Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastbeef | Hacker News Reader

>It's the difference between a handful of dudes in a speedboat with some explosives and an aircraft carrier.

That’s uh... one helluva metaphor you got there.

It's a somewhat infamous tactic used by a US leader in a war game simulation of war with a hypothetical mid east enemy (Iran of course), he used first a wave of cruise missiles, then a follow up attack of many small boats on suicide runs to overwhelm a carrier force (hypothetically) and won a two week planned exercise in one day, so the folks in charge re-ran the simulation and barred the tactics he used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

True that, if could with the pants down a carrier is nothing more than a big target. There is alo an example (no source, sorry) of a German sub surfacing next to a US carrier, within the inner defense ring, suring an exercise.

But all that only works of the carrier is caught flat footed. To stay in the metaphor, the carrier "automotive industry" is no longer flat footed. Partol aircraft and choppers are deployed and the defenses are up.

By the way, I like that image, fits the business world much bettwr than the proverbial tanker vessel for big co.

Sweden produces short range diesel electric subs that were able to sink a US carrier in a similar war game so the US Navy leased one to learn how to adapt to the previously unknown weakness. IIRC China was making these kinds of subs but they have pretty short range, compared to most attack subs.

The point of a simulation is to find vulnerabilities. When something works the correct thing is to rerun it with the assumption that you have mitigated that attack to see what your next vulnerability is. You of course also make sure the mitigation actually happens.

Lawyers run practice trials all the time, if their opponent in practice comes up with an argument they can't destroy on the spot they know where they need to focus.

Yes, they should have at least tried once again with no restrictions to see if the assymetric warfare worked with the Blue team prepared for it by the first run experience, the barring the tactic totally seems to be the opposite of what they should have done.

I had a reply written for that poster, but decided against posting, but yeah, look up the USS Cole. The ship was ruined, people killed. Not talking about some military exercise, but about reality.

Edit: wow, still reading comments, everyone talking about exercises and not about when a speedboat actually went up against a warship. Maybe a perfect analogy, all theory, no real world with some crowds.

> I had a reply written for that poster, but decided against posting, but yeah, look up the USS Cole. The ship was ruined, people killed. Not talking about some military exercise, but about reality.

I think the GGP had that covered:

>>> At most the former can hope to land a good sucker punch before the latter knows they're even fighting.

The USS Cole attack was the sucker punch. Now that the US Navy knows they're fighting, they reprogrammed their robot guns to attack speedboats:

https://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=2100&tid=...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izP3liVmfCE

It's necessary to have the sentence following even try to make sense.

>> Once the latter is aware of the former you can be reasonably assured who of will win.

What does it even mean to "win" in the context of the EV market? Or even just the car market generally? Markets may be competitive but that doesn't translate into the competitiveness of a battle. It's a wonder the world finds a place for variety of so many products and goods at all, given people's obsession over "the winner", somehow creating a monopoly, and fear of losing some "battle" that isn't actually happening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com