It's a nice story, but the distribution of the bullet holes in the illustration ( http://motherjones.com/files/images/blog_raf_bullet_holes.jp... ) looks a bit too neat to me. I wouldn't expect the bullet holes to be placed exactly so that a cursory glance makes it mind-blowingly obvious where the weak spots are, in a neatly symmetrical way. I'd expect a bit of frowning and thinking and calculating to be needed to figure that out.
So, for an article about 'obvious but wrong' conclusions, I think the illustration is kind of deceiving... unless I'm wrong!
In reference to the illustration in question, it says "the result was a graphic that looked something like the image below", in other words it's made up.
So, for an article about 'obvious but wrong' conclusions, I think the illustration is kind of deceiving... unless I'm wrong!