[michaelt]

> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare?

I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not.

Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack.

One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy.

One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict.

One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles.

One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks.

How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?

[13of40]

Remember how the US went into Afghanistan with HMMWVs (aluminum bodied cars with canvas doors) and M16a2s (full length battle rifles with iron sights) and left with MRAPs and A4s. You learn stuff when you switch from training to combat.

[ared38]

The US and the HMMWV did great at the combat part of Iraq and Afghanistan. The real switch was from conventional military operations to the long peace.

"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs... it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations."

MRAPs exist to minimize the political costs (dead and wounded soldiers) in a policing action. When you look at conventional wars like Ukraine, HMMWVs remain very relevant in their doctrinal role.

[hunter-gatherer]

> The US and the HMMWV did great at the combat part of Iraq and Afghanistan. The real switch was from conventional military operations to the long peace

The combat part was ok I guess, but what OP is pointing out was what we went to conflict with. Lots of money was spent upgrading Humvees with armor and turret mounts that didn't exist. The equipment fielded by US troops actually looked very different from a comparison of 2001 and 2005. Body armor went through development iterations, camouflage patterns, infantry equipment like magazine carriers and weapons optics, and so on.

Had the US tried to drive into the Afghan and Iraqi desert the way we did against fighters armed with heavier weapons and fighting skills then the US losses would have been a lot higher.

The Iraqi military had more formidable equipment but was so ill-trained and the moral so low that it was very much a paper tiger.

I think people underestimate hiw much the US military has transformed over the two two-decade long conflicts. There have been striking changes both organizationally, culturally, and technologically.

[jonstewart]

I think the hypothetical you posit is wrong, as US doctrine places primacy on air power. In Iraq, I & II, air strikes at the outset destroyed much of the Iraqi armor and spurred a lot of desertion.

I’m not a military and/or Iraq war expert so I don’t want to argue definitively, but I don’t think you can say US losses would have been significantly higher had the Iraqi army had heavier weapons and fighting skills — they’d have needed effective air defense, too.

I think the Ru-UKR war shows the vulnerability of contemporary air forces to air defense, however, and that Western/NATO forces themselves lack cost-effective short-range and medium-range air defense systems. The US Air Force fields exquisite weapons (“platforms”) and these may prove useless in a conflict like Ru-UKR. Or, perhaps, they’re good enough to overcome the difficulties that the Sukhoi/MiG-based air forces of either side have encountered. Hard to know.

Range and mobility in artillery systems also seems like a weak point for the US military. The Excalibur precision shell is very expensive but likely cost effective—one shot, one kill. But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.

[torstenvl]

Excals are not very high precision in my experience, and definitely not "one shot one kill." I don't remember exact data and I'm sure it would be classified even if I did, but... suffice it to say that laser guidance for final targeting is not good for dusty environments. (Ditto for GBU-12s, which were worthless.)

Afghanistan may have been a different story.

[rascul]

> But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.

The US has the M109 which can serve in some of the same roles the Caesar can.

Also, does France have much rocket artillery? That might play a factor in the requirements for other artillery systems.

[WeylandYutani]

America didn't learn it forgot. Many people wrote about counter insurgency warfare in the 70s after Vietnam.

Mind you much of it was political: "we're about to occupy a country where 20 million people want to kill us" would have sounded pretty awful at the State of the Union.

[roarcher]

The military took many lessons from Vietnam that didn't work in the Middle East.

As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked well.

The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up.

There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".

[remarkEon]

>There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war"

It's a saying that people in the military are well aware of (OEF Veteran here). We were well aware of what happened in Vietnam with counterinsurgency. The problem is that counterinsurgency just doesn't work unless you treat the country like an imperial colony. We didn't do that, in Iraq or in Afghanistan. It wasn't worth the resources to "do Imperialism" in those places, and so we got a half-assed "strategy" that wasn't really related to any seriously considered national objective.

>The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments.

The Taliban were able to do this with ease.

[roarcher]

> It's a saying that people in the military are well aware of (OEF Veteran here).

Same. That's where I heard it.

> The Taliban were able to do this with ease.

The Taliban weren't doing what we were doing. They generally did not, to my knowledge, go out and sit in an OP on a rocky hillside for 3-5 days straight, where any random goat herder might happen to decide to graze his herd one afternoon. Their MO was to set up an ambush that would be executed the same day and that was not likely to be discovered by a passing American, since Americans weren't wandering randomly through the hills at all times.

[dvt]

Super cool insight, I wonder what the turnaround or bureaucratic process is of fundamentally changing an SOP. It can't just be generals mandating these things (or is it?).

Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.

[roarcher]

Although I was tangentially involved in the aforementioned incident, I'm not sure what level the change came from or what the process is but it was an extremely broad order--at least Marine Corps-wide, and possibly for all units in theather (excluding SOCOM/JSOC, I assume). So pretty high up. The incident made some pretty big waves. As far as the turnaround time, it was quick, within a few days I believe.

It's worth noting that this was one of many incremental changes. When I started that deployment in 2009, snipers were going out in 5-man teams. The team that got hit actually did technically consist of 8 men (as was already the SOP), but they were split into two four-man elements that took different positions about a kilometer apart. The mandate going forward was that all 8 team members had to be within earshot of each other at all times. It was the latest of many orders in the trend of ratcheting up firepower at the cost of concealability.

[jasonladuke0311]

You talking about the team that fell asleep in their nest and all got killed?

[andrewflnr]

Sort of a nitpick, but really not: length has nothing to do with whether a rifle is a "battle rifle". The difference between a battle rifle and assault rifle is all about the cartridge, not length of the barrel.

[edrxty]

I think that's probably arguable. Most of these kinds of definitions are much more length focused and the length does most of the same things as having a larger cartridge.

[jack_h]

Battle rifle implies a full powered cartridge such as 7.62 NATO. Assault rifle implies an intermediate cartridge such as 5.56 NATO. Intermediate cartridges have lower energy than full powered cartridges.

Barrel length is important to velocity up to a point, but you can also tune other parts of the system to increase velocity out of shorter barrels (M855A1). However, that is far from the only consideration when discussing the ballistics of a cartridge. Projectile mass determines how stable the projectile is. The 5.56 projectile tumbles and cavitates when hitting soft tissue due to its low mass. However, that also means obstructions like foliage can cause it to destabilize in-flight and it is less effective at barrier penetration.

[TexanFeller]

To some degree but even if you put a 24" barrel on your 5.56 it's still got nowhere near the oomph of my 16" barreled 7.62x51.

[andrewflnr]

It's really not. Any serious discussion of "battle rifles", by military history professionals, hinges on the cartridge. I've never seen a definition of it in terms of barrel length.

[eastbound]

Remember when the French went to field war in 1914 bearing the official costume with BRIGHT RED pants? Yeah you really forget about war when there is no war for a generation.

Well they did have unbeatable prices on this red taint from a producer in… Germany. Yup. Some people are actually good at war.

[WastingMyTime89]

It’s not about forgetting about war. France was constantly at war from the fifty years preceding 1914 fighting colonial conflicts.

It’s about misunderstanding new technology notably machine guns or to be even more correct a military career structure and organisation which prevented people who understood new technologies and try to shake the boat to rise in ranks while putting conservative officers in control of the army.

[inglor_cz]

"when there is no war for a generation."

It isn't as if there was no war for a generation. The Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 was precisely the kind of brutal industrial conflict that foreshadowed the horrors of WWI almost to a T.

But Western powers were mostly unwilling to learn from such a distant war, and lessons learnt by junior officers who observed the carnage closely weren't taken seriously enough.

[speed_spread]

Maybe it was a strategy. Once you lose enough troops, red does become good camouflage?

[gonzo41]

They picked up the M4s in Iraq. Those full length M16a2s go HAM for the engagement distances in Afghanistan. And don't worry, the army is already circling back towards light skinned vehicles.

[ocbyc]

Well we left a bunch of the mraps behind. So I guess they gotta start over.

[tester457]

Why the change? What lessons were learned?

[stanford_labrat]

I am merely a military/tactical gear hobbyist so anyone with actual subject matter expertise feel free to chime in.

In this specific case humvees were particularly ineffective against the IED-based warfare being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Light, fast, vehicles are not particularly resilient to explosives.

Also, while the 20” battle rifle does provide superior ballistics for the 5.56 round, it’s unwieldy and there was a fair bit of CQB during the GWOT. 14.5” carbines were a sort of middle ground that could perform in both long range and short range engagements. Night time direct action raids by special forces even opt for shorter 10.5/11.5 barrels.

I recommend Jeff Gurwitch on YouTube he goes in depth into the history and rational behind equipment evolutions during the GWOT from a first hand perspective as an ex-SF soldier.

[ProjectArcturis]

MRAPs: you need better defense against IEDs.

M4: a short barrel is easier to use in close quarters fighting, and this outweighs the loss of accuracy at longer distances.

[akiselev]

The primary change to HMMWVs is the shape of the hull: they’re now designed in a V shape to deflect the force from explosives away to the sides of the vehicle.

[HPsquared]

They also weigh about 4 times as much.

[ikiris]

that bombs go boom, and militaries don't have the monopolies on them they thought they did.

[DubiousPusher]

> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not.

I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another.

But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success.

Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example.

The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?

[pfdietz]

You can wargame and simulate. It's not perfect, but it can give very useful pointers, especially at the strategic level.

The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").

[jcranmer]

The Youtube channel Drachinifel covers those war games, and the lessons the US learned (and didn't learn) from them in pretty extensive detail here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMK9a-vDE5zEmzgruoWAy...

[pfdietz]

That's a different set of games. The Fleet Problems were LARPing with ships. This could be invaluable for understanding (some) tactical issues but could not apply to understanding prolonged campaigns (that would be too costly). For that, the Naval War College did tabletop/paper games, lasting up to months, that covered multiple engagements.

Fascinating free book that motivated these comments:

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publicati...

"Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that won a two-ocean war. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how that was accomplished. This book argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution."

A whole string of vital lessons were learned during the gaming, which I can go into if you like (or you can read the book.)

[jacobr1]

One take from that historical episode that might be applicable to those on HN: the real value came from building the organizational muscle around metaproblems. How do we adopt the organization to a changing environment? How do we introduce feedback loops? How do we get good data and test assumptions? How do we continuously improve? Building that mindset and capability was potentially as important as any specific lesson on logistics or whatever.

[pas]

please do go into details!

[pfdietz]

Glad you asked!

Most importantly, the game in 1933 showed that the "through ticket to Manila" version of War Plan Orange would not work. The capital ships would arrive there with underwater damage and no way to repair it. They'd have to go back to Pearl Harbor, or the west coast, to reach facilities that would allow repairs. In which case, what was the point?

After that part, US war plans in the Pacific involved island hopping, so forward bases could be obtained where repairs could be performed. This had a number of important downstream implications: amphibious assault against protected islands would be necessary, with the equipment, training, and doctrine that implies (these would go on to be applied in the various invasions in Europe, including D-Day). Mobile dry docks would be needed (the US led the world in these in WW2, including modular ones that could be hooked together to produce something that could service a battleship.)

The need to fight across the Pacific implied ships would be up against land based planes in the Mandates (various island groups assigned to Japan after WW1). This meant carrier planes had to be on par with land based planes. The British did not learn this lesson and started the war with greatly inferior carrier planes (some of which were biplanes!)

The games illustrated that carrier operations needed to be optimized for rapid recovery of planes. The more rapidly planes could be recovered, the more planes a carrier could launch (and then recover before they ran out of fuel.) Capt. Reeves went on to command USS Ranger, where he pushed strongly to accelerate flight operations, eventually developing the system of landing planes before a wire crash barrier, then pushing them forward of the barrier to rest on the deck as more planes landed. This avoided the need to cycle the elevator(s) during landing operations. The US Navy was the only navy doing this at the start of the war. Fueling and reloading, even storing, aircraft on the flight deck was a natural extension of this. As a result, US carriers could carry more aircraft than those of other navies; they were not constrained by the size of the hangar.

The games showed that carriers were vulnerable to damage to their flight decks from even small bombs, and that there would be great value in the context of a campaign if this damage could be repaired by the ship's crew. This led the US to designs where the flight deck was unarmored, made of wood on a steel framework. USS Enterprise could not have participated in many of the carrier battles of the war (and the US would have lacked any carrier at the final climactic battle off Guadalcanal) had this not been the case. The British, in comparison, had armored flight decks, which meant after any damage to them they needed to go to a repair facility.

The circular formation used in carrier task groups in the war was developed in the games.

The games showed there would be great attrition of aircraft and aircrews. This meant the fleet had to be backed up by a very large pilot training program, as it was. The Japanese never understood this implication (at least, until it was too late) and failed to implement a scalable pilot training program, nor adequate pilot recovery efforts, and suffered from catastrophic decline in effectiveness as their first team pilots were lost.

The games showed the importance of scouting. Various ways of doing this were tried, eventually leading to investment in flying boats (which also were imagined as bombers, although they were overshadowed in that respect.)

[jcranmer]

I distinctly recall that many of those lessons were learned from the Fleet Problems, especially several of the carrier tactics as well as the logistical lessons (US invested heavier in at-sea refueling than any other navy at the time). So I suspect your source is integrating the Fleet Problems as part of the war games going on, and your denigration of them as "LARPing with ships" is unwarranted.

(Of course, perhaps the most famous unlearned lesson from the Fleet Problems was the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor... the Navy simulated a surprise carrier attack on Pearl Harbor two or three times, each time it was wildly successful, and still the defenses weren't beefed up before December 7).

[munificent]

Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.

[tomxor]

I think "can't profile" is probably the most accurate in summary.

Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.

[jacobr1]

The thing about benchmarking and profiling is that you need a target scenario. Even if you can simulate a generic representation of a given workload, you might have different workload, or your specific environment might differ from the norm. One could imagine an armed force that actually was well attuned to fight a near-peer power in a border conflict, but wasn't well setup to fight battle a continent away against guerrilla forces. This is a peril all benchmarking has, even when correct, it is still limited to its own assumptions and context.

[gsatic]

It doesn't matter in the military. People aren't machines. And when you throw them into high stress, chaotic, unpredictable environments, the expections of performance arent like what you see in the movies.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

If everyone had a helper in ear with birdseye view from drone or sattelite that would clear up lots of unneccesary fog of war. I've seen footage where the squad leader has an audio feed with a drone operator fro ukraine

[mlry]

It might. But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation. You need to find or create a space and time where you focus on that input while you and your team are under threat. And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.

[CRConrad]

> But it adds yet another channel with a shitload of information from just outside your immediate surroundings that you have to filter, process and put into relation to your situation.

As I understand it (or surmise), the trick is that the drone operator sees your squad and its surroundings. So he can give you a shout, “Yo! People in the bushes forward to your left, eighty metres!”. You as the squad commander aren't doing the filtering on that channel, it's self-prioritizing.

> And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.

Hmmyeah, sounds familiar... Aliens, with the Lt. back in the ship[1] directing his Space Marines and Ripley, right?

___

[1]: Or was he in the ground vehicle, that long low truck(ish) thingy with the ridiculously non-existent ground clearance? Been too long and I'm too old, can't remember.

[distortedsignal]

How do you know which conflict you're going to fight next?

Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict.

Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required.

I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now.

TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan

[credit_guy]

> I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not.

I think that's correct. And I have 2 examples, one that proves it, and one that disproves it.

The first example is the Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century. The master of the seas. In the absence of any real competitor, how was it supposed to stay in shape? Well, it was hard, it was little by little metamorphosing into a paper tiger. Admiral George Tryon [1] tried to reshape it again into a Nelsonian navy, but he died in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893 [2], one of the most consequential events in the history of the world. And one of the most unknown. With Tryon dead, the Royal Navy promoted people like John Jellicoe or David Beatty, one a perfectly competent officer with all the right technical knowledge, but with roughly zero fighting spirit, and the other a raging lion of a man, but too good to bother with the details of how to actually command a fleet. But how would the Royal Navy create an organization where the right people would get promoted, if there was noone to "keep them honest" ?

My second example, or counterexample is the pair that was the exact opposite of Jellicoe/Beatty. It was King/Nimitz. I would argue that this was the most fortunate pair of boss/subordinate in the history of naval warfare. King was as aggressive as Beatty, or more. The ultimate no-nonsense guy, hated by many because he was so frank and intolerant to fools. We owe King the decision to follow Midway with Guadalcanal, and then to keep Japan on the ropes from that point on until the end of the war. But of course, nobody remembers Ernest King today, because one thing is to have the idea, another one is to execute. And Nimitz was the one who executed flawlessly. In my book, Midway is well ahead of Trafalgar or Tsushima. At both Trafalgar and Tsushima you had a better fleet obliterating the worse one. But at Midway, it was the underdog that won. And won because Nimitz put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place ahead of time. Replace Nimitz with Nelson, or Togo, or Yamamoto, and the US loses at Midway. But Nimitz did it, and with it basically won the war in the Pacific.

My puzzle is this: how was it possible for a nation at peace to create an organization like the US Navy that promoted Ernest King and Chester Nimitz (and Spruance, and Halsey)? I don't have an answer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria

[zmgsabst]

I think it largely comes down to staff quality:

- US flew quite a number of sorties that weren’t directly effective, at high casualties, to delay and “stuff up” the Japanese fleet

- US use of kamikaze attack rattled the Japanese command

- Miles Browning wrote a paper about exactly the tactic used at Midway against the Japanese [1]

You can (and the US did) shuffle commanders as needed — but you can’t suddenly create enlisted to do the dirty work or experts with the right ideas. Those require existing culture. Similarly, with a robust industrial base, you can pivot your manufacturing efforts (eg, battleships to carriers) — but you can’t build entirely new factories of skilled workers very quickly (eg, US struggles to build shells for Ukraine).

Perhaps this is a simplistic view, but I don’t think you can have the right military at the start of a conflict; you can only develop a robust, rapidly adaptable military base. That is, you can only make the military anti-fragile.

My advice would be to ignore the admirals (since you can always get new ones), and instead focus on quality NCOs, junior officers, and economics: they’re the backbone/framework of any future victory.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning

[erikerikson]

Isn't this the problem we've been having?

"Here are the parts of a full solution, pick a favorite to the exclusion of others."

So... Probably the one that despite a specialty has the greatest strength in all the others. Certainly one who appreciates all the others as well as the other aspects you didn't mention

[photochemsyn]

Well, in the next war the first casualties will most likey be Moscow and Washington, probably at least a 20-mile radius from initial ground zero, so there'll be plenty of room for promotion.

After that, it'll be back to leading charges of soldiers equipped with sticks and stones. I imagine any idiot will be able to figure that out.

[wly_cdgr]

Promote whichever one of those guys has 9000 hours in Arma III and is a respected clan leader in the game

[akira2501]

It's entirely possible. They did it.. and, it went exactly how you would expect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

[LandStander]

Paintball.

[bratbag]

None of those things.

The one who is most flexible and has the best ooda loop when under pressure.

[cosmojg]

Wait, isn't the point of teaching the OODA loop to avoid maintaining a legible OODA loop? As I've been taught it, OODA loops are a means of modeling and interfering with adversaries, not a tool for organizing yourself.

[chiph]

Both sides have their own OODA loops. The phrase you hear a lot (Hollywood loves it) is: "get inside their OODA loop", which means to execute your loop faster than theirs so you are responding & acting to your observations before they can respond & act to theirs.

It may be that one side's OODA loop is dysfunctional - perhaps they have to wait on higher headquarters to respond, or has an indecisive leader - before acting and that introduces a delay that an opponent can take advantage of.

How to get a tighter OODA loop? Practice. And modeling/war-gaming in advance any potential actions so your responses become automatic. Or at least "good enough".

[karmakurtisaani]

Probably not his point tho.