Or you learned that decades ago, modeled it for them, and they ran with it.

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).

As HR McMaster likes to say, "all wars are the result of a miscalculation"

(Attributed to an unnamed Soviet Staff Officer)

I always (as a Vet) thought this was a misnomer - it's often best described as "no battle plan survives contact with reality" - reality being the new info you get that you didn't get or couldn't have gotten.

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.

  You need to go to shit-ton of schools to be able to make simple decisions. Otherwise you'll start to invent all kinds of over-complicated solutions. 

  Everything in war is simple. The guy in the front lines is the one at war. You can't win in a war unless you give simple orders. The people on top need to be able to give commands that are so simple that even the man in the front lines understands.

  Everything is as simple as possible. To understand that, you need to go study a lot.

Simulating the real world is hard.

https://www.google.com/search?q=no+battle+plan+survives

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.

Moltke the Elder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder) wrote that to understand military strategy you have to understand two basic things:

- No plan survives contact with the enemy

- Strategy is a system of expedients

In other words, you can make all the plans you want, but as soon as you put them into action they have to take into account the behavior of the enemy, which may or may not go as you predicted. And once events start departing from your predictions, gaps in your plan will appear that you will have to plug with whatever you have at hand, because once shots have been fired you can't un-declare war and start over with a new plan that incorporates what you've learned. You're hip-deep in the muck now, and have to struggle through to the other side as best you can.

Something similar could be said about designing software. If no military plan survives contact with the enemy, no software architecture survives contact with actual users.

The architecture of a particular piece of software is, at root, a hypothesis: given problem X, here is how one could go about applying a defined set of computing resources to solve it. And at the beginning those architectures are always clean, because they're being applied at a purely theoretical level where things we don't really understand about the problem aren't evident yet. And since it's all theoretical, there's no warts; re-drawing the architecture on the whiteboard doesn't inconvenience anyone, so we can do it boldly and often.

But at some point you have to translate that beautiful architecture into working software and put it in front of real people, and that's where the problems start. Because those real people will use the software in ways that surface facets of the problem you didn't appreciate, forcing you to modify it to keep up. And because now making changes means inconveniencing real people and losing actual money instead of just scrubbing off a corner of a whiteboard, those changes will have to be conservative and expedient rather than bold and sweeping. And this is where the warts start creeping in, as you try to drag your original vision into some form that actually fits the real world as quickly and cheaply and non-disruptively as you can.

If the architecture is the hypothesis, the software is the experiment.

And you may think, after running the experiment once, that if you could just start over with a clean sheet of paper armed with what you know now, this time you'd "get it right". But of course the real world isn't static, so by the time you develop a new hypothesis and are ready to run the experiment again, you often find the ground has moved out from under you. Your hypotheses are chasing a moving target, and so the need to patch them up with duct tape and bailing wire never ends.

Shelling cities to the ground is absolutely a plan A tactic.

Armor can't return fire at high azimuthal angles, to move it through a city without risk of ambush, they destroy tall buildings near the route. And to avoid giving away the route ahead of time, they cut multiple routes.

what matters is how you adjust vs your mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, even during military operations, because nothing is known in advance.

I guess they learned that from the German army.

    No plan survives contact with the enemy.