Chicken or egg?

[The Chap]

Being eternally seduced by the fringes of military technology and merely an interested party - at great distance - when push comes to shove; which SHOULD come first:

The Kit
The Wit

Does it pay to develope weapons etc. to fulfill the requirements of doctrine? An example might be the electronic battlespace. A distinct failure would be the conviction that aircraft wont need guns or dogfighting ability!

The flip-side might be NVA and VC adapting doctrine to material. Naturally these are simply binary choices for fun.:)

[SnowLeopard]

Probably depends on the situation.

Ie, if you need it (or something) right now, right here ............ one is going to grab what they have to best be able to do the job.

But a lot of the time, when one has fancy gadgets, it is usually because one was thinking in the above, "wouldn't it be great if...." or "how I could do this better..." or someone was reading the accounts of what was done and was thinking something like that, IMHO.

I don't quite know what was the motivation to develop clotting bandages, but I would suspect someone looked at wars and thought, "wouldn't it be great if...." instead of using superglue to seal wounds.

So then someone put something together for the next time around. Now, sometimes it doesn't work, like the magnetic torpedo at the start of WWII.

A couple of weeks ago, I was chairing a discussion on crisis management and someone asked, does all this stuff really matter? Ie, an emergency comes up and one isn't going to think, just react. Another put out that such was partially true, the thinking mind shuts down and one goes by rote memorization ........ but how much you know in that memory dictates how you will survive. Ie, the more you drill, the better off you are in the actual emergency.

It's a two step process and one doesn't necessarily alway rank above the other.
-----------------------------------------
(After overruling his previous objection, it is made again after further testimony is given. "Timing is everything, counselor, substained."--Judge Gray, (w,stte), "Judging Amy")

[The Chap]

Probably depends on the situation.

Ie, if you need it (or something) right now, right here ............ one is going to grab what they have to best be able to do the job.

But a lot of the time, when one has fancy gadgets, it is usually because one was thinking in the above, "wouldn't it be great if...." or "how I could do this better..." or someone was reading the accounts of what was done and was thinking something like that, IMHO.

I don't quite know what was the motivation to develop clotting bandages, but I would suspect someone looked at wars and thought, "wouldn't it be great if...." instead of using superglue to seal wounds.

So then someone put something together for the next time around. Now, sometimes it doesn't work, like the magnetic torpedo at the start of WWII.

A couple of weeks ago, I was chairing a discussion on crisis management and someone asked, does all this stuff really matter? Ie, an emergency comes up and one isn't going to think, just react. Another put out that such was partially true, the thinking mind shuts down and one goes by rote memorization ........ but how much you know in that memory dictates how you will survive. Ie, the more you drill, the better off you are in the actual emergency.

It's a two step process and one doesn't necessarily alway rank above the other.
-----------------------------------------
(After overruling his previous objection, it is made again after further testimony is given. "Timing is everything, counselor, substained."--Judge Gray, (w,stte), "Judging Amy")

A question in response regarding active repose Is drill dogma or pragma?

"It depends" is invariably the intelligent answer/response/reply;) to any interogative bait.:)

This, I think, is always a clouded issue that I ought to have refined. To whit:

Let us consider things solely on the grounds of finance/govt.

i.e. with ten quid what slice of a fixed pie goes to training vs weapons developement. As a second layer it might be ammusing to posit the fracture between the natures of nation states vs. more fluid entities (bastard terrorists )

Time scales and humint, sigint etc. may have a still bigger part in this posit, but just 'til more join the binary is enough for me!:)