It's all in this military powerpoint, apparently official. On the positive side they are aware the problem is complex.
Hat tip Chris Coyne at The Austrian Economists.
How to win in Afghanistan
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It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s Obama.
Good luck; you will need it.
To humans I recommend to read Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions. As he said In the preface to the 1996 edition: “How a variety of social institutions and processes coordinate innumerable scattered fragments of knowledge, enabling a complex society to function, is the central theme of the first half of Knowledge and Society.”
I think it’s an encrypted map of secure shipping routes in the Caribbean, cleverly disguised as a tribute to the inertia and incompetence of large, bureaucratic govt bodies.
One more time, please. What is it you’re asking me to do?
Yeah, military ops can be complicated. I liked the description of a divisional logistics planner’s job: “You have 20,000 people who have just arrived at a town where they’ve never been before, and there are no street signs. Calculate how many deliveries need to be made–not just food and water but also socks and surgical supplies, batteries and bulldozers. Provide a route for every delivery and every commuter that gets them where they need to be on time, bearing in mind there are anarchists in town who will see any traffic jam as an opportunity for mayhem. Provide an alternate route for every vehicle. Provide a second alternate. Tomorrow this will all change and you can start over.
Trevor, I think the snark about this ‘plan’ is that it is to be implemented by the guys that Abrams said if you drop one of them and an anvil in the desert and picked them up two weeks later the anvil would be broken.
However, maybe some network analysts can identify that particular anvil that if broken results in total collapse of resistance.
That’s a schematic for a system dynamics simulation. Such simulations are necessarily opaque so a schematic like this could help a decision-maker understand what the model accounts for. And like Trevor said, the benefits of such a model come from thinking rigorously about the problem and from hopefully teasing out possible feedback loops and other higher-order effects.
no software could ever be this simple.
I suppose “Kill KILL KILL KILL KILL!” isn’t acceptable to the technocrats….so they distract them with this stuff.
The snark is well deserved, becuase in case you couldn’t tell, the wars in the Mid-East have been monumental failures at “increasing our security”. In the course of murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people that had no intentions of ever even coming to our country, us defense policy has created millions of new jihadist.
Similar to the Clinton/Albright trade blockades aimed at Iraqi peasants…killing hundreds of thousands…the end-results of these murders won’t be known for years.
According to Obama’s own intelligence chief Admiral Dennis Blair, domestic security is more at risk from the economic problems we now face than from any other threats. Some of these economic problems do stem from the reckless spending and wasted capital that have come with these idiotic wars.
The reckless overspen
actually this chart isn’t too hard to understand.
Would we feel better if the graph we simple?
Don’t be fooled.
This map was created to confuse the enemy.
I cannot help but think that our decision makers are unduly influenced by lobbies that benefit from all this military spending. This war will be dragged out as much as possible.
I work in a plastic factory and it’s nice to have a little checklist of the things that will change if you speed up your RPMs: opacity, width, layflat… In a vastly more complex system like the Afghanistan effort I think you might need something like this to say “don’t forget by changing A you’ll change B, and you can’t change A without A’ being in place first.” The computer simulation would just automate that.
Looks like a knitting pattern for an Argyle sweater.
This may or may not be just me: does this graph roughly resemble a map of the world?
Reference image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Equirectangular-projection.jpg/800px-Equirectangular-projection.jpg
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