Originally Posted by FliesWay2Much
I HAVE read it and I wasn't terribly impressed on this particular issue. It would take too long to explain why I believe (and why many of my colleagues in my Air War College seminar believe) his numbers were taken out of context and didn't adequately address such key aspects as demographics, tactics & doctrine, force structure, etc, changes that make it virtually impossible, or irrelevant, to normalize the statistics for comparative purposes. I know you base most of your argument on 4 flights and a couple of hundred people in total. But, that's hardly enough data points to draw any sort of quantitative and defendable comparison.
Well, his data is pretty instructive to me, seeing how it was adapted by the military itself and training regimens adpoted across the board (pop-up targets, stress training, silhoutte targets, etc) in military and LE circles and the results speak for themselves.
I also base my argument on other events (Russian school incident, for incidence) where they outcome is equally pre-ordained (ie-the hostages are pretty sure they will die) and still do nothing. My argument is also based upon a decade and a half of training, observation and work in the field of human violence, having seen the elephant myself.
Of course my argument is much more "quantitative and defendable" than yours, in that yours has happened only one time in recent history and we have several incidents where they did not fight back.
I do hope I am wrong, but the evidence to date does not give me hope.