Have you ever tried to plan an invasion? Like, actually done a net assessment of a scenario in detail accounting for terrain, equipment, training, intelligence, logistics, and all the other things that go into a military encounter? It is time-consuming and hard. So is efficiently butchering a hog. So is learning to program well.
Changing diapers and pitching manure? Not so much.
Dying gallantly? Only get to practice that once, so how would you get good at it?
People throw this quote around because it is fun to imagine yourself as a supremely Competent Man in all these domains. Indeed, it makes for excellent fiction—-but it is just that, fiction. When you actually start trying to seriously think about investing in specialized skills like military science, this quote quickly reveals itself to have not made any distinction between life skills that the average person should have and things which require years of study.
This is actually a massive undertaking. An undergraduate at MIT taking a semester-long course on this will barely scratch the surface of it. Furthermore, you're never going to suddenly and unexpectedly need to know this. Any situation where you plan an invasion is going to be preceded by spending a long time getting into the position where people trust you with their lives and the fates of their nation.
> die gallantly
You're only ever going to be in this situation once, and probably not even that. Why does it matter how gallant your heart attack is?
These skills make a bit more sense in a world where most of us need to march off to war. Happily, we don't live in that world.
You should prepare for the situations you are only mildly unlikely to be in and where your skill matters.
> After 14 years in the military and experience with several armed conflicts and humanitarian disasters, I have seen that pretty much all your plans and preparation will go out the window, so you need to learn to move adapt and improvise.
Eisenhower said it best: Plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.
> The quote that shows the futility of war games is “No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy” from German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke
How does that show the futility of war games? War games are one venue in which military leaders develop skill in adapting to the unexpected. The accuracy of von Moltke's quote certainly suggests that planning can't completely substitute for skill in execution, but it doesn't mean that planning is unnecessary or that war gaming is not valuable.
"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower - one of my favourite quotes that sums this up well.
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Eisenhower
The idea being that the process of planning makes you more easily able to react when everything goes to shit. Eg don't treat a plan like a recipe for success.
That in combat, it's never that simple. It seems like that, seems like the enemy has 100% information, or is 100% capable. And it's not (nor are we).
Everything is muddy, nothing is guaranteed to work, the environment is unforgiving, people react differently under stress. We, they, everyone KNOW this and it still doesn't work.
So, you plan, you test contingencies, develop capability, even if they're never used.
In Germany, they had plans to use shopping centers as ad hoc aircraft bases. Knock large holes into the store front (they tend to not be load bearing), shove out all of the shelves and what not with a bulldozer, clear the parking lots of cars and lights (bulldozers work well for this as well). Boom, instant hangar and tarmac.
But that's just it, just warplans. Think tanks thinking through potential problems and ways to solve them. They also had warplans to blow up dams to wash over a teeming Soviet advance. Seems, in the large, to be a bad idea. But, on the other hand, consider the events and thinking going on when someone chimes in "Hey, maybe we should blow up the dams...".
Combat is very messy. No plan survives first contact. Just ask the Russians.
> In war, lack of preparation means death of your men at minimum, and the collapse of your nation at worst.
This is the fallacy that keeps people locked in over preparing. The way past it is to identify less risky goals that are still aligned with that particular objective. So in war your objective is to learn the enemy's weaknesses. So you could try trading with them, to survey their defenses. Imagine the Vikings at Lindisfarne, they are not going to go in blind. They first build a trading relationship, selling fish, and as friends they can see how strong the Abbey is, how many monasterial guards there are, or when the collection trays are the most full etc. Very little risk right? Similarly with sales, where your risk is your reputation. Say, you can't afford to jeopardize it with your one big connection because you spent a decade building the relationship. Well then you go in asking for advice on your idea, something low risk, instead of trying to make a yes-no sale.
> Any plan will certainly be wrong, so there no point wasting time making one.
There's a famous Eisenhower quote that goes something like, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
The point being that any single plan is likely not to pan out because of unknowns and surprises, but by going through the process of planning, you have "cached" knowledge about your domain like what the opportunities and threats are and you can use that knowledge to adapt when the specific plan falls through.
People don’t talk like this in the military. You’re never doing something ‘at all costs’. First you’re always bound by the laws of armed conflict, and second you always want to give yourself the mental option of backing out and achieving your objective another way. The town is a means to another end. If you expend all your resources getting the town and have nothing left for the actual objective then you’ve achieved nothing.
> Example: every bridge in Europe is 'pre-prepared' for demolition (..) the plans are already done. A combat engineer need only draw the plan for the database and execute one of the options.
You would think. But in reality, these one-off type preparations probably have a actual low chance of going as planned or being executed in a timely manner. The only exceptions being contingencies that are actively, regularly simulated by computer or otherwise. I don't think it'd be surprising to find that, bureaucracy & budgets working the way they do, no one there is simulating demolitions like that (at least not since the 50s or 60s).
Changing diapers and pitching manure? Not so much.
Dying gallantly? Only get to practice that once, so how would you get good at it?
People throw this quote around because it is fun to imagine yourself as a supremely Competent Man in all these domains. Indeed, it makes for excellent fiction—-but it is just that, fiction. When you actually start trying to seriously think about investing in specialized skills like military science, this quote quickly reveals itself to have not made any distinction between life skills that the average person should have and things which require years of study.
reply