fnordseer:

had a weird dream where i was thinking about nash equilibria, the invention of bronze, domestication of the horse, gunpowder, etc., there was an animated segment about some mongols tricking a town somehow by sending a small skirmish and then coming back later with the entire horde. cool how lucid my thinking was in the dream, same as if i’d been awake. the gist of the train of thought was that there are semi-stable strategies for fighting wars that then get upset by new technology being discovered and spreading but what if someone siloed away technological progress into the secret underground black budget world so that everyone else was left using strategies from several generations of warfare ago.

I dunno, you really need a second player to run the dialectic through, and if you try to simulate it there’s no guarantee actual counterparts would go down that path.

A lot of Soviet Cold War naval strategy revolved around submarines firing suborbital missiles as a counter to carrier battle groups, yielding many advances in suborbital missilering – in turn inspiring AEGIS radar-picketing – in a way that would not have occurred, finite resources going to other priorities – without carrier battle groups.