That quote was Russian observations on their securing valuable technical information, but lamenting on their inability to overcome their capability gap through spying due to changes in tactics of their "main adversary". In WW2, a major factor for the US Naval success in the Pacific was a change in attack doctrine. Aircraft would attack relentlessly from multiple directions, overwhelming the Japanese defenses. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, when Australian and US pilots mauled a Japanese supply convoy with Bristol Beaufighter aircraft. In the battle, aircraft fake a torpedo run, the ships changed course to align with the aircraft and minimize the attack surface, then they were strafed with the four 20 mm cannons. The air campaign in the Pacific was much more vicious and effective than Europe. One of the pilots quoted
"They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up off the deck of ship; they'd fly all around ... and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realized what I was watching were human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they'd fall in the water."
The Russians have difficulty adapting their tactics on the field. Reviewing the successes of the US battles must be quite different than throwing bodies at a front line.
The major factor in winning the Pacific battles was code breaking the Japanese communications. Doctrine doesn't matter when you know what the enemy is doing or planning.
That is crazy reductive to the point of ignorance. Doctrine does matter. You might know what your enemy is doing but if you fight wrong, even with foreknowledge, you will not win.
The problem with code breaking is that you can't benefit from it too much because your enemy will realise you're reading their messages and change their practices.
For this reason the allies had to let convoys be hit sometimes, because they couldn't always be too suspiciously at the right place at the right time. Luckily the German confidence in Enigma was so high that their top leaders ignored reports of enigma being broken, they thought it literally impossible.
I'm not sure how this played out in the Japanese war. But the point remains. You can't use signals intelligence too much unless it's literally ending the war in a couple of days.
In my opinion, the Russians are quite tactically adaptive. The current war has seen tit-for-tat adaptation between both sides. The Russians don't/can't invest resources in not losing personnel. It's not a priority for them.
The war evolves every day... Russia has upgraded those Iranian drones themselves many times, including just this week introducing a variant with a thermobaric warhead. There is a constant tit-for-tat with electronic warfare devices and drones, with armaments, with how radar stations positions are identified, the routes the drones take to uncover additional targets etc. The tactical play is pretty endless. I'm not sure how you would reduce it to "they bought some drones from Iran."
That wasn't really true during World War II. Some of the most celebrated veterans of that war were anti-authority as hell, doing things like stealing parts of fellow aircrews' planes to rebuild their own, ignoring formation to get better torpedo angles, and running ahead of everyone else in a tank. In Korea that attitude still survived, but only in the air, and by the end of the Vietnam war it had basically been stamped out. The U.S. military since about 1972 is way less lenient than before then, especially as the equipment's gotten more expensive.
You should listen to interviews with special operations folks. Navy Seals, Green Berets, Delta Force, etc.
There is a strong culture of do what's needed to accomplish the mission. Even a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" to many challenges.
HN has a curiously strong hatred of libertarians (although also professing to dislike authoritarians?) so it's not surprising the comment got downvoted though.
That's the textbook definition of survivorship bias. It's like a lottery winner boasting about his winning strategy that everyone else is just not able to learn.
At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning. Statistically someone will win, there are good odds someone will win twice, but the odds of anyone winning 3 times is almost zero.
> At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning.
The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.
The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis. Of course by winning the lottery I mean win a large jackpot - most have smaller prizes that you have high odds of winning many times if you play often enough.
Only if you only play 3 times though (in your previous example). Statistics also are about figuring out what sort of outliers must exist for a process to be fair (true random). For something like a mega lottery with terrible odds, then winning twice is already very unlikely. But for something easy like a coin flip, every N trials should have a run of about sqrt N heads or wins in a row if it is unbiased. For something unlikely like lotto, it is closer to looking at the birthday paradox: the probability of one person winning twice is low; but the probability that there exists a person who won twice is high, at random.
> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need.
No, you're missing the whole point. Think about the problem about survivorship bias. Imagine you are at a M&Ms factory. You decide you want to assess what's the color distribution of M&Ms by sampling the colors that come out of the production line. You somehow make the mistake of sampling the production line for the peanut core M&Ms right out of the pipe that produces yellow M&Ms. You sample away and after hours you present your findings: 99.9% of yellow M&Ms have a peanut core. Based on your findings, you proceed to boldly claim that having a yellow core is a critical factor in producing yellow M&Ms. You even go as far as to rationalize it, and claim that yellow represents peanuts, and if anyone wants to create yellw-colored candy they need to start by adding peanut to the mix.
I then alert you to the fact that you made a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality. Your answer:
> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis.
You're sampling M&Ms out of the freakin' peanut M&M production line. If you fix your mistake, you'll get all kinds of M&Ms. You do not fix your mistake with higher sampling. Your mistake is that you're unwittingly filtering out an important subset of the problem domain, and proceeded to do a faulty analysis on the subset you picked.
I read the OP differently. I think there can be many angles to a person's identity makeup and they don't always cohere perfectly. A person can have their identity in "entrepreneurial libertarian" while also having it as "someone who comes from a family valuing military service". Humans aren't always perfectly rational when it comes to their different values/tribal identities.
There are a lot of people who join the military while simultaneously "hate authority" for example.
That is still downstream of the question of “why would someone make such a [seemingly contradictory] decision.” The person you replied to is misunderstanding the OP, which they later clarified.
My point is understanding outcome causality doesn’t necessarily have to even enter the decision.
1) why would someone who calls themselves libertarian even join any kind of formalized armed force
2) even if they did, how would the command not realize that clearly such a person is unfit for duty and at best should be confined to some work far away from actual combat
People from totalitarian shitholes improvise a lot more than people from functioning democracies (because they have to improvise to survive daily life). And they trust their state and follow the rules a lot less (and for a good reason - their state exploits and lies to them to a degree you can't imagine living in a free country).
USA wouldn't send its army to Mexico with 12 hours of fuel telling the soldiers it's exercises. After selling half the fuel and ammo on black market and providing them with faulty non-spec tires so that significant percentage of their vehicles just broke the first week it actually had to drive somewhere.
Russian army did all of the above, on a massive scale. Nobody in Russia was surprised except maybe putin. IMHO he was more surprised that Ukraine was organized than that his own army wasn't.
Think for a while how you'd adapt to living in such a society. One of the first things is that you pretend to do what they tell you and then completely ignore it and do whatever you can to survive. And then to adapt to that - the army has units that shoot at you from behind if you don't want to be a "meat wave" in the next frontal attack.
Army won't provide you shoes your size? Steal. Army won't provide you drones or anti-drone measures? Cope cages and loot Mavics from malls. Etc. In totalitarian countries (and I've lived in one so I'd know) everybody had to learn DIY cause you couldn't trust the economy/country to provide you with the things you need.
Oligarchy and libertarianism is the same system, just looking from POV of rulers vs ruled. When society doesn't work people have to be libertarians. When everybody's a libertarian - oligarchs rule and society doesn't work.
Lack of social solidarity and communal trust has got to be a kiss of death in wartime. Especially when fighting against an opponent who has it in spades. (US in Vietnam, Russia in early days of the war in Ukraine, etc.).
>And they trust their state and follow the rules a lot less
It was my understanding that the opposite was true in Ukraine early in the conflict. Russia suffered high casualties because they still relied on a central command structure and field leaders were reluctant to make decisions without the express validation of their superiors. This led to them being sitting ducks as they waited for confirmation, and resulted in many high level soldiers being killed because they had to travel to the front lines to communicate orders for any effect.
The centralised structure, the lack of trust and selfishness, and the improvisation and ignoring the rules are all connected.
The less people care about rules - the harsher you have to be to enforce them.
The high level officers had to go to the front lines not because foot soldiers were helpless without them. They had to go there because without them the soldiers would ignore the orders to go forward, hide in relatively safer place, start looting and lie in the reports they executed the orders perfectly killing thousands of enemies :)
Remember when Ukraine invaded Kursk region this year? Kadyrov troops that defended the border there said they were "bypassed" by Ukrainians when they "were eating dinner" :)
That is all true, except there's another reason people learn to DIY. That is when they have a basically functional government and economy but live in a rural area. The US libertarian ethos stems from a cultural memory of pioneers and farmers that couldn't be served by a centralized state.
This isn't really clarifying the question of "who acquired the land for them", just acknowledging they (sometimes? often?) had to defend for themselves out there. In the end those settlers purchased deeds to those lands often for very cheap from the US federal government and expected for the federal government to support their Westward movement (which often did happen as well).
They acquired the land from the government and expected some amount of protection provided by the federal government as well.
And even then a ton of that settlement happened after many wars and what not with Native American tribes and groups in those territories.
Without getting into the (worthwhile) details of US expansion, it's important to note that the security provided by the continental and federal governments did not stop raids, and on a scale of services provided relative to dysfunctional present day governments was truly hands-off. There is running water in Aleppo.
This is basically entirely false ... They would only move into settle AFTER the government clears the land of most natives and signed "treaties" with others. Along with mass relocation and government programs to incentivize the settlers like encouraging the military to kill all Buffalo on site or actively salt spring water sources in favour of European deep wells.etc.etc.
"They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up off the deck of ship; they'd fly all around ... and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realized what I was watching were human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they'd fall in the water."
The Russians have difficulty adapting their tactics on the field. Reviewing the successes of the US battles must be quite different than throwing bodies at a front line.