> I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests.
It's possible. It's also possible that he had a good sense of how test results are presented by program managers to Congress, and was trying to accurately convey the situation. Congress typically doesn't have time to delve into the details of the test, they get top-line results like "the Bradley did not catch fire when shot by an RPG" even though the footnotes would talk about the water in the tanks.
More generally, there is a tendency even today to make test results look good through judicious selection of test conditions. Program managers will refuse to do tests where "we already know the answer" - but only when we think the system won't work. We do plenty of tests when we have high confidence the system will work. So you get headlines like "86 of 105 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful" [1], without the context that we never attempted the shots that we think we would miss, even if those scenarios are tactically important.
I'll grant that there are several motivations for testing like this, but let's not pretend that they are all purely technical.
It's possible. It's also possible that he had a good sense of how test results are presented by program managers to Congress, and was trying to accurately convey the situation. Congress typically doesn't have time to delve into the details of the test, they get top-line results like "the Bradley did not catch fire when shot by an RPG" even though the footnotes would talk about the water in the tanks.
More generally, there is a tendency even today to make test results look good through judicious selection of test conditions. Program managers will refuse to do tests where "we already know the answer" - but only when we think the system won't work. We do plenty of tests when we have high confidence the system will work. So you get headlines like "86 of 105 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful" [1], without the context that we never attempted the shots that we think we would miss, even if those scenarios are tactically important.
I'll grant that there are several motivations for testing like this, but let's not pretend that they are all purely technical.
[1] https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2018/11-2019-M...