But grand claims made by technologists are nothing new. Certainly I don’t know, Ive never been in the military, but aren’t people always trying to sell The Next Big Thing to the military? Is it not the responsibility of those in charge to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of new systems being integrated into their forces? If someone said “we dont need the rigor we used to have anymore, we have AI” I see that as a failure of the org, not an indictment of the claims being put forth by boosters.
Corporate Decision Maker #2, sure, theyll get hoodwinked. They and their company may have only 50 years of experience and institutional memory to draw on. But State Militaries? What excuse do they have? War changes, but the armed forces have a long memory, and their poor decisions cost lives. Maybe Im off base, but I would expect each mistake to be an opportunity to learn for that industry. The industry has had plenty of lessons learned over the past 100 years. Why is the latest hype cycle to blame, and not those whose job it is to ensure they maintain capabilities and extensively game out scenarios and responses?
Bad bets on tech happen even in institutions with lifetimes of history to draw on, but I see that as a failure of the institution, not on the completely mundane hype cycles which occur naturally.
Obviously mistakes happen, and maybe thats what the article is getting at. But if we’re going to point fingers (not saying you are) then lets not let decision makers off the hook whose job is to prevent that hot new thing getting their people killed.
Yes. It is a military maxim you will lose if you want to fight the next war with the tactics and equipment from the last war. Your future opponents have been studying the last war and have invented all kinds of ways to destroy you if you use the same tactics again.
Modern military doctrine can be attributed to the Prussian General staff that defeated Napoleon III in the Franco Prussian war. Moltke the Elder was in charge of the Prussian army at the time. Moltke the Elder was a student of Clausewitz who literally wrote the book on modern strategy. But Clausewitz when he was in active service was not some world beating general. Clausewitz fought for the Prussians during the Napoleon’s time and was actually at one point a prisoner of Napoleon. Clausewitz and his boss Scharnhorst spent the rest of their careers developing a scheme to defeat Napoleons’ tactics of massive concentration at a single point. They developed modern combined arms with a logistical backbone of railroads.
It would also redirect resources towards boring stuff like manufacturing, that actually increases real wealth. But you're right, the fact that so much of our theoretical wealth is in hype, and there's a lot of people who don't want that brought down to more realistic valuations, is what's driving this.
But, you can look at the Chinese real estate market for an example of what happens if you try to keep inflating the bubble for too long.
