Category Archives: War

To politically balance my previous suggestion to cut US medical spending in half, let me now suggest we cut US military spending in half.   I haven’t researched this subject anywhere near as much as medicine, so I can’t argue as strongly.  But the simple argument seems compelling: The US with 27% of world product has about 46% of world military spending (up from 40% in 2000).  Yet our "defense" needs are few, as we are rich, isolated, have friendly neighbors, and haven’t been invaded for centuries.  And it is hard to see how "offense" spending at this level could possibly be cost-effective. 

A bit of web search finds a 2005 William Nordhaus essay making similar points:

The U.S. has approximately half of total national security spending for the entire world. The runners-up appear to be China, with about $50-200 billion of spending for 2004, and Russia, with about $15-50 billion in recent years.  In one sense, the $590 billion for national security is not a "large" number, because it constitutes only 4.8 percent of GDP, which is smaller than the U.S. spent in earlier hot or cold war periods. On the other hand, national security spending is "huge" by absolute standards. It constitutes about $5000 per family. …

The question I would like to contemplate is whether the country is earning a good return on its national-security "investment," for it is clearly an investment in peace and safety, as well perhaps in oil supply and exports. The bottom line is, probably not. …

Continue reading "Cut US Military in Half" »

Recently published in Interfaces:

[Regarding] the decisions that adversaries will make, we compared the accuracy of 106 forecasts by experts [e.g., domain experts, conflict experts, and forecasting experts] and 169 forecasts by novices about [choices in] eight real conflicts. The forecasts of experts who used their unaided judgment were little better than those of novices, and neither group’s forecasts were much better than simply guessing. The forecasts of experts with more experience were no more accurate than those with less. The experts were nevertheless confident in the accuracy of their forecasts. … We obtained 89 sets of frequencies from novices instructed to assume there were 100 similar situations. Forecasts based on the frequencies were no more accurate than 96 forecasts from novices asked to pick the single most likely decision.

Maybe conflict games are full of mixed strategies?  Hat Tip to WSJ Online, via Tyler Cowen.

Terrorists are hampered by biases as much as the rest of us. In a Wired commentary "The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail" Bruce Schneier discusses the interesting findings of Max Abrams in his paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work (International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 42–78).

Basically, terrorists run into trouble because people use correspondent inference theory to infer the intentions of others: the results of their actions are assumed to be concordant with their intentions. If a person sweeps the floor we assume he wants it clean (but he could just be working off excess energy). If somebody hits somebody else, we assume the intention was to harm (but it could just be a game). Similarly, people infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of a terrorist – which likely leads to a misunderstanding of the real goals of the terrorist.

This is bad news for terrorism as an effective coercive means to political or social ends. Although the terrorist can state his demands and goals, people will tend to assume that he is just a sadist rationalising. Possibly a dangerous sadist one has to occasionally acquiesce to, but the goals are not seen as essential to him. His "real" goals are assumed to be the destruction of society, and this makes accepting demands less favorable. Abrams finds empirical support for this in that terrorists are much more likely to succeed with their demands if they focus their attacks on military goals rather than civilian ones, and if they have minimalist goals (evicting a foreign power, winning control of a piece of territory). Attacking civilians or wanting to change the world makes people assume the intention is something else.

This analysis assumes bias among the non-terrorists making them unwilling to play along, but clearly there are plenty of biases among the terrorists too. The correspondence makes them impute evil intentions to governments that behave clumsily or violently. The emotional salience of terror probably introduces a lot of availability bias, impact bias makes terrorists overestimate the emotional effect of their actions, groupthink is likely pretty big within terrorist grooming communities and so on.

It seems that one could probably analyse terrorism in terms of cognitive biases quite fruitfully. Whether that will lead to ways of reducing terrorism is another matter. Maybe unbiased terrorists will simply see that the Bayesian thing to do is simply to go home since terror doesn’t work efficiently – or they would start making non-hyperbolic long-term plans for surgical strikes that simply cannot be misunderstood. Conversely, maybe terrorists could be incited to bias themselves into inefficiency, but highly biased people can occasionally be dangerous. Maybe the real aim should be an unbiased anti-terror strategy – but as long as politicians and public are biased they will likely see the unbiased strategy as wrong.

Today is Memorial Day.  In a park near my home is a plaque that reads:     

We honor all those who fought for our community.

There is probably a similar plaque near you.  I would be more proud to live in a community with a plaque that read:    

We honor those who fought against our community when it was wrong. 

Via Bryan Caplan, we get this quote from my favorite author, Leo Tolstoy:

If an American wishes the preferential grandeur and well-being of America above all other nations, and the same is desired by his state by an Englishman, and a Russian, … and all of them are convinced that these desires need not only not be concealed or repressed, but should be a matter of pride … and if the greatness and wellbeing of one country or nation cannot be obtained except to the detriment of another nation, … – how can war be avoided?

And so, not to have any war, it is … necessary to … destroy what produces war. … the desire for the exclusive good for one’s own nation – what is called patriotism. And so to abolish war, it is necessary to abolish patriotism, and to abolish patriotism, it is necessary to it is necessary first to become convinced that it is an evil, and that is hard to do.

Bryan comments:

A hundred years later, Tolstoy seems more perceptive than ever. In the modern world, how often do countries actually have anything to fight about? 

I intend to take this position:  I prefer what is good for the world, over what is good for my country, and when USA patriots disagree with others about what is good for the world, I’m not particularly likely to take their side.  But I wonder: Do I really take this position?