cthia wrote:As I also posted upstream, for quite a while now everyone has been ranting on about where MA officers might acquire their talent, and we all suggested there has to be holes in their instruction. It appears that we
might have been right.
How are you promoted from a Lieutenant or Captain or Admiral with only classrooms and sims. What, slaying dragons on a SIM can get you promoted? Perhaps it is some threshold of hours logged on the SIM.
I'd actually argue that for a tactician, when fighting in an environment that is entirely sensor based, sims of sufficient fidelity can be an effective way to develop a tactician.
After all these sims aren't playing against a canned script, or pre-programed "AI", where you can exploit its programming to win. You've got other humans on the other side of the sim than you're trying to defeat.
Now I'd argue that today while the US Army spends quite a lot of time putting their tank crews through networked sims that those cannot be a complete replacement for real word practice because significant parts of tank combat can't be fully captured by the sim (properly hiding the tank for an ambush, physically preparing fighting positions, eye for the commander and driver on how best to approach various terrain and ground conditions, etc. And even depending on exactly how good the sim is it may or may not do a good job of getting you used to some real world effects that might, for example, cause you to get a laser range finder return from some obstruction you didn't notice instead of the actual target). So there's still no complete substitute for real world exercises where you're throwing the tanks around actual environments.
But with Honorverse warships sims you can be sitting at the actual stations of the actual ships, looking at the same sensor feeds -- the only difference is that you're seeing a feeds of the simulated returns of sensors. But there's no terrain difference between the simulation and reality.
The MAlign's problem isn't, as I see it, that they presumably do their tactical training primarily in sims; so does the RMN, despite their preference for live wargames, they still do many times more simulated combat than live wargames. And the RMN's pre-war anti-piracy work give combat experience in (generally) single ship combat against 3rd-rate enemies. It does get the captains and tac officers used to actually killing enemies; but that's about it. It provides no tactical training, or test of tactical doctrine, for even squadron combat; much less fleet combat between walls of battle. Those tactics were only worked out, and practiced, in simulations and war games and prior to the war with Haven the RMN had basically never gotten any real world combat experience to proof their fleet strategies against.
Hence those strategies and tactics getting revised again and again based on seeing how they worked out in actual combat, once that began.
And yet those same revised strategies are primarily taught to up and coming tactical officers, captains, commodores, and admirals through classroom instruction, and various levels of simulation (everything from the handful of sim stations in Honor's house allowing; what up to 12 people to simulate commanding anything from a LAC up to entire fleets, up to full fleets in orbit all participating in a simulation) long before they get to try them during one of the rare wargames. However, they're learning battle tested tactics and strategies and generally now have battle seasoned instructors running the OpFor -- so they get realistic challenges.
So as I see it the Maligns problem isn't the sims, everybody has to primarily use those. It isn't even that they don't have combat experienced folks to run their OpFor (until the last 20 years that's be basically true of everybody's navy as well -- at least if you're talking about combat with your most powerful warships in large formations). It's that they need wildly new an innovative tactics to take advantage of their wildly divergent ship designs and due to the secrecy around those designs they're pulling from a pretty small talent pool with no way to get outside input or to cross check against outside thinking. They're at high risk (though its not guaranteed) of falling into a trap where they a) end up setting simulation conditions that preclude discovering actual flaws in their tactics and b) don't throw in enough curve balls to identify and cultivate the officers with the flexibility to both see when an established tactic no longer works and to figure out how to adapt and overcome. If you end up with training where your tactics just always work you can end up selecting for officers that are best at following them by rote and will do quite poorly in real combat the first time reality deviates from their plan.
But that's not a flaw in using sims for training. That's a flaw of misusing your training (and real wargames are just as vulnerable to that flaw -- sometimes even more so they're so rare that you'll need to reset if things deviate too far off script. After all they'd be a bad way to train your escort commanders if a surprise tactic killed them all in the opening minutes and they had to sit out the rest of the multi-day wargame. At least with a sim you can sometimes afford to let a "ruined" one play fully out because they're more frequent and you can just try again soon)
