on combat effectiveness, but I did on public opinion (in the Middle East and Afghanistan), which they quantified (e.g. counting the number of anti-American statements in Arab media). I shared a room with 2 operations researchers (or whatever they're called) in Basra airport. They ran numbers through a computer but mostly played Doom - mind you the war was supposed to be over then. No-one military paid them any attention.
DeleteHa! That sounds about right!
DeleteSounds so right;)
ReplyDelete