The COIN wars: a toe in the water

The gentlemen of On Violence are the latest to raise the whip over the carcass of that old glue-pot COIN, taking aim this week at what they've callled "the Chicago School of Counterinsurgency." The post is filled with generalizations, mischaracterizations, and the spurious received wisdom of second-rate popularizers and third-rate social scientists, but those errors are mostly peripheral to the main theme. This strange little essay is in fact a subtle confirmation of the rational choice theory the authors mean to criticize. The purportedly contentious assertion of what is in fact an entirely uncontroversial banality – that war is not a wholly rational, predictable phenomenon – gives the authors a platform to draw tendentious normative conclusions in purposeful contrast to the ostensible COIN orthodoxy. This serves to situate On Violence on the side "of the faction they assess to be the one most likely to win" the battle for influence and credibility in our new post-counterinsurgency era. It's almost 2012 – every blog needs to have something on record saying look, I told you they were doing it wrong!

Semantic carelessness is often the sign of poorly-formed ideas, and the post in question is rife with lexical errors. Beginning with the assertion that "the Chicago School [of economics] believes that humans always act rationally when it comes to money," the authors on several occasions use words in misleading or ambiguous ways. (Warfare in place of war is another frequent mistake.) The excerpted quotation is a simple mischaracterization of rational choice theory, which is based on the idea that people survey the choices available to them and select the one most likely to maximize gains. To assert that individuals "act rationally" is not to say that they always choose wisely, but rather that they base their choice on some expectation of benefit.

The On Violence guys clearly misunderstand this: their pronouncement that "rational investors frequently make irrational decisions, believing they are rational" is utterly nonsensical to an economist, for whom the actor's willful effort to maximize utility is precisely what defines "rationality." Of course, rationality does not imply perfect information or foreknowledge of consequences; rational actors can take decisions that turn out disastrously for them thanks to a failure to properly account for context or an imprecise evaluation of various costs and benefits. Richard Posner – who knows a fair bit about the dogmas and creeds of the Chicago school, and whose biography one might like to investigate before crowning David bloody Brooks as "our greatest living conservative commentator" – wrote an entire book about the calamitous conspiracy of rational acts that led to the recent financial crisis. (SPOILER ALERT! He does not conclude that "rational investors [made] irrational decisions, believing they [were] rational.")

On Violence further confuses the "rationality" issue by inexpertly applying the lessons of cognitive psychology (or at least Brooks's retelling of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky) to behavioral economics. According to OnV, Kahnemann and Tversky "proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old, rational models, revealing flaws in the machinery of cognition." But about this, too, they're mistaken. The "old, rational models" say nothing at all about the machinery of cognition; they merely model the way cognition manifests as action. It's certainly true that emotion, unconscious bias, and other so-called cognitive "flaws" may interfere with the exercise of pure reason, but – as we've discussed above – that's not the same thing as irrationality. To put it rather more simply: the rational actor model may not be perfectly descriptive, but it is adequately predictive.

So who are these folks that populate "the Chicago School of Counterinsurgency"? Who accepts "the idea that in warfare—with death and subjugation on the line—mankind's rationality trumps his unconscious thoughts and emotions"? Who fails to consider how social context and personal psychology may influence the decisions of the enemy or the population held at risk? The only person named among the "military theorists [who] continue to ignore humanity's underlying irrationality" – by which the authors seem to mean the influence of emotion and other cognitive and psychological elements – is Andrew Exum, whose unsourced quote concerning "cold-blooded calculations about their self-interest" is reproduced out of context. Who are the rest?

What of the military theorist who wrote this?

[W]ar is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but passive and yielding, as is the case with the human mind and emotions in the fine arts. In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. It must be obvious that the intellectual codification used in the arts and sciences is inappropriate to such an activity [as war]. At the same time it is clear that continual striving after laws analagous to those appropriate to the realm of inanimate matter was bound to lead to one mistake after another. (149)

Later in the same work, this theorist argued that

The effects of physical and psychological factors form an organic whole which, unlike a metal alloy, is inseparable by chemical processes. In formulating any rule concerning physical factors, the theorist must bear in mind the part that moral factors may play in it; otherwise he may be misled into making categorical statements that will be too timid and restricted, or else too sweeping and dogmatic. Even the most uninspired theories have involuntarily had to stray into the area of intangibles; for instance, one cannot explain the effects of a victory without taking psychological reactions into account. (184)

You'll surely have figured out by now that we're talking about Clausewitz. (The page numbers given above are from the Paret/Howard 1984 translation of On War.) The much-misunderstood "remarkable trinity" (pdf) introduced at the close of Book 1, Chapter 1 (89) is indeed composed of "(1) primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; (2) the play of chance and probability; and (3) war's element of subordination to rational policy." To repeat: the foremost theorist in the history of western military thought contends that emotion and chance make up two of the three vital considerations in any useful theory of war. Let's get straight to the point: any analyst who fails to consider the importance of moral factors in war – including the interplay of what On Violence misleadingly dichotomizes as "emotional reactions" and "rationality" – is a failure.

There is, of course, some irony to all of this, what with me here advocating Clausewitzian nuance and balance to a blog that has made a habit of gleefully slaying Clausewitzian straw men; claiming the Prussian's relevance to a form of war that the On Violence men have called "our style of warfare" as they scramble to distance themselves from it, ever in tune with the zeitgeist. I know, I know – try to keep it together. While we're on the subject of irony, how 'bout the OnV guys taking Pape at face value and citing his spurious conclusions as fact in an essay questioning the very legitimcy of the rational choice model?

Unsubstantiated assertion is unfortunately something of a theme in this post, and its conclusion is centered on the grand-daddy of them all: "people aren't rational when it comes to killing and death," an unequivocal pronouncement that is both demonstrably false (why then the persistence of instrumental violence?) and patently at odds with the authors' own previous acknowledgement that "war is about people, politics, and ideology."

The problem with On Violence's Gladwell-deep survey of behavioral economics is that bounded rationality cannot as yet meaningfully inform our models of human agency in conflict. We may recognize that rationality and utility maximization fail to perfectly explain all human behavior, but we have no better predictive model on which to base our efforts to influence the choices of others -- the most extreme of which is war. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, perfect realism may be impossible, but predictive accuracy is still the coin of the realm in social science. Until Kahnemann, Tversky, Thaler, Becker, et al can present a coherent, predictive theory of human choice that can be plausibly applied to economic and political behavior and which definitively falsifies the rational choice model – which is, let's remember, a model, not an attempt at descriptive realism – all this bleating about "humanity's underlying irrationality" is worse than useless: it distracts us from efforts to improve the valid models we have today and the policy prescriptions we may derive from them.

When boiled down to its essence, the message here is a simple if deeply controversial one. The authors of this essay mean to assert that the failure of rational choice theory to completely explain the whole of human behavior renders it useless as a guide to action. Because we cannot perfectly comprehend our interlocutor's decision calculus and cannot be sure his choices will be sensible to us, we must instead assume that calculus will be entirely insensate to our behaviors. If "people aren't rational when it comes to killing and death," then how can we possibly hope to exert our will in predictable ways through violence?

To accept this contention leads the thoughtful man down a dangerous path, at least so far as the anti-Clausewitzian OnV brothers are concerned: to the conclusion that predictable, willful influence is an impossibility, that the choices of an adversary or neutral cannot be shaped, and that our own alternatives are reduced to disengaged indifference to the other or his total annihilation. If we can't persuade, influence, or coerce in a predictable way that's consistent with human reason and our perceptions of causality, we are left to compel by destruction of the enemy's means to resist. This conclusion is perhaps closer to the truth than the chimera of calibrated influence offered by the many proponents of the indirect approach, but I'm quite sure it's not the one the On Violence men would like us to reach.

I'm quite conflicted about the whole thing, in spite of my stridency. The utility of force or its threat for any purpose short of compulsion is something about which I have less and less confidence every day, and I loathe the multivariate philosophies of international engagement that are founded on an unexamined faith in security through transformational change to our operating environment – whether the composition of polities or the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit them. But I see this On Violence post as reinforcing the very worst lessons of the recent COIN era: men can be changed, if only we understand what really drives them, and violence is at best a necessary complement to that transformative action. I fear COINdinistas and COINtras may both be missing the point, and if we throw out the hard-won lessons of counterinsurgency's history and present – that violence is essential to effecting needed change, however temporarily in the absence of legitimacy and consent of the governed – then this decade of "institutional adaptation" will have indeed been a waste.

UPDATE Thurs 22 Dec @ 1125: I see that Ex has responded to the original On Violence post here. I actually took out a fair bit of a draft that dealt with Kalyvas' work, so I'm glad to see that he touched on it.