[throw2ih020]

This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.

A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...

[dylan604]

I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.

[Animats]

The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.

There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.

A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.

The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842

[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/

[dylan604]

I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...

[Animats]

The US Army War College publishes a quarterly, "Parameters", with articles about current military issues. "A New Security Framework for NATO’s Eastern Flank" (253 downloads), which is about what to do about Russia pushing against Europe, and "Key themes in Sino-American History" (165 downloads), which is about why China is pushing against Taiwan. Those are kind of important subjects.

"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.

This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.

Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.

Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/

[throw2ih020]

Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.

[dylan604]

So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?

[throw2ih020]

Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.

[throwaway27448]

This is why Russians now attack in teams of just two, down from dozens in 2022.