The second presentation on the second day was by Dr. Christopher Davis of UNCG (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) called “History as an Enemy and an Instructor: Lessons Learned from Haiti 1915-1934. It is here: History as an Enemy and Instructor
Now, in all my insurgency and counter insurgency work I drew all my cases from post-World War II data. It not because I did not think that data before WWII was not relevant, I just knew it would be a harder sale. People often high-handedly dismiss history as irrelevant when it gives them an answer they do not like. The older the history, the easier it is to off-handedly dismiss it. Therefore, for the sake of not having to have that argument, I kept all my insurgency work post-WWII. Even that did not protect me, with people complaining about me referencing insurgencies in Chad they had never heard of and using too many “wars of national liberation” in my data set, which supposedly biased my results. Apparently, if you do not have the data to dispute the result of our research, you just dismiss our data; which apparently is enough to establish your opposing viewpoint. Anyhow, I felt that Haiti is in fact a perfectly representative example to learn from so when Dr. Davis offered to brief on it, I immediately agreed.
The first presentation of the day was my monstrosity, Iraq, Data, Hypotheses and Afghanistan (which I later turned into the book America’s Modern Wars): NIC Compilation 3.1
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We had a total of 30 presentations given at the first Historical Analysis Annual Conference (HAAC). We have the briefing slides from most of these presentations. Over the next few weeks, we are going to present the briefing slides on this blog, maybe twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursday). In all cases, this is done with the permission of the briefer. We may later also post the videos of the presentations, but these are clearly going to have to go to another medium (Youtube.com). We will announce when and if these are posted.
The briefings will be posted in the order given at the conference. The conference schedule is here: Schedule for the Historical Analysis Annual Conference (HAAC), 27-29 September 2022 – update 16 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
The nine presentations given on the first day are all here: Presentations from HAAC – Air Combat Analysis on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
