Delicate strategic balancing: perception's role in formulating strategy

I, like nearly everyone, am saddened by yesterday's tragic murders in Afghanistan. The details are gruesome and as a father of young children, I react to the needless death of children viscerally. I'll hold off on any sort of analysis of this specific situation until investigation results are released. I'll also defer to others on what it portends for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and suggest must-read analysts Daveed Gartenstien-Ross and Carl Prine.

I suspect it would be helpful to use this incident and similarly bad events that recently occurred to take a look at the role of perspective and how it affects strategy from a broader perspective beyond Afghanistan. I endorse Carl and his fourth point that the deaths of 16 Afghans will not likely drive changes in domestic perspectives and subsequently will not drive changes to our strategy. Our current force generation system - an all volunteer force - allows the government to use force as a tool of policy without burdening the overwhelming majority of the nation's citizens which in turn negates the need to have the people's consent to wage and continue war. Barring a catastrophe such as Mogadishu in 1993, the bombings in Beirut in 1983, or Tet in 1968, domestic perspectives simply do not play a role in determining how the U.S. government uses force in the current era. Both the government and the citizens seem pretty content with this arrangement as it allows them to pursue whatever they wish to pursue with minimal burden.

That all said, incidents in Afghanistan these past few months have caused me to question the validity of strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign audiences*. This is not to negate the fact that foreign perspectives affect nearly every intervention in some way - there has been plenty of writing on this and believe it to be true. I firmly believe that reminding soldiers of this fact was possibly the only redeeming value of the counterinsurgency manual. To say nothing of this excellent work. But strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign populations are another matter altogether.

This is not to say that abusing detainees, offending the religious sensibilities of local populations, killing civilians through negligence or indifference, mutilating corpses, and willful murder are unimportant or that they should not or may not affect the execution of a strategic plan. Iraq came unglued after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and Iraqis had every right to be angry, causing them to rebuke U.S. efforts. And of course there were more screw-ups after this incident - the strategic knucklehead is pervasive and unpreventable after all. But in spite of all of that, the U.S. strategy there eventually met most of its goals (reasons for which include a whole bunch of luck, but good strategy leverages luck). While Afghanistan is obviously not monolithic and reactions will vary, every new incident is accompanied by analysis of how much it sets back our mission there, suggesting to me that we're nearing a cusp where winning the approval of the Afghan people will become the determining factor of our outcomes.

We have a whole suite of problems with our strategy in Afghanistan, foremost of which are a failure to state specific and achievable ends as well as a misalignment of ways and means to achieve the pitifully-described desired ends we have written down. But if our strategic success now depends upon selling to the Afghans that we mean well and that they are now more skeptical than not of us, well we have a very, very serious problem. Balancing the Say-Do equation is an imperative. However, if public perception is that mistakes and crimes committed by individual U.S. service members is indicative of U.S. policy or strategy, then public communications begins to drive strategy instead of the other way around.

Public communications and information operations to influence perceptions are ways, but the U.S. keeps falling into the trap of making perceptions ends in themselves. If our ends, ways, and means were better formed and aligned, I suspect that the "Do" side of the equation would be solid enough to negate the affects of mistakes. But this is not the situation in Afghanistan where continued programs of questionable efficacy, strategic drift with regard to ends (compare this and this for instance), and continued support for an illegitimate and ineffectual government abound. If ways and means are not succeeding (to what ends?!?) or are the wrong ways and means entirely then your strategy rests in total upon Afghan perception that you're making a difference instead of in part, which amplifies individual disasters such as we've seen of late. While it is unlikely that the United States will change course at this juncture, we need to start paying attention to this phenomenon now and avoid it in the future so we can avoid codifying perceptions as ends and put influencing them back where they belong: as ways. A successful strategy would go a long way to restoring this balance. Once again, maybe in the next war.

*I apologize for the awkward term and I just can't find the right one that doesn't sound trite. Here it means the people living in the country in which your forces are operating.

UPDATE: See the always insightful and on point Adam Elkus on this topic.

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.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War: Libya edition

Tonight a friend asked me "if everyone hates Qaddafi so badly, why isn't there more rebel activity in the west? Why isn't there more sabotage and insurgency and all that?" My first thought was something like, hell, you've got me. What the hell do I know about Libya? And that's true enough: I don't know much of anything about the specifics of the civil war, of ethnic cleavages or tribal rivalry, or really even about the geographic patterns of violence there beyond what's been widely reported in the media. But I do know a very little bit about the general subject of insurgency and irregular war, and the literature has something to say about this.

For one thing, popular interpretations of civil war and rebellion tend to overstate the power of ideology as a motivating factor for combatants. In the present example, this manifests as the belief that widespread loathing of an authoritarian leader should logically translate into broad-based, geographically indifferent rebellion. A melange of motivations is evident in anecdotal reporting from the front (none better than what runs under the byline of prolific multi-platform star C.J. Chivers), though we'd be well-served to keep in mind that people aren't always fighting for the reasons they say they are. These accounts don't really answer our question, in any event: if the rebels of Brega and Benghazi are fighting for democracy, the Qu'ran, or anything but Qaddafi, then surely some in the west of the country would take up arms in the service of one of those ends, right? Here's Stathis Kalyvas (p. 46) on the subject:

An extensive body of research shows that combatants are usually motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear but by peer pressure and processes involving regard for their comrades, respect for their leaders, concern for their own reputation with both, and an urge to contribute to the success of the group -- in short, what is known as "primary group cohesion."*

Chivers' account of one rebel straggler, too, puts paid to ideological explanations; Sgt. Abdullah Insaiti, a 13-year veteran of Qaddafi's army, defected to the opposition with his entire unit in February.

His unit, he said, had been scattered under fire in the fighting in recent weeks. He said he believed that eight of his friends had died, but offered that the number was probably much higher than that. Some, he said, had been blown apart in the shelling they had been subjected to out in the desert, where the forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been pounding the rebels with all manner of fire. 

Asked if he knew where his unit was now, Mr. Insaiti gave a perplexed shrug.

I'd be curious to see how many of this man's unit return to combat versus blending back into the considerably less dangerous routines of civilian life, but the tale is an instructive one either way: surely an entire platoon doesn't defect over ideology.

But regime security forces are a bit of a special case, to be fair -- this still doesn't really speak to the question of the west's relative quiet. But Kalyvas does, at least in a general sense. To boil a 400-page book down into a few sentences, let's put it like this: The Logic of Violence in Civil War argues that combatants are most likely to employ selective violence in areas where they are approaching, but have not secured, hegemony. To put it even more simply: the warring parties are most likely to kill people not in those places that either they or the opposing faction firmly control, but rather in those places where killing people might have a meaningful impact on defections and the supply of information. Here it is in the original Social-Science-ese (p. 13):

The theory bridges the meso- and microlevels and predicts the likelihood of violence as a function of control. On the one hand, political actors do not need to use violence where they already enjoy high levels of control and cannot use selective violence where they have no control whatsoever; having no access to information, they may use indiscriminate violence, but it will be counterproductive. Instead, they want to use selective violence in contested areas, where they have incomplete control. On the other hand, individuals want to denounce only where it is safe for them to do so; this is the case where their victims have no access to the rival political actor and, therefore, lack the option of counterdenunciation. In turn, this option is related to control: the higher the level of control for one actor, the lower the presence of the rival one, and, hence, of the option of counterdenunciation. The prediction is that violence is most likely to occur where one actor is near hegemonic, not where this actor is in full control or is being contested. Violence, in other words, is most likely where the organizational demand for information meets its individual supply. 

Now, if you're still awake: what does this mean for Libya? Well, Kalyvas doesn't directly address the question of sabotage and guerilla activity, but rather selective violence against neutral or undecided populations. We can, however, draw logical conclusions from his work, and the most meaningful of these -- widely known to students of insurgency but perhaps counterintuitive -- is that collaboration follows control. Conceptually inseparable from the belief that ideology drives rebellion is the commonly-held view that regime strength corresponds geographically (and demographically) with regime popularity; in point of fact, civilians are most likely to peaceably accede to the wishes of the government in areas where the regime's military power and physical control are at their peak.

All of which is just a long way of expressing a pretty simple hypothesis: it's entirely possible that few Libyans are rising up outside of the east and a few small pockets of rebel control simply because government control of the rest of the country just seems incontestable or insurmountable. (Kalyvas, p. 93: "The absence of alternatives often produces collaboration irrespective of the level of popular satisfaction or lack thereof," which come to think of it could've pretty much been the whole post all by itself.) As I mentioned to my friend, there may be other valid explanations related to ethnic or tribal politics, geographic history, and so on, and these would certainly be more effectively articulated by an area expert. But I'm not that guy, so this is what I've got.

*Why this should be so is a complicated question that's largely beyond the scope of what we're talking about here, but Kalyvas alludes to a number of biases that impact scholarly work on the subject. Notably: "There is a clear epistemic bias, at least in the sociological and historical traditions, in favor of the assumption that all (or most) participants in conflicts are motivated by ideological concerns. Because 'urban' scholars tend to be primarily motivated by ideology themselves, the often assign unambiguous ideological motives to participants, even if this is not the case" (p. 44).