Chances Are (45 page)

 

Charles Kinglake, chronicler of the Crimean campaign, said: “The genius of war abhors uniformity, and tramples upon forms and regulations.” Yet the civilian eye sees forms and regulations as the stuff of military life. All conflict is ultimately conventional, not just for convenience but because victory is so difficult to define. How, then, should the successful commander behave—as a rational player or as the genius of war?

Millennium Challenge '02 was a $250 million joint forces exercise, one of the most elaborate ever undertaken. The scenario involved a U.S. action to neutralize a rogue military strongman in the Persian Gulf area—someone not entirely fictional. The Joint Forces Command, anxious to measure American capabilities against a worthy adversary, brought in retired Marine Lt. General Paul van Riper to lead the opposition. A decorated combat veteran, ex-Commanding General of the Combat Development Command, he is known for his aggressive and unconventional thinking.

Van Riper took to his role with evident gusto: knowing his radio traffic would be insecure, he sent orders by motorcycle to be broadcast as part of the evening call to prayer. He set his air force and navy circling, apparently aimlessly, in the sea approaches to his unnamed country—but when the invasion fleet concentrated in one spot, his forces suddenly swooped in a precoordinated attack, and sank it. The ships had to be “refloated” for the exercise to continue. But by the end of the first week, van Riper says, he found his orders were being countermanded: “Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the Joint Forces commander advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end.”

The Joint Forces Command countered, perhaps reasonably, that the point of an exercise is to test untried systems and concepts; if an opponent exploits loopholes in the rules to gain an advantage, this negates the wider purpose; it becomes a matter of winning the game, not winning the next war. Van Riper, though, would have none of this: “You don't come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out”—including, presumably, how it plays out against someone whose game is very different from yours. It was a new example of the old problem: what if the enemy doesn't agree with your definition of victory?

You might consider a man like General van Riper to be simply a gad-fly, a useful puncturer of the chummy complacency that often infects a professional army—but his motivation actually goes much deeper than that. He opposes scripted exercises on philosophical grounds: he believes that you
cannot
model war accurately, for the same reason that weather foils forecasting: “War is a non-linear phenomenon. . . . There are so many variables in any military action, you simply cannot predict the outcome at the outset of any conflict.”

Van Riper and his school see war as subject to chaotic forces; they specifically deplore the “Newtonian” assumptions, both of the Cold War planners and of those who predict a computer-mediated information battlefield. They deny that there can be a calculus of destruction, a cost/benefit analysis of triumph and defeat, an algorithm to purge war of its essential uncertainty. Battle is shaped by human minds under great stress; only history, therefore, can provide the equivalent of ensemble forecasts: a method to isolate war's few constants from its many unpredictable variables. “U.S. military policy,” says General van Riper, “remains imprisoned in an unresolved dialectic between history and technology, between those for whom the past is prologue and those for whom it is irrelevant.”

It's natural for a school of thought that places such emphasis on history to notice that these ideas are not new: the acknowledged prophet of the non-linear view of war was a contemporary of Napoleon's. A Prussian officer of Polish origin in the Russian service, Carl von Clausewitz is the Wittgenstein of military theory. His major work,
On War,
reveals him as brilliant, absorbing, but maddeningly elusive.

Von Clausewitz thoroughly understood non-linearity—the way forces can feed back into themselves to produce unpredictable results. All attempts at calculation, he says, are objectionable “because they aim at fixed values. In war everything is uncertain and variable, intertwined with psychological forces and effects, and the product of a continuous interaction of opposites.” Three fundamental, opposed forces are at work in every conflict: primordial violence (a natural force), probability (a creative force), and policy (a rational force). Broadly, the people, with their hates and enmities, drive war; the army, attempting to harness chance, shapes it; and the government, pursuing political ends, steers it. No force is paramount, though; all act on the course of war as on “an object suspended between three magnets”—that is, chaotically.

Even within pure military art, von Clausewitz saw randomness constantly at work: “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties build up to produce a kind of friction . . . which creates effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” And friction, as we have seen, is a typical source of chaotic behavior, because it influences the very forces that generate it. Friction and its moral equivalents—passion, confusion, impossible objectives, and chance—prevent war from ever being entirely rational. They remain the elements that disrupt games and cloud theory.

 

So are we left with no way to predict the course of conflict except to repeat it over and over? Not entirely; there is at least a benefit in knowing when and how a situation is unpredictable: generals will no longer commit the lives of thousands on the basis of little metal strips, contour maps, and rolling dice. Civilian experts will no longer assume that all war is a poker game, where only the outcome matters and history has no meaning.

As we saw with meteorology, chaos and complexity need not mean the defeat of human ingenuity. Indeed, once recognized, they
can
mean the end of human dunderheadedness. If conflict is like weather, it also has its trade winds and doldrums: areas of predictability within a larger non-linear system. The genius of war abhors uniformity, but its sullen cousins—mistrust, oppression, and vengeance—cycle as surely as the seasons. Here, game theory can be very helpful.

One of its best-known situations is the prisoner's dilemma; briefly stated, it's this: you and a fellow criminal, with whom you cannot confer, have been caught and taken to the police station. The police suspect you both of a major crime (robbing a bank, say), but they
know
only that you've committed a lesser one (stealing the getaway car). The interrogator offers you a deal: betray the other prisoner and you will go free, while he gets a long sentence. You deduce, of course, that your companion has been offered the same deal. If you betray each other, you will each receive a medium-length sentence. If you remain loyal to each other, refusing to talk, you each receive a short sentence for the minor crime.

This is a dilemma because intuition would say that the right thing to do is refuse to talk and trust the other prisoner to do the same, but the minimax solution is for both of you to betray each other. True, the outcome is only the third best of four for either of you—but, given that the other might squeal, it's least risky for you to squeal, too.

In real life, times of visible change—when populations increase, resources decline or new spoils become available for distribution—create conditions where the slightest germ of mistrust can rapidly generate a prisoner's dilemma. Protestant and Catholic, Serb and Croat, Hutu and Tutsi; two populations in one space can find, even without any great prior enmity between them, that the outcomes of life's game are suddenly realigning. The majority in a mixed population may still believe that peace and cooperation are best, but if a sufficiently large minority comes to think that its interests are served only by the victory of its own tribe or creed, then this rapidly becomes a self-fulfilling assumption. You fear your neighbor might burn down your house; will you wait until he comes with his shadowy friends and their blazing brands? No, best call
your
friends, best find matches and fuel . . . Civil society rapidly curdles: individuals lose the chance to choose for themselves. Even the brave who stand up for peace lose everything, betrayed by their fellow prisoners.

A prisoner's dilemma, like almost all things in life, is much easier to get into than out of. This is partly because it so easy to misrepresent the interests of the many to the benefit of the few. The teenage fighters in Africa's many wars do operate out of self-interest, but that interest is confined to their unit. No longer representing the populations they nominally fight for, they have fallen out of the net of mutual support and obligation so painstakingly woven in peacetime. Their choice is simple—between a short life of excitement, bullying, and plunder and a slightly longer one of toil, humiliation, and worry. Senseless and brutal as they appear, they are rational players in a warped game.

Where the prisoner's dilemma prevails, leaders, like fighters, can have a personal interest in the continuation of war. It is usually they who first presented the problem in terms of “us” and “them,” condensing the general uneasiness onto the two poles of fear and hatred. Often they themselves are defined, indeed elevated, by the trouble they helped to begin. The founder of Peru's most persistent guerrilla group, the Shining Path, had been a professor of sociology at a provincial university; even the prestige of tenure could hardly compare with that of terrorizing a whole country. Radovan Karadzic was a small-town psychiatrist, Stalin a seminarian, Hitler a watercolorist of limited gifts. None, one feels, would have much to gain outside the struggle in which he involved his people. The fighting leader is rarely comfortable with the dull problems of peace—which is probably why, half a century after coming down from the hills, Fidel Castro still wears fatigues.

Even legitimate, elected politicians who inherit a protracted conflict can have a personal interest in its continuation, if peace were to mean an end to international attention and aid, summits and subsidies. We elevate peace to an absolute—the moral trump card—but in game theory it is only one of many factors in someone's utility function, whether that person is warlord, gunman, or refugee. Changing utilities, therefore, is sometimes the only way to bring a conflict to a halt.

 

International terrorism invites metaphors: we say it's a disease, or a parasite, or a poison. We hesitate to call it “war,” because it has none of war's conventions or apparent simplicity, despite being demonstrably a conflict between humans.

Disease appears the most valuable metaphor for detection and prevention of terrorist acts. Statistically, our methods of finding the terrorist in our midst are identical to screening for a rare but virulent disease: they share the problem of false positives. It's like the breast cancer screening in Chapter 7. Let's say there are 1,000 terrorists operating in the United States. If we had a 99 percent accurate test for identifying terrorist suspects by sifting through publicly held information, we would end up accusing 2.8 million innocent people: the chance that the given individual handcuffed in the back of the squad car is actually a terrorist would be less than 1 in 300,000. Meanwhile, 10 real terrorists would get through the net—and it needs only one. More important, what would this attempt at positive certainty do to the civilization in whose name we say we are fighting? If society is an arrangement of trust, how could we be both free from danger and free? As Benjamin Franklin said: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“A pure security strategy can never be the answer,” replies Gordon Woo, terrorism expert for one of the world's leading risk-analysis companies. “The real metaphor for terrorism is flooding: if you raise the levees here or there, you just make the flood worse downstream. We ‘harden' prominent targets—the terrorists switch to softer targets.” Soft-spoken, bespectacled and slightly hunched, Woo has the combination of personal diffidence and intellectual self-assurance that is the hallmark of a top degree in mathematics from Cambridge. He came to study terrorism through his long experience with the probabilities of other phenomena that combine unpredictability with severe risk: earthquakes and volcanoes.

He goes on in a quiet if blunt style: “If you can't protect everything, you have to know more about the threat, about its own dynamics. In the case of al-Qaeda, there are several different ways of visualizing their methods, their motivation—and these all affect our ways of dealing with them. In method, they seem to have a swarm intelligence, much like an ant colony: instructions don't go out from the center, nor does each individual operate independently. Instead, there are brief, informal links, shared goals and standards, a hybrid of vertical and horizontal elements. All this means that taking out the top or sweeping up some foot soldiers won't make much difference. The network is self-repairing.