The Computer That Predicted the U.S. Would Win the Vietnam War

[corbe]

The Computer That Predicted the U.S. Would Win the Vietnam War
The Atlantic
Alexis C. Madrigal
1 hr ago

At just about the halfway point of Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’s monumental documentary on the Vietnam War, an army advisor tells an anecdote that seems to sum up the relationship between the military and computers during the mid-1960s.

“There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’”

<..snip..>

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-computer-that-predicted-the-us-would-win-the-vietnam-war/ar-AAsWbnj?li=AA4Zpp&ocid=ientp

[unite for individuality]

War has many factors that are not so easy to quantify, like,
"How motivated is the enemy?" and
"How clueless are our commanders?"
I.E., "Are our forces being commanded by bean counters?"

[dfwgator]

The US won it.


South Vietnam lost it.

[Smokin Joe]

The US won it.


South Vietnam lost it.

The Democrat Congress lost it.

[dfwgator]

The Democrat Congress lost it.

That too,  but it was their country, they should have done a better job.  Maybe not pissing off the Buddhist majority would have been a good start.

[Smokin Joe]

That too,  but it was their country, they should have done a better job.  Maybe not pissing off the Buddhist majority would have been a good start.

Politically, yes, but what would have stopped the invasion by the north's armored columns and massed troops would have been air power, and that was the plug the Dems pulled. The North knew this and exploited a weakness that had not been there while we were supporting the South.