At 23:52 15-8-01 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
> > > > >Another site calls a war game model of the US Army flawed, without
> > > > >going into details as to why.
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > >On the net, you usually provide links. If it were a non-refereed
> > >source, then I would attach next to no weight to the reference.
> >
> > What is your opinion on the credibility of the war game models of the US
> > military?
> >
>
>Well, lets look at the data. The record of war games vs. actual war
>outcomes have been mixed. But, the Gulf war, the last one with significant
>US ground troops has shown that the tactics were fairly successful. So, on
>the whole, their claims would probably be given decent weight.
I find this rather surprising. You always claim that reports must be
peer-reviewed, and you want a link to them so you can examine them in
detail. Yet, the contents of these wargames are not publicly available (the
Pentagon conveniently uses the argument "that information is classified")
so the validity can not be determined, but you nevertheless seem to believe
that those wargames are accurate.
>And, quotes of facts are more likely to be believable than untrained
>projections. For example, if you use "North Korean Army" in a hotbot search
>you will find sites like
>
>http://www.iht.com/IHT/DK/00/dk090800.html
>
>which quote the US army as saying that N. Korea is running constant
>maneuvers and that they have moved their forces south so that 70% of N.
>Korea's forces are within 100 km of the border.
Let me apply your standards to that article. The article cites "an
intelligence report prepared by the U.S. military command", but it does not
provide a link to that report. Is that report available to the general
public (preferably on-line), or has the US military command conveniently
labeled the report "classified"? If that report is not available to the
public, its validity is questionable at best.
The article also cites a document titled "North Korean Threat", compiled by
the intelligence section of the U.S. command. Again, no link to that
document was given, and again: if it's not publicly available, its
credibility is virtually non-existant.
BTW, I found the "Exploding the Landmine Myth in Korea" report; the URL
takes 2-3 lines of text, so I've taken the liberty of copying the file (60
Kb, .txt format) to my own website:
http://www.geocities.com/jeroenvb.geo/Landmine_Myth.txt
Jeroen
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