How to make war

What Hacker News says

1. ChuckMcMNov 2019
   Not a stupid question at all. Weapon systems all have various areas where they are optimum and where they are at their weakest. In ship to ship battles, maneuvering is slow so its difficult to line up behind a ship like it is with a plane. Even so, if this test system works I expect there would be a matching version on the stern.

   Frank Dunnigan's "How to Make War", which is putatively about how to develop war games, goes into some depth of comparing offensive versus defensive impact of various weapon systems. It makes for an interesting read.

   Show morethread
2. ChuckMcMMay 2015
   Not a very well developed thesis on Artillery. If the author is reading, please get a copy of Dunnigan's How to Make War which describes in detail how to calculate the various effectiveness of different artillery strategies. I've got a dog eared copy of the 2nd edition I was using while writing my 'ultimate replacement for Bright's empire' game (unfinished :-) But overall, in the context of war gaming it is an excellent reference.

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/...

   Show morethread
3. ChuckMcMJun 2014
   That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through.

   A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip I joked with one of the design engineers that it would be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU / graphics capability to do that in real time, at least not in our lifetime :-).

   While I never finished my efforts (-1 for me I guess) I learned so much along the way, I bought Dunnigan's excellent 'How to Make War' book which was the bible for wargames at the time (and to some extent still is) and tackled path finding algorithms, and automated forces deployment, and strategic evaluation with limited vision, and all sorts of really interesting problems/puzzles that each offered up a ton of interesting insight. Bottom line it wasn't a waste of time for me, even though I have nothing to show for it.

   I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.

   Show morethread
4. stcredzeroJun 2013
   Defense Analyst James Dunnigan, in his highly influential book How to Make War, argued that late in the war, the blockade and mining of Japanese Shipping had by far the largest effect on the Japanese ability to wage war. Given enough time, the Japanese military machine would just have bled to death. However, it may have been political rough going to continue the war in Japan long past the defeat of Nazi Germany. By other accounts, the Japanese were pretty much ready to surrender without the bomb anyway.
   Show morethread
5. stcredzeroAug 2010
   Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was within the budget then it was a good design.

   The old Soviet defense design houses benefitted tremendously by being the follow-on developers. They could see what US defense contractors did, then figure out how to do it cheaper and more reliably.

   That said, the Soviets have had an amazing record of comparable, cheaper, more rugged, more reliable dating from World War II. Where a US cargo plane requires infrastructure, a comparable Soviet cargo plane would be able to land on unpaved airfields and include a manually operated fuel-pump. Where German designers would require over 20 parts for some doo-dad in an artillery piece, the US equipment would accomplish the same functionality in about 3/4ths of the parts, but the Soviets would undercut them by another 3 or 4 parts.

   James Dunnigan discusses this in his classic _How to Make War_.

   Being the follow-on competitor is actually a great way to avoid overengineering.

   Show morethread
6. RobGRJan 2009
   A lot of the suggestions here seem to follow the philosophical advice from generals meme, like the people who read Sun Tzu to learn how to better manage their sales team and etc.

   The best book I know of in the "detailed stuff, like how to use tanks, planes and so on" area is James F. Dunigan's "How to Make War". It's a little cold-war oriented but still pretty applicable, and the first chapter is helpfully titled "How to Become an Effective Armchair General". Given that wars are usually massive economic and logistical operations, it has a lot of charts and tables to that effect, showing the number of shots per soldier killed over the centuries, tonnage of explosives per plane, etc.

   Just by glancing over the charts you can see the basic history of military activity -- the Civil War being the first "modern" war in terms of slaughter, economic mobolization, and etc; then a period of regression to small wars, before WWI and so on.

   As far as "how to use tanks" and so on, that is often considered tactics not strategy. There are books written on that stuff, however; how many people should be in a small platoon and how they should move, leapfrogging each other so one moves while the other keeps the enemy ducking; how two tanks can use their light machine guns to clear each other's close-in areas that they can't see or shoot at themselves; the strategy of having a tank attached to a platoon of infantry so they work together; etc.

   But I don't know of one single book that collects all that. If I had to find them I would probably look at the some of the publications of the Army War College, and I would go to a gun show and find that guy who is always there with a lot of field manual publications, and ask him.

   Show morethread