Missile Defense

Postings just around and after Sept 11, 2001 make interesting reading - and can be traced, by date - at http://www.mrshowalter.net/calendar1.htm . Click "rshow5" in the upper left hand corner of my postings for some additional detail. A good deal of reason to think some Congressional types look at this board - that would "knit together" - if anybody asks me.

rshow55 - 06:44pm Jun 11, 2003 EST (# 12486 of 12490)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

At my first meeting at Gettysburg, in late September 1967, Eisenhower also handed me a copy of C.P. Snow's Science and Government and pointed out these passages , which I quoted in 12406 on June 8th http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.PJtub0tNeTt.503343@.f28e622/14059 :

Tizard and Blackett worked to "teach one lesson each to the to the scientists and the military" . . . "The lesson to the military was that you cannot run wars on gusts of emotion. You have to think scientifically about your own operations. That was the start of operational research, the development of which was Blackett's major personal feat in the 1939-1945 war. The lesson to the scientists was that the prerequisite of sound military advice is that the giver must convince himself that, if he was responsible for action, he would himself act so." p. 29

and also this one:

"I could go on accumulating negatives and empirical prescriptions. We know something about what not to do and whom not to pick. We can collect quite a few working tips from the Tizard-Lindemann story. For instance, the prime importance, in any crisis of action, of being positive what you want to do and able to explain it. It is not so relevant whether you are right or wrong. That is a second-order effect. But it is cardinal that you be positive."

(I'm quoting from the Harvard U. Press 1961 edition.)

Eisenhower knew the stakes for the nation and the world. He knew how soldiers and weapons, including atomic weapons, worked. He wanted to find ways so that being right could become a first order effect.

General Eisenhower also had a list of stumpers - from operations research - negotiation theory, such as it was - crypto - and servomechanism theory. He wanted answers. Right answers.

He wanted those answers within a context where ordinary administrators - no matter how brilliant and hardworking, were to constrained and distracted to have any chance to solve the problems that had to be solved.

He pointed out these lines from Science and Government to help explain what he wanted me to do - why it was hard - and to explain why he, and some other people were taking trouble about me . ( If the Cornell Six Year Ph.D Program hadn't been a tragic mess - there would have been others besides me. )

People were stumped where the straight analytical problems were hard - and made much harder by the sophistication and delicacy of social relations. I was an "experiment" in stripping the constraints of those social relations away.

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