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Chamale posted:This reminds me of a naval wargaming tournament I heard about once, where each player was given a rulebook and a trillion-dollar budget to design their navy. The winning navy consisted of millions of rubber dinghies with whatever weapons they could carry. How many jeeps does it take to kill a Tiger tank?
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Apr 26, 2013 09:15
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Jeoh posted:The guy was launching Tomahawks from fishing boats and a whole bunch of other impossible poo poo. But all everybody remembers is "hurf durf America can't handle defeat". No you're thinking of the actual naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, while we're talking about a table top naval wargame.
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Apr 26, 2013 09:26
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Alchenar posted:How many jeeps does it take to kill a Tiger tank? One  
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Apr 26, 2013 09:31
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Rabhadh posted:I remember this story too, they changed the rules after the guy won the tournament a couple of times in a row. I think it may have appeared in this thread but googling isn't helping me right now. You're thinking of Millenium Challenge 2002 "Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy. In particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World War II light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected"
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Apr 26, 2013 13:23
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Alchenar posted:Yeah, often in a crisis the Germans would draw a circle over a sector of the front and say 'everything in here is now in Kampfgruppe X' (X usually being the name of the commander). This wasn't entirely unique to the Germans as both the US and Soviets had ad hoc all-arms battlegroups, from the Combat Commands of US armored divisions which generally mixed the armored infantry, armored, and cavalry recon battalions to basically the 1942 Soviet Army, which evolved into the six Tank Armies(which were more all-arms forces with concentration for attacks).
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Apr 26, 2013 13:58
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Postorder Trollet89 posted:You're thinking of Millenium Challenge 2002 That Wiki article was way too brief. Riper also cheated like a maniac. He didn't use real motorcycles for the communications, for example, they were hand-waved into existence and 100% reliable. From what my military friends tell me, it was more a hissy-fit on his part than an actual useful bit of out-of-the-box thinking.
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Apr 26, 2013 14:03
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Obdicut posted:That Wiki article was way too brief. Riper also cheated like a maniac. He didn't use real motorcycles for the communications, for example, they were hand-waved into existence and 100% reliable. From what my military friends tell me, it was more a hissy-fit on his part than an actual useful bit of out-of-the-box thinking. Wargames are 90% cheating for all sides. Alot of computer generated units are inserted for each side, otherwise an exercise of that scale would cost several billion dollars. The results do speak of a doctrinal weakness in the US military, something that Riper is more than willing to highlight. The truth of the matter is that Rumsfelds DoD was about as efficient and self aware as McNamara or Kissingers. Postorder Trollet89 fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 14:14
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Postorder Trollet89 posted:You're thinking of Millenium Challenge 2002 No, I wasn't thinking of that. When I find the thing I was talking about I'll post it.
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Apr 26, 2013 14:19
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Postorder Trollet89 posted:Wargames are 90% cheating for all sides. Alot of computer generated units are inserted for each side, otherwise an exercise of that scale would cost several billion dollars. The results do speak of a doctrinal weakness in the US military, something that Riper is more than willing to highlight. The truth of the matter is that Rumsfelds DoD was about as efficient and self aware as McNamara or Kissingers. The results, to me, more show that wargames where you don't actually physically do poo poo aren't actually going to tell you about physically doing poo poo, unless you have a very, very, very accurate simulation. Which they didn't. I don't think the other dudes are smarter or less bullshitting than Riper was.
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Apr 26, 2013 15:37
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Alchenar posted:How many jeeps does it take to kill a Tiger tank? It depends how much c4 you throw on the front. NightGyr posted:One That drat thing is the reason the HMMWV exists...they had a tendency to flip the Jeep. I ran across a copy of Stars and Stripes in a box of junk at my parents' house (we were stationed overseas in the 80s) and it was the issue covering the jeep's phaseout. Godholio fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 15:57
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Chamale posted:This reminds me of a naval wargaming tournament I heard about once, where each player was given a rulebook and a trillion-dollar budget to design their navy. The winning navy consisted of millions of rubber dinghies with whatever weapons they could carry. It was some space fleet battle hex game thingy.
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Apr 26, 2013 20:21
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vuk83 posted:It was some space fleet battle hex game thingy.
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Apr 26, 2013 20:51
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The original Steve Jackson Games version of Ogre had a slight balance issue with what it called the Fuzzy Wuzzy Principle. GEVs had sufficient pre- and post- fire phase movement to stay out of the Ogre's ramming range. It was eventually stripped of active armaments and helpless to the remaining swarm of very cost-effective bees.
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Apr 26, 2013 21:25
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Alchenar posted:How many jeeps does it take to kill a Tiger tank? 
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Apr 26, 2013 22:48
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Rabhadh posted:No, I wasn't thinking of that. When I find the thing I was talking about I'll post it. Pretty sure you're thinking of Eurisko and this article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
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Apr 26, 2013 23:28
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Throatwarbler posted:There was an actual point to having big battleships though, in that they have huge guns and it's hard to fit huge guns and their ammo and the engines needed to move them on a small ship. Once you've gone to missiles, and/or planes with missiles you've solved that problem. So it's identical to the whole tube vs rocket artillery debate from a few pages ago!
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Apr 27, 2013 04:41
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Phobophilia posted:So it's identical to the whole tube vs rocket artillery debate from a few pages ago! What do you guys think would be better, a tank-destroying battleship-carrier hybrid armed with tube artillery or missiles? Oh, and Heil Gay Black Hitler!
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Apr 27, 2013 06:50
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Monocled Falcon posted:Pretty sure you're thinking of Eurisko and this article: Yeah, it was Eurisko I was thinking about. Excellent article by the way, recommend it to everyone in here.
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Apr 27, 2013 11:54
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Rabhadh posted:Yeah, it was Eurisko I was thinking about. Excellent article by the way, recommend it to everyone in here. Yeah it says a lot about how insurgencies work.
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Apr 27, 2013 14:43
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vuk83 posted:Yeah it says a lot about how insurgencies work. It really doesn't. It says a lot about how gaming the systems worked. You can make an analogy to insurgencies, but, like all analogies, it's a very flawed one, and this one extremely so. The article is also, typical of Gladwell, slipshod in the extreme. He sets it up as though he's talking about competitions between David and Goliath, between the scrappy team that lacks skill and the highly-skilled team, and talks about ways the underdog can perform. Then he brings in Eurisko, which is entirely different-- it is a match between groups that have been given stringently exactly the same resources. They then choose to spend those differently, but the budget they have and the constrains in spending it are exactly the same. By calling Eurisko the underdog, Gladwell is trying to say it's a David, but it's not. Eurisko was not the underdog, in the same way the basketball team with shorter and less-skilled players. If the basketball team had had shorter and less-skilled players but a lot more of them, then it would have been closer in analogy, though still vastly different, from Eurisko. The idea that there are edge cases in gaming where spending your resources in non-intuitive ways is neither new or particular interesting; this sort of min/maxing goes on in every MMO, RPG, and tabletop game, and every once in awhile someone actually sits down and does the math and knocks conventional wisdom on its rear end. Evolutionary computation is the fanciest way to do this, and that's what it sounds like Eurisko is, from this quote: quote:“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” What Eurisko did, basically, was analyse only the battlefield and the rules, to not make any assumptions, to not analogize to the real world. In doing so, it analyzed the best way to win the scenario but the takeaway from that is extremely limited; it is not in any way revelatory or even especially interesting that in a system where you know all the givens and you know all the rules exactly and you start with equal resources, that you can create a superior game through evolutionary computation than you would be able to through analogies with the real world. The limit of this, of course, is that it works both ways: Just as Eurisko succeeded because it did not fall into the trap of filling in information from the real world, taking specific lessons from Eurisko-- not the metalesson that all things are gameable and to not take assumptions with you into a new situation-- would be the exact wrong thing to do.
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Apr 27, 2013 15:27
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Alchenar posted:Yeah, often in a crisis the Germans would draw a circle over a sector of the front and say 'everything in here is now in Kampfgruppe X' (X usually being the name of the commander). This was arguably one of, if not the biggest strenght of the Wehrmacht throughout the war: Their low-level officers were very good at acting on their own initiative and thinking on their feet, taking advantage of momentary opportunities or putting together rapid counter- and/or spoiling attacks, which at times drove allied/soviet generals into fits because one little Major or whatever in the right place just managed to effectively blunt a division- or corps-level offensive they had spent weeks to prepare. The Soviets and western allies learned to perform similar as the war progressed, but didn't really reach the level of the Wehrmacht right up to the end. Postorder Trollet89 posted:Wargames are 90% cheating for all sides. Alot of computer generated units are inserted for each side, otherwise an exercise of that scale would cost several billion dollars. The results do speak of a doctrinal weakness in the US military, something that Riper is more than willing to highlight. The truth of the matter is that Rumsfelds DoD was about as efficient and self aware as McNamara or Kissingers. There's cheating as in "doing something against specific exercise rules" and cheating as in "doing poo poo that would be physically impossible IRL". Van Ripers actions at the Millenium Challenge fell into the second category, what with his lightspeed motorcycle couriers, Boston Whalers carrying missiles bigger than the boats and magical invisible-until-firing flotillas of fishing vessels that he handwaved away declaring the USN would just ignore several dozen fishing boats moving directly at a carrier group.
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Apr 28, 2013 15:47
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But isn't there an argument to be made about using small, almost suicidal in their mission, vessels against the kind of navy that powers like the U.S. have? It's physically impossible for someone to compete against the U.S., Britain, France or Russia in the sea in conventional terms, certainly adopting maritime guerrila warfare is the way to go? This is just assuming even a fishing vessel could even get close enough to a navy to see it on the horizon without being obliterated, of course. Modern warfare really makes theoretical situations really boring.
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Apr 28, 2013 21:10
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Mans posted:It's physically impossible for someone to compete against the U.S., Britain, France or Russia in the sea in conventional terms, certainly adopting maritime guerrila warfare is the way to go? Need to update your navies. China/Japan are larger than the European countries now. India is close as well. You'd be surprised how big the "Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force" is and how much power it can actually project now.
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Apr 28, 2013 21:29
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jaegerx posted:Need to update your navies. China/Japan are larger than the European countries now. India is close as well. You'd be surprised how big the "Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force" is and how much power it can actually project now. I really love that the JSDF has Helicopter Destroyers which totally aren't light aircraft carriers, seriously guys!
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Apr 28, 2013 21:34
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Mans posted:But isn't there an argument to be made about using small, almost suicidal in their mission, vessels against the kind of navy that powers like the U.S. have? It's physically impossible for someone to compete against the U.S., Britain, France or Russia in the sea in conventional terms, certainly adopting maritime guerrila warfare is the way to go? Yes. The problem with the Milenium Challenge was that van Riper just pulled stuff you literally couldn't do in real life, which made the whole thing practically useless effort. You're not going to stuff a pair of Kitchens or Sandboxes on a small fishing boat without sinking the thing instantly; these suckers are 5+ tons each without the launch canisters and control units. And neither is a CBG going to flat-out ignore surface contacts in its area of operations, especially when they're on a bearing that gets them closer to the carrier.
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Apr 28, 2013 23:07
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Still, by all accounts the response was much more 'no you didn't!' and to redo do it over rather than, I dunno, address the unorthodoxy. Like, how would the USN deal with motorcycle couriers. Should they trust SigInt all the time when maybe there's actually a lot of other communication going on overland/by pigeon/whatever?
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Apr 28, 2013 23:37
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the JJ posted:Still, by all accounts the response was much more 'no you didn't!' and to redo do it over rather than, I dunno, address the unorthodoxy. Not by all accounts, just by van Riper's account. Also, it wasn't unorthodoxy, it was just cheating. People have already mentioned some things, but another thing van Riper did was to continue making attacks with units that had been destroyed. As in, attack aircraft from the blue carrier would destroy a coastal ASM battery, and then reconnaissance planes would observe the site to ensure that it wasn't repaired, but van Riper would just declare that he was launching ASMs from that site which was, in game terms, a crater full of fire and twisted metal. quote:Like, how would the USN deal with motorcycle couriers. Should they trust SigInt all the time when maybe there's actually a lot of other communication going on overland/by pigeon/whatever? The issue was basically that van Riper was cheating so blatantly that he had made it impossible to learn anything useful from the wargame, which is why they stopped and reset. To take the motorcycle couriers as your example, what could the US military learn about their real life practical utility from a simulation where van Riper was treating them as invisible, perfectly reliable, and instantaneous? What can you learn about the potential threat posed by arming small civilian boats when van Riper armed them with weapons they couldn't possibly carry and then declared that they had teleported to the middle of the carrier group? They had to restart the exercise and order him to stop cheating so much to learn anything. Another issue was that van Riper's cheating allowed him to neutralize blue's landing ships before they could offload troops, which prevented the whole ground combat phase of the exercise from taking place. This would have denied them to opportunity to simulate amphibious operations, which were the main reason that the exercise was being conducted in the first place. They weren't going to simply write off the exercise as a failure, especially given how expensive it was. But to answer the question, SigInt would notice that they weren't seeing the kind of activity they would expect, and simultaneously visual reconnaissance would show the presence of huge numbers of soldiers on motorcycles riding around all over the place. Putting those two observations next to each other, they would then begin killing anything on two wheels. IRL, motorcycle couriers can't teleport and aren't invisible, so the problem is not exactly insoluble by military means.
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Apr 29, 2013 01:03
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The man's name is Ripper. For fucks sake he had a good intention: make the USN not feel invincible.
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Apr 29, 2013 02:31
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Baloogan posted:The man's name is Ripper. For fucks sake he had a good intention: make the USN not feel invincible. He absolutely should've known better. He almost wasted EVERY valuable lesson to be learned from such an exercise and he alienated a lot of people from a good loving idea (outside-the-box exercises). The USN has been fairly open with a lot of its problems. This douche caused a lot more damage than any feely-good results that could ever come from taking the Navy down a peg in his esteemed loving opinion.
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Apr 29, 2013 02:49
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Baloogan posted:The man's name is Ripper. No, it's not. His name is Paul K. Van Riper. quote:For fucks sake he had a good intention: make the USN not feel invincible. I don't know what his intention was. I recall some rumors that his retirement hadn't been entirely his idea and scotching a $250M war game was his attempt to get back at the Rumsfeld group, but I don't know about that.
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Apr 29, 2013 03:05
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Sounds more and more like Down Periscope is the most realistic movie released about the contemporary American military.
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Apr 29, 2013 03:06
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coolatronic posted:Sounds more and more like Down Periscope is the most realistic movie released about the contemporary American military. 
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Apr 29, 2013 07:40
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I just looked up that Traveler Trillion Credit Challenge, and it was actually a space game and not a naval simulation. While I find the idea of capsules with lasers less hilarious than a billion liferafts firing smoothbore cannons, it's interesting to note that the Goonswarm used very similar tactics to achieve economic domination in Eve Online. The Goonfleet could win a war of attrition against any opponent because the team could absorb a near-infinite number of casualties and eventually bankrupt ships firing the latest in expensive ammunition at flying scrapyards. It's not overly applicable to real military history, but it makes an interesting analogy to the homemade Palestinian rockets shot down by $50 thousand dollar missiles.
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Apr 29, 2013 07:57
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The same though had occurred to me but I was to embarrassed to bring it up here
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Apr 29, 2013 08:27
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Chamale posted:I just looked up that Traveler Trillion Credit Challenge, and it was actually a space game and not a naval simulation. While I find the idea of capsules with lasers less hilarious than a billion liferafts firing smoothbore cannons, it's interesting to note that the Goonswarm used very similar tactics to achieve economic domination in Eve Online. The Goonfleet could win a war of attrition against any opponent because the team could absorb a near-infinite number of casualties and eventually bankrupt ships firing the latest in expensive ammunition at flying scrapyards. It's not overly applicable to real military history, but it makes an interesting analogy to the homemade Palestinian rockets shot down by $50 thousand dollar missiles. That's a complete misunderstanding of Goonfleetswarmwaffe and EVE Online and what goes on there. e: Goons are rich in EVE because they're sitting on a large proportion of EVE Online's version of oil. They got that by winning wars the same way everyone does - better CnC, better logistics, and a willingness to commit forces to the right fights and not to commit to the wrong fights. Rifters have nothing to do with economic wars of attrition, they have a useful role in warfare but the real point is to give new players something fun to do in PVP so that they don't get bored and quit, and in a few months time that Rifter newbie who sticks around will generally have upgraded into one of the more important ships. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 08:28
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ArchangeI posted:I really love that the JSDF has Helicopter Destroyers which totally aren't light aircraft carriers, seriously guys! Oh and of course they're not gonna stage F-35s off of them.
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Apr 29, 2013 11:55
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jaegerx posted:Oh and of course they're not gonna stage F-35s off of them. Neither is anyone else, if the program keeps up the way it has been...
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Apr 29, 2013 12:39
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Japan's buying neither the B nor C variants, so there's no way they could fly them off of a DDH as is. I don't know how different the A and C varians are, but with Japan's tech base I'm sure they could manage to alter them to a C-equivalent, but it would probably be pretty obvious if they did so. At any rate what difference does it make? Really Japan should have at least some limited strike capacity. Article 9 is pretty much completely self-imposed and if anything the US would likely prefer Japan to drop it. As-is North Korea could start hurling missiles at Japan and there would be no way, literally no way, for Japan to stop it without outside support.
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Apr 29, 2013 15:11
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LimburgLimbo posted:Japan's buying neither the B nor C variants, so there's no way they could fly them off of a DDH as is. I don't know how different the A and C varians are, but with Japan's tech base I'm sure they could manage to alter them to a C-equivalent, but it would probably be pretty obvious if they did so. They have AEGIS equipped destroyers that can shoot down missiles before they escape the atmosphere, and North Korea is already within the combat radius of their land based F15s?
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Apr 29, 2013 15:27
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Why are all modern American ships called destroyers when they are the size of battleships and cruisers?
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Apr 29, 2013 16:03
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