Bayesian.

My video today (it should be available for everyone in an hour or so) talks about what this blog and my YT especially are all about from the inception. Sure, visuals, explosions, drones, tanks, aircraft and red and blue arrows on maps (which are as removed from real military maps as possible, with some exceptions you all know) that the nature of war and REAL combat has been completely drowned in this tactical minutiae by all kinds of fanboys who never served a day in uniform as a grunt, forget about officer rank with real military experience. At some point all this pseudo-military noise gets to you and I used today's lull in "political news" to deliver some doze of war reality as seen from those who plan and execute those plans in REAL war. 

So, the primer to those who never heard about Markov Chains or Bayes and Bayesian Networks. This is not difficult on a conceptual level. 

Bayesian statistics combines prior knowledge with new data to make decisions. It provides a flexible way to update beliefs as new information becomes available. Unlike traditional methods, Bayesian statistics quantifies uncertainty and provides a more dynamic view of data. This article explains basic ideas like prior knowledge, likelihood, and updated beliefs. It also shows how Bayesian statistics is used in different areas. 

Here is a key and also the entrance into Operational ART. Why it is called such.

Bayesian statistics provides a probabilistic framework for reasoning under uncertainty. It is valuable in scenarios with limited data or prior knowledge. At its core is Bayes’ Theorem:

Here: 

• P(θ∣D) is the posterior probability: The updated probability of the parameter θ after observing the data D
• P(D∣θ): is the likelihood: The probability of observing the data D given the parameter θ
• P(θ) is the prior probability: The initial belief about the parameter θ before considering the data
• P(D) is the marginal likelihood: The overall probability of the observed data D for all possible values of θ

Do you see what is highlighted yellow and underlined? Well I will repeat again what real military professionals are dealing with--RESOLUTION of UNCERTAINTIES. And here comes the main issue--why West loses its wars. Speaking plainly--it has fucked up beliefs both in enemy's capabilities and gross overestimation of own ones. This clusterfuck hasn't been fixed, it is impossible to fix. Not with present crop of NATO planning officer corps which is largely incompetent, arrogant and lacking military culture required for the war of the XXI century. It has been proven empirically time after time since 2022. It is institutional catastrophe. So, here is my little introduction to COGNET and how you POPULATE networks and how handling beliefs (yes, Bayesian Networks are belief networks) and uncertainties separates a true operational artist from some three-star ass-kisser. This is your frame of mind you need to understand what is in my today's video about how operational planning is done.