mozz

Tru dat. Small birds are more maneuverable. If it's pure bird-on-bird aerial combat, the bird with less mass will pretty much always have the advantage; they can get behind the big bird and just peck it from above until they feel like stopping. It's a very rare inversion of the usual rules of Nature Fight.

I suspect that they deliberately played into the creepiness to make a more effective viral video

This needs to have a voiceover at 0:18, quietly asking "Do you have stairs in your house?"

Bring back old Youtube

I like this version

It was a huge operation based on a whole bunch of new software and also on actual live personnel doing their part in the overall plan in person; it was wild.

E.g. I don't fully know the details but based on what I was reading today it kind of sounds like they couldn't position the ships where they actually would be for an operation, and they couldn't turn the auto-defenses of the ships on, because there was a bunch of civilian shipping in the area and they had to run their whole operation without the defense computer being active because otherwise it might get frisky and decide to blow up an oil tanker or something.

I looked this up. This is the reddit post, and this is the interview that it links to. I'd recommend reading the actual interview even though it's a little technical, instead of getting it through 3-4 layers of telephone-game from people who may or may not know what they're talking about or how to spell Van Riper's name.

I, honestly, couldn't completely make sense of the interview because of how deep into the details Kernan goes. I do note that he strongly disagrees with the thing I said that the second run of the simulation was railroading a certain particular result, and goes into some details of problems in the simulation that Van Riper then exploited, but he also says this:

I'll be straight up with you. I was the reason why Paul Van Riper was at Joint Forces Command. He's a very controversial individual. He is a good warfighter. I admire and respect him very much. I brought him in because he is controversial.

We were looking at it from an experimental concept perspective. He was looking at it from an exercise perspective. So I think if you -- you know, if you neck it down and look at it just from his perspective, an awful lot of what he had to say was valid. But if you look at it from what we were trying to accomplish in the way of setting conditions to ensure that the right objectives were satisfied, the experimental objectives, it's a much bigger picture, broader picture.

Now maybe that's just him being diplomatic and supportive not wanting to throw the guy under the bus. And like I say, I don't know enough about the details to really talk about what he's saying in terms of picking out details of what I was saying that's wrong. But to me it sounds like on the overall point, he's saying the same thing that me and @BombOmOm@lemmy.world were saying: Van Riper was trying to win, blue team was trying to run a productive simulation, and those aren't exactly the same thing and they had to override him on some things to make the exercise into the second one of those things. But that doesn't mean he's completely wrong with everything he did.

There's more than one species that can fully change its biological sex mid lifetime. It's not real common but it happens.

Male bearded dragons can become biologically female as embryos, but retain the male genotype, and for some reason when they do this they lay twice as many eggs as the genotypic females.

Yeah, I agree with all of this. I said basically what you just said (with a lot less detail / citation) in my comment that starts "I mean I get it" (which I just recently edited to expand it a little).

I understand why they did it. I'm not saying it wasn't productive to do. I actually think the way it played out probably made it extremely productive to do, and it's to the US military's credit that that type of outcome can even happen, as opposed to most authoritarian structures where the red team would just understand that they're "supposed to lose" and wouldn't even try to do something like Riper did. You don't have to have the final "official" outcome be a blue team loss in order for everyone to learn valuable lessons from it.

What I was disagreeing with was your assertion that they just changed the conditions. They changed around the parameters and rules underlying the situation, specifically to railroad the simulation into a particular outcome. Even if I understand why that happened I can still point it out and think it's notable, no?

Not really. They disallowed specific tactics that the red team had used to win, told them they had to turn on their radars at certain points (so that the fancy electronic countermeasures would work), told them they couldn't shoot down planes during a particular attack, things like that. For the most part the things that were different the second time around were artificial constraints on the red team.

Absolutely heinous

I actually thought about tracking down the original source because it was so obnoxious, but I didn't have the motivation to invest the time in it

I mean I get it

The guy got to make his point; I'm sure they're going to adjust some things in their strategy because of things he did. At the same time, you're gonna go talk to congress or the president or something and lay out what you want to do, and they're going to ask, okay what's the prediction for what'll happen? And you say well sir we actually did a little war game for it, and the Iraqis crippled most of our ships and the landing failed and we're still in the Persian Gulf for the most part but it's mostly a big clusterfuck at this point. So we're good to move forward, right?