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Misguided weapons : technological failure and surprise on the battlefield /
Technological failure results when one side in a conflict does not fully grasp the potential impact of known, or even familiar, weapons in the enemyÆs hands. In most cases, such failure resulted from higher officialsÆ ignorance or their total misunderstanding of the importance and relevance of such...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Washington, D.C. :
Brassey's,
©2002.
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| Edición: | 1st ed. |
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
Tabla de Contenidos:
- Cover; Contents; Preface; Prologue: Early Technological Failure: The Battle of Crecy; 1 Predicting the Outcome of Conflicts; Introduction; The Importance of Quantitative Factors; The Quality of Troops and Commanders; Other Factors, Including Common Sense; Quality vs. Quantity; Lanchester's Equations; 2 The Roots of Technological Failure; The Role of Weapons; The Origins of Various Misguided Attitudes; Some Possible Explanations; The Problems of Expanding Technology; Old Knowledge versus New, and the Effects of Specialization; The Problems of Cooperation
- The Effects of Large and Small FailuresLack of Preparedness; How Do Technological Failures Occur?; Some Opinions of Military Leaders; 3 Misunderstanding the Battlefield Environment; Machine Guns in the First World War; The Story of the Nitrates; Radars and the Battle of Britain; Strategic Bombing and the Self-Defense of the Heavy Bomber; The IDF (Israeli Defense Force) Confronts the Sagger Missile; The Effectiveness of the Patriot Antiballistic Missile System; Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1991; 4 Misunderstanding Available Technology; The Failure of Gas Warfare in World War I
- Early British Tank DevelopmentDrop Tanks: The German Failure; The Missed Opportunity of the Snorkel; The Problem of the Allied Long-Range Escort Fighter; PGMs (Precision-Guided Munitions) in Vietnam; 5 Bad Management, Worse Leadership, and NIH; The Centimetric Wavelength Radar Battle; NIH (Not Invented Here) and Gunnery in the U.S. Navy; Plastic Armor; The Sherman Tank and the Seventeen-Pound Gun; The Scandal of the American Torpedoes; ''Window'' and What to Do about It; Night Operations and the Failure of Bomber Command Leadership; The Japanese Atomic Bomb Project
- 6 Preconceived Ideas, Overconfidence, and ArroganceIntroduction; Henry Tizard and the Battle of the Beams; Lord Cherwell and the Question of the V-2; Enigma, Purple, and Overreliance on Preconceived Notions; The Predictions of Iraqi Missile Attacks; Technological Predictions about Future Conflicts; 7 Political and Ideological Meddling; Introduction; Nazi Germany and Science; The Waste of the Me-262; How the Bomb Saved Soviet Nuclear Physics; 8 Technological Developments and Science Fiction; New Technologies and New Weapons; Weapon Development Times; Is It Really Science Fiction?
- 9 Technological Surprise and Technological FailureBattlefield Surprise; Total Surprise and Self-Inflicted Surprise; The Limitations of Intelligence Gathering; The Effects of Technological Surprise; Some Concluding Remarks about Technological Failure; The Problem of Feedback; Some Current Potential Causes of Technological Failures; Lanchester's Equations and the Effect of Technological Innovations; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z; About the Author