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“...I do place a lot of credence in what those at the pointed end have witnessed, seen and done in combat. ...”

It cannot be doubted that the troops who go in harm’s way deserve our respect, even our deference. All the rest of us - and everything we do, we say, we hope for, we build - stand on the foundations laid by others, but forged into one, by the sacrifices of troops, and of them alone. And all of it would vanish in the blink of an eye, if their modern counterparts did not stand endless guard. Without them, the finest weapons ever made are nothing more than so many soulless chunks of metal, plastic, wood, fabric.

And it cannot be doubted that they endured a great deal.

But all of it tells us precisely nothing about which systems were effective, nor why. Nor what level of effectiveness was attained.

By explicit DoD directive - spelling out the details of how public law, passed by Congress, must be implemented - decisions about system effectiveness (and a number of other attributes) must be made on a quantitative basis, as much as possible. We cannot set store by stories, no matter how many tell them, no matter how movingly and convincingly. We have to KNOW. We have to know numbers: that means measuring.

Which means criteria must be set, results tallied, details set in order, conclusions drawn.

Therefore, the military builds, maintains, and uses a number of facilities where testing is done. And each armed service has called into existence organizations given the formal mission of planning, conducting, analyzing, and reporting on tests thus accomplished.

Life and death for gigantic programs is thus decided; tactical concepts proposed, validated, discarded, reinforced; careers are made and destroyed, fortunes won and lost (mostly by system builders and supporters, it’s true).

All of which are but small potatoes, compared to the penultimate purpose of such systems, the “real reason” the nation lays out chunks of cash to design, build, maintain implements of war: to go into action. That means battles small and large, operations succeeding or failing, wars won (one hopes) - or at least not lost.

So entire outcomes hinge on how well systems are designed, constructed, maintained, employed, intermeshed with other systems. The stakes can get big.

Does the forum, then, prefer to trust all of it to the memories of veterans?

Assuredly, those vets did great deeds. But being in the midst of the mad scramble that is combat does not mean - necessarily - that their memories are accurate.

Even when recollections are spot-on, it is never possible to go back to the battlefield, to measure exact ranges, elevations, angles, temperatures, weather, ambient light, air pressure, soil densities, color tone and contrast. Still more fleeting are the anatomy and physiology of the combatants (either side). No one knows exactly where the vital organs were, nor how much adrenaline was pumping (one infers a lot, but that’s simply not good enough). And for the dead, none of it can ever be recaptured.

And this is only the shortest, simplest, most superficial list of “stuff” that might be measured. When large distances and more esoteric systems become involved (think radar or infrared, just for starters), the number of such attributes grows to a total of hundreds. Multiple hundreds.

Which leads to only the lightest of validations, of the assertion:

Wars are not the best venues in which to collect data.

If forum members are having trouble grasping such truisms on an elevated conceptual level, I’ll circle back to something more substantial: jmacusa’s buddy’s rice paddy experience.

At the outset of WWII, S.L.A. Marshall conned Army brass into accepting his claim, that he could “interview” hundreds of infantry combat vets in nothing flat, just after they’d been through a firefight. He came up with the then-controversial theory that aimed fire was next to meaningless, and the Army transfigured that into their modern firepower concepts, that volume of fire transcended all other considerations, which led directly to the small bullet fired by the M16.

That’s right, the same M16 said to have failed American troops at very inconvenient times. There were of course a host of other reasons for its shortcomings, most of which jmacusa’s buddy could not have known about, and which were beyond his control.

But the chief reason the rifle was there, at that time, was because “SLAM” (Marshal was said to have loved the nickname) was a big talker, a man of no small ego. He sweet-talked decisionmakers - leaders - into believing he could deliver. He delivered a bunch of war stories, lent greater credence by weight of numbers and greater intensity by recency, and people who should have known better let him have his way. Indeed, he attained immortality, in institutional terms - decades after his death, he is still honored in some circles.

It strikes me that none of this touches on optimizing performance, within constraints. A lesson, perhaps, for another time.