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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35239 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect.

I thought, and still think, that warfare is highly mathematical. I guess it stems from my love of games like Panzer General, or Hearts of Iron. There are things like esprit de corps, or civilian morale, or troop experience that still can be modeled — e.g. through modifiers. There are political events that are difficult to simulate (like the recent putsch) — but surely you can simulate events on an operational level, like Zaporizhzhia/Western Donbas front? Wargaming is a thing, but do they utilize a huge progress in compute to quickly work through numerous scenarios to find the most optimal ones?

I agree that war is in principle fully simulatable, but in practise it's not particularly effective.

The reason is that data collection is incredibly difficult, since both sides will do their best to obfuscate.

Further, a lot of high level decision making still hinges on the decisions of a very few people, who are also near impossible to model. Seriously, how would anyone model Rommel in code?

To the best of my limited knowledge, even modern wargaming heavily relies on humans to mediate the rules, there's no single program or set of programs that is capable of doing so. No, not even my beloved Arma 3 :(

Plus the risk of black swans.

Maybe one of your best generals gets taken out by a pulmonary embolism prior to a critical battle. Or adverse weather conditions delay the arrival of your fleet or, worse, sink your fleet before even engaging the enemy. Maybe a lucky enemy spy manages to sneak a bomb into a factory that is critical to your war effort.

To a large extent these will average out over the course of a long, large scale conflict, but it can also result in a series of dominoes falling such that outcomes you didn't intend or expect are the result.

And thus the problem is that computerized models tend to be sterile and overly deterministic where such crazy events don't get proper consideration.

Right, but people like Rommel have just bigger phase space of possible decisions which stems from their better intuition and greater experience. I had in mind simulations like what they do e.g. in astronomy when they try to simulate formation of star systems, galaxies, and such. It is also highly probabilistic — they'll say something like "with the probability of 60% the planet with Jupiter mass will form at the distance of 1 au away from the central star" based on thousands of simulations they run; unlike wargaming where you have only a specific scenario you run several times with imperfect humans.

I read somewhere that US DoD has some precise models for logistics — I'll try to research.

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