From January through April we ended up doing more than two dozen blog posts on the issue of validation. I also addressed the subject in my book War by Numbers (Chapter 18: Modeling Warfare). It is, of course, an issue I have writing about since 1997 with my article in Volume I, No. 4 of our modeling newsletter (here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub4.htm). We also did a number of efforts inside of the DOD to promote validation, the most significant being our Casualty Estimation Methodologies Study (May 2005) (see:Â http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm). This report resulted in at least one manager at one agency recommending that we be terminated from all contracts with them because we criticized their models. The response to all this discussion was underwhelming to say the least, until now:
And then out of the blue, here comes the Senate Armed Services Committee report. We have no idea where this came from, who did it, or why? Were they reading our blog?