[OT] WWI and change of doctrine

From: <laserlight@quixnet.net>
> "Each year, roll 1 die. On a 1-4, your doctrine remains the same, no
DRM -1
if you have already changed doctrine within the last 10 years."
> It is very easy to have the attitude "This worked last time..."

Well, it DID work last time, and you are never sure that the new ideas will
work, in spite of all the theory, training and testing. And you get worried
when your (or your subordinates) life depend on it.
In a lot of e-mail discussions discussing present-day military
innovations (e.g.for the US the OICW, wheeled AFV, black berets) you get an
awful lot of comments along the line "That's fine in theory or the training
ground, but it won't work in the field". Is that much different?

Specifically with regards to WWI, there are some often overlloked aspects:

The last major European war - 1870/71 - had been over 40 years ago and a
lot of things had changed in the meantime. The minor wars (Balkans, Boer war,
colonial actions) were only partially instructive, and the
Russo-Japanese
war was far away - though it was studied by European staffs. So there
was a
lot of untested theory around - not all of it bad. For example, I have
got hold of a 1903 German text (Balck "Taktik") that has a lot of interesting
and reasonable-looking ideas. Certainly not the stereotypical upright
mass
charge - though he criticizes French doctirne for on over-reliance on
'elan' and the Russian for poor flexibility (now, where have I heard that
before?).

The fact that all the major participants took very long to come up with usable
tactics and strategies points, IMO, to the difficulty of that task. Keegans
"The First World War" has some interesting discussion of this. For example,
without portable radios and given the smoke, sound and shelling of the typical
battlefield, it was basically impossible to control large bodies of troops
once they had left their trenches to attack. Coordinating artillery and
infantry was equally difficult.

Greetings Karl Heinz

> On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 10:46:52PM +0200, K.H.Ranitzsch wrote:
DRM -1
> if you have already changed doctrine within the last 10 years."

I find myself having these sorts of conversations at work.

You say to people "What about trying <methodology>?"

"Ohhhh, that'll never work. My god, we'd have projects fail!"

"We have projects fail at the moment.."

Something like 1/3 of all IT projects are cancelled with no noticeable
outputs. The remaining projects arrive /on average/ 200% over budget
and 200% late.

So I periodically suggest the current methods don't work and we should maybe
look at other things, and everytime people reply "we've always done it that
way..."

I mention this to my partner. He points out that there is considerable
political defensibility from failing 100% of the time but having toed
the party line. No-one wants to try XP or anything else because if
that fails, its their fault - it's a decision that can be traced back
to them. If they do the same thing as everyone else and they fail, they can
plead that they are at worst guilty only of a lack of