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He's conflating a lot of stuff by the end of this.

Knowing "where the pickle barrel is" has not "always been the harder problem". In the fleet battles of the 18th century, they often had a very good idea where there opponents were for weeks or months. They knew where enemy shipyards were, just like the Allies in WWII knew where that chemical plant was - they just couldn't strike them effectively. Modern weaponry would have insta-won lots of historic conflicts as there would have been no problem finding stuff to blow up. It's not like Norden was trying to solve the wrong problem, he just didn't have the right solution.

Sometimes stuff doesn't work in the field - sometimes it does. There's interesting lessons there, but they're unrelated to the next thing he talks about, which is:

Sometimes you can't use your great tech effectively. They can hide the SCUDs. The Taliban is not going to all get together like a Napoleonic army or try to make a big Hannibal pincer. They make themselves harder to be found.

But that doesn't mean the weapon is ineffective - it's very effective, it limits your opponents possible tactics. And those limited tactics are one reason why direct American casualties are so low in modern wars - the enemy can't ever really show in force, and thus only has a limited set of tactics available.

Sometimes your equipment or strategy is going to directly work, sometimes it's going to work less directly. Every action you take could provide a reaction, and sometimes those could be very bad. Hunting with drones might create a terror attack across the world. There's interesting ideas there, but again you can't just conflate it all together as "technology and war... something something... Norden bombsight".

And it certainly doesn't reason into: War is often a bad idea. Obviously that's true, but it doesn't follow from the story. Sure, sometimes having good tech can make war seem more attractive than it would if we had less tech. You get the illusion of clean war.

Interesting. But the fact that the above is true - that Americans can kill thousands of dirty foreigners while suffering few casualties - is kind of the opposite lesson from the Norden bombsight. If the Americans had a bunch of "Norden bombsight" style ineffective weapons, they wouldn't have nearly the success they do in slaughtering people who were born in the wrong place and maybe the US would end up in less wars.

So maybe that's the lesson? It's better to have complex, works-in-the-lab-only tech, because otherwise it'll be too easy to kill people? Or something?

Anyways, the base story is interesting - his attempts to supply the moral at the end are much less so.

The interaction between tech and war goes lots of different ways, and I'd say sometimes the "Norden"s of the world are right and their war technology does reduce aggregate suffering. For example, I think it's at least arguable that the tech race prevented the Cold War from ending in a total war scenario that would have killed millions. (Note: if you plan on telling me that I'm crazy and the Cold War was all some kind of fraud or illusion or power consolidation for the elite or that Russia was never a threat or whatever, don't feel bad if I don't bother to answer - it's probably because I'm intimidated by the great arguments you made.)

The lesson is: We humans are not capable of considering all variants and variables of a complex reality. We tend to simplify things and use that simplifyed base for our solutions, wondering later, why this very good and ingenious solution did not work as intended, even make things worse than before.

The lesson is: We are not that smart as we think we are!

This lack of accuracy is one of the great tragedies of WW2. There was an effort on the Allied side to concentrate bombing raids on military targets, but as described here, real life conditions made targeted strikes little more useful than indiscriminate bombing, especially since many of the raids before air supremacy was achieved over mainland Europe had to be conducted at night, and so less discriminating policies were installed. There was, even at the time, controversy over the usefulness of bombing civilian targets, and maybe cities would have been targeted to some extent even if bombing precision had been better, but the woeful inaccuracy of bombers unfortunately gave a lot of support to the proponents of total war - style bombing raids. Such raids continued even after air supremacy was achieved, which - in hindsight, admittedly - was not optimal for the war effort, but the procedure was established and difficult to change.

Thus, Dresden.

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Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 2:33pm PDT - promote requested by geo321.