Richard,
The point I was trying to make is that military (or for that matter business) success, as I suppose the Tactics of Mistake proposed, does not depend entirely, or even primarily on technology. In fact I would propose that there is a point of convergence located somewhere between Leadership, Doctrine and Technology which strikes the balance that achieves success.
A force so balanced will defeat higher TL force that fails at leadership and doctrine.
This is why I stopped using Striker rules (2nd ed.) and decided to look elsewhere for rules.
The problem is, and this is not confined to sci-fi wargaming, is that most wargamers just don't understand the doctines of the forces they seek to 'lead' in games.
How did this realisation start for me?
After the Cold War I was doing a degree that involved doing some fairly deep research.
As part of this research I realised that what I read about the Wehrmacht 'thinking' about warfare was largely based on the Allied interrogations and post-war writings of the surviving senior officers, many by then employed as Allied and then NATO 'consultants'.
Yet during th elate 80s these same officers, now retirees, were invitged to participate in a series of simposia conducted under the auspecies of US Army Staff College Carlisle that sought to re-examine what the US Army understood about the Red Army's conduct of the Eastern Front war. It turned out that almost everything that was printed in Western military literature up until that time was wrong.
The former Wehrmacht officers admitted that there existed prior and during the war an extreme cultural bias withing the German officer corps about the Red Army, in part highly influenced by the Nazi indoctrination. It turned out the Red Army was not a bunch of brutish undereducated bolshevics and comissars that sent their troops blindly into the frontal attacks like so much cannon fodder.
And this started me thinking about a number of things, one of them a couple of years later when I returned to Traveller, was about how various races thought about warfare. In the early 80s when I used to play Traveller I usually chose an Aslan character, adn when we had military actions, used Aslan mercenaries. But, how did Aslans relate to warfare culturally? Obviously their technology was going to be different, and so was their leadership based on their culture, but what about warfare? Lets say they were feline-like in mentality. Did felines think about combat the way primates did? Did feline warfare evolve the way Human warfare did? How would Aslans fight on the Eastern Front?
And the troubling conclusion I came to is that technology does not define success in military operations.
So one day I took an Aslan merc unit and did a planetary assault the way I thought it should be done, and not by the rules.
My game ended in about 20 minutes real time, of which most of the time was spent on movement from the orbiting ship to the surface.
I used a force equipped with TL 8/9 and mounted in TL 9/10 grav vehicles. The opponent was TL13 (TTL). And all I did was to apply the 'theoretical' doctrine the Weimar/Red Army team developed in the 1920s/30s.
I'm sure not a few here have seen the term disruptive innovation in various online sources.
But have you seen it employed where you were on the receiving end?
In case you are new to this,
here is a brief intro.
The entire suit of US, and NATO, Advanced Technology platforms, the M-1 Abrams, M-2/3 Bradley, AH-64 Apache, etc. were intended to produce technological superiority over the Soviet Army and Warsaw Pact, but they missed the whole point of how the Soviet Army viewed warfare, and in fact missed the entire point of where the SA's conviction about its methods came from during the Second World War. NATO got the whole of 20th century warfare wrong, and then the 'success' of Desert Storm's 100-hour 'battle' was used to 'confirm' that this failure was in fact quite the opposite, and the M-1 Abrams performance in that 100 hours was used as evidence.
So here is a question, how would Aslans act in place of the George W. Bush's Administration vis a vis Iraq-Kuwait situation?
Greg