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.
“Terrorism is the mirror image of insurance: its aim is to concentrate destruction, to achieve the largest and most public damage. And just as insurers diversify big risks across many smaller ones, the terrorists, once the big targets become too risky, move to more but smaller randomized attacks in a mixed strategy. It’s straightforward cost/benefit analysis: what will be big enough to show the Umma, the Muslim world, that they are hurting the West, but not so big as to be too costly in resources and, especially, risk of failure? What that means for us, though, is that we can begin to formulate our own curve of severity and frequency. Just as with earthquakes, we can assess and even price terrorism risk without having the deterministic power to predict any single attack.
“These people are intelligent; their goal is to leave an imprint in history. They know that to do that means being visibly successful in hurting the West—taking lives and destroying value. Time, though, means almost nothing; if they really want to re-establish the Caliphate, they are thinking in centuries. Similarly, the lives of individual terrorists mean nothing. The only significant loss to them, in game-theory terms, is being seen to fail at something spectacular. That’s why the key words for al-Qaeda are patience, preparation, and reconnaissance.”
So game theory tells us this about terrorism: despite the West’s overwhelming military superiority, we are, in this dark and private battle, in the position of Lee facing Grant. We are attempting to defend all along our global perimeter against an enemy willing to spend any amount of time and blood to do us harm. We can win each battle if we choose, but to win the war means changing the matrix of the game: denying that this must be zero-sum, molding our opponent’s utilities by adding new benefits. “The ambitions of the extreme Islamists are perpetual; they have no ending.” says Gordon Woo. “The only way success in the terrorist strategy loses its dominance is if success in some other form becomes possible and more attractive. The key factor is helping the aspirations of ordinary, secular Muslims—making peace worth having. This is something Western governments have hardly even tried to do.
“Since terrorism won’t simply go away, governments should also be more honest about their understanding of risk and their degree of belief in intelligence information. Frankly, I think people who have gone to business school may be better qualified to evaluate these problems than people in government; at least they’ve been trained to reason under uncertainty. It’s all probabilistic—intelligence assessment, risk analysis, decision making—and I don’t think our politicians are willing to think that way or use those terms. They want to project certainty, but it simply is not there.”
Only in a knife fight are there no rules; war remains a matter of convention. When these conventions become confused, war’s savagery increases and fighting becomes an end in itself. Herman Kahn pointed out that an important source of the horror on the Eastern Front in the Second World War was the confusion between the apparent conventions of the Wehrmacht (formal, “honorable,” aspiring to chivalry) and the anticonventional values of the SS (violent, “frightful,” power-worshiping). Even in areas where the Germans were initially welcomed, this contradiction soon turned all against the invaders: there was no understanding them.
Convention, in classical political theory, is the basis of organized society. We cooperate with one another; we pay and accept payment in pieces of paper; we stop at red lights. Game theory would ask: why? Shouldn’t our individual strategy be to get all we can, shaft our neighbors and head off to a debauched retirement in Brazil? If life takes the form of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, why don’t we occupy the point of equilibrium, each betraying the other to Fate’s policeman?
The answer seems to be that we are never playing just one game. In Kenneth Axelrod’s famous experiment in 1980, individual computer programs were matched against one another in a round-robin tournament of repeated prisoner’s dilemmas. Points were given on the basis of the payoffs: 3 points each for cooperation, 1 each for mutual defection, 5 for the sole defector, and zero for the trusting chump. Of 14 entrants in the first tournament and 64 in the second, the winner was one of the simplest: Anatol Rapaport’s TIT FOR TAT, which cooperated on the first round and thereafter did to the opponent whatever the opponent had done on the previous round. In the electronic society, TIT FOR TAT is the solid citizen: It takes no nonsense; you can play it for a sucker only once, but if you act on the square, it sees you right. As the wise always tell us to do, it hopes for the best and prepares for the worst. Simply by adding these elements of memory and conditional behavior, Rapaport’s four-line program introduces convention and thereby changes the game from Hobbes’ state of nature to the beginnings of civilization.
Similar experiments in evolutionary game theory, where strategies are represented by software agents and payoffs by “reproduction,” show even more interesting dynamics: in a world where the rogue and honest citizen, greedy and fair-minded, mix and interact randomly, the rogues do well. Add, however, just a touch of preference—let the honest marginally prefer to do business with the honest, or even simply favor their nearest neighbors—and the law comes to Dodge City: the trusting structures of civil society appear, with only a small residual population of rogues picking off the unwary at the margins.
All this, though—and, with it, all the mental freedom we derive from mutual fair dealing—depends on a vital belief: that this game is not the last one; not even the next to last. We expect to live on in a world shaped by our actions of today. If we knew for certain we were playing the final hand, with no chance of future retribution, we could deal off the bottom; we could pillage, betray, and destroy. Even if we only knew for
certain which would be the last hand, we could benefit from acting dishonestly. That is why history’s most dangerous men are those who believe they know how the game ends, whether in earthly victory or in paradise.
When first it appeared, game theory seemed to provide a way of waging war that assured we could choose the least bad course. Now, the lesson of game theory seems both more subtle and more true to life: death will find us—but, we hope, not soon. In the meantime, this is the one life we are leading and our opponents, godly or godless, face choices as we do. In these circumstances, behaving decently is not just what our mothers taught us—but a pretty good strategy.
11
Being
I think chance is a more fundamental conception than causality; for whether, in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation.
- Max Born
Outside, the night was loud with the cries of beasts; within, the lamplight shimmered on the broad table, giving his spread-out pages the air of fallen leaves shifting in a breeze. Bishop Colenso looked at the intent face of Ngidi, who had listened so closely. The day’s translation was done, but the Zulu still had a question: “Is all that true? Do you really believe that all this happened thus? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as the rest?” The bishop paused: he had to admit that he did not believe it all—setting off a chain of events that would see him vilified and excommunicated.
Chances Are Page 31