"Alan Minyard" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 20:39:49 GMT, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:


"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
In message , Chad Irby
writes
In article ,
Alan Minyard wrote:
Are you familiar with the concept of guided missiles? If you get
into
gun range you have already screwed the pooch. The gun is a last
ditch, desperation weapon in ACM, wasting airframe volume and weight
on a honking great, slow, unreliable gun is not a wise trade off.

Comments nearly identical to the one above were very popular in the
early 1960s. And then we got into a real shooting war, and pilots
suddenly needed guns again.

It's an interesting area to actually analyse, particularly when
comparing USAF and USN performance: in Linebacker the USAF shot down
forty-eight MiGs for twenty-four air-to-air losses, while the USN lost
four and scored 24 kills. More interesting yet, the Navy's fighters met
MiGs twenty-six times, for a .92 probability of killing a MiG and a .15
chance of losing one of their own; the USAF had eighty-two engagements,
for .58 kills per engagement but .29 losses.[1]

Ugh! That all sounds dangerously like the "operations research", or
systems
analysis, kind of numeric mumbo-jumbo so characteristic of the McNamara
era---PLEASSSE don't go there! It took us a generation to rid ourselves
of
the most of the "mantle of the number crunchers" (and we were only
partially
succesful--witness the continued use of the POM process in budgeting) as
it
was...

Brooks

snip

OR has been in use since WWII, when it was used to determine such things
as the parameters of an "ideal" depth charge attack. It was quite
effective
at the time, and still is.

But it was taken waaay too far by the McNamara crowd, who felt that all
things were quantifiable by numbers, and numbers were more important than
actual results.

I certainly have no love of McN, he did an amazing
amount of damage to the US Military (the term "McNamara's Nightmare"
was applied to *numerous* systems).

Not to mention his micromanagement in Vietnam, and his later published
fandango about his involvement in the decisionmaking that went into that
conflict.

Brooks


Al Minyard