Deliberate forgetfulness will do that to you. Modern San Francisco saw the reappearance of sicknesses not seen for decades or more. And they were serious! To the extent that they forwent such commonsense practices as basic hygiene. For them it was Year Zero, when the enlightened would shake off the dead hand of the past and build a brave new world from scratch. In fact, reported Wolfe, denizens of Haight-Ashbury had decided they had nothing to learn from millennia of human history and traditions. Wolfe recounted walking around San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1968, while the Sixties were in full swing, complete with hippies propounding all manner of novel doctrines about politics, society, and life. It comes from novelist Tom Wolfe, who wrote an amusing piece titled “ The Great Relearning” in 1987. Garbage in, garbage out.īut I think it’s worth revisiting some larger candidate explanations for the Pentagon’s evident obtuseness toward the need to have a sizable armory of munitions on hand should a major regional war break out. If they’re deeply flawed, a game based on them tends to produce results incongruent with reality. They’re taken as self-evident, much like the “givens” from which students try to work proofs in grade-school algebra or geometry.Īssumptions are powerful things. Any system of logic is founded on assumptions that can be neither proved nor disproved within the system. Sal traces this “gobsmacking” statement from America’s top-ranking uniformed military officer to faulty wargaming, and there’s doubtless truth to that. A war in Korea or the Taiwan Strait would consume far more.Ī major war means a major expenditure of ordnance. General Milley recently held forth on the Ukraine war, maintaining that “a big lesson learned” from the Russian invasion is “the incredible consumption rates of conventional munitions” even in a limited regional conflagration. Months back, the amphibian pundit CDR Salamander had some tart words for Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley.
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