ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
ORIGINAL: RFalvo69
ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
"Red Storm" is hypothetical, right? So how could it be evaluated for historical performance?
Are you telling me that we can't evaluate almost half of TOAW IV scenarios? [&:]
You can't evaluate hypotheticals for historocity, that's for sure!
What is "historicity" if not a "scenario" played once - and thus not comparable with anything similar?
We will never know how the Allies' performance in '44-'45 fell on an hypothetical "probability curve". Maybe they rolled two six-sided dice, were unlucky, and got a "3". Maybe had Market-Garden been a bit more lucky they could have been in Berlin for Christmas. Maybe, had the campaign be played ten times, we would have discovered that the Allies won the war earlier eight times out of them. We will never know.
What we
do know is that "the historical result was 3". So we build a top-down model that has 3 as the average: two six-sided dice with only 1s and 2s on their faces. This way we concede that the Allies can got a "2" or a "4", with the historical "3" as the most probable result. But we can't refuse the idea that the model is skewed: you can't shop it around as "correct", because we can't compare
what it models (i.e. the real campaign) with anything. It was artificially built to get a specific result.
NATO ends up in Vladivostok or Warsaw Pact ends up in San Francisco. Neither case (nor anything in between) could be refuted.
Maybe not, but I do have a pretty good idea about why we never saw many plans tackling those "cases" [:)]
"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..."
"Oh dad... so you were a God-damned cook?"
(My 10 years old daughter after watching "The Hunt for Red October")
; Julia Child
