Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War? 572
StatisticallyDeadGuy writes "A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full elaboration of the forecasting methodology is laid out in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to the abstract). Some details can be gleaned from her 2006 draft (PDF)."
100% likely outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that lots of people are going to suffer and die, and lots of money will be spent, usually with detrimental results to all parties involved.
Oh yeah, and the companies that make bombs and guns will get richer.
If i'm reading this correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing stuff.
Psychohistory (Score:5, Insightful)
Future Wars (Score:3, Insightful)
This is (Score:2, Insightful)
26% chance of WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I know nobody has formally specified the 'win' outcome for the war -- so I'm a bit doubtful that anyone has worked out an EXACT 26% (not 25%! That number would sound like a guess! But 26% sounds like SCIENCE!) chance of the US side achieving it.
If the 26% really was worked out with a reasonable methodology, then the interesting part isn't the number so much as whatever definition they came up with of 'victory'.
That said, giving ridiculously exact answers to impossibly vague questions is fun and harmless. 92.8% of the time.
Re:If i'm reading this correctly (Score:4, Insightful)
People are always trying to build models based on historical data, especially for things like the stock market. But, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results" - and one big reason is that all it takes is for one significant new factor to come into play that didn't exist in any of the historical data and the model becomes useless.
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that lots of people are going to suffer and die, and lots of money will be spent, usually with detrimental results to all parties involved.
Yep. Those original 13 colonies are still licking their wounds.
Re:If i'm reading this correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Sullivan analyzed all 122 post World War II wars and military interventions in which the United States, the Soviet Union, Russia, China, Britain or France fought a weaker adversary. She examined factors such as the type of objective (on a continuum from brute force to coercive), whether the target was a formal state, guerilla or terrorist group, whether the target had an ally and whether the more powerful nation had an ally.
>> She tested her model and found that it was accurate in 80 percent of conflicts. It predicted a seven percent chance of success for the Soviets in the 1979 to 1988 war in Afghanistan and a 93 percent chance of success for the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War.
Just from reading the abstract what concerns me is hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is when you build a model, based on some data. Then to test the validity of the model you test the data. You can't do that because the model is based on data that you are trying to test.
To properly test a model you need to use data that is completely out of the blue. For example I would love to have seen her test the model against the American civil war.
Re:If i'm reading this correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If i'm reading this correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Pre-vietman we were generally exposed to "traditional" wars. Part of the disaster there was that I'm not sure we really gauaged the enemy correctly going in.
Iraq has a different insurgency again, and we were almost certainly expecting to have to defeat saddams army (which was relatively easy), but we overlooked the "terrorist" contingent.
Winners of war? (Score:1, Insightful)
Winning a war in modern times means that the war has ended - and that's something that nowdays never happens because there will always be "resistance (one man may call it "freedom-fighters", another calls it "terrorist").
There are numerous historical examples of this (Ireland, ETA, Tibet, Afghanistan, vietnam), and you'd think someone would get the message.
The winners of war are the ones profiting on war, and by that I mean convert it into cash (territory/resources can be retaken).
It's the same entity with one hand destroying infrastructure/society in a warzone, and the other getting the contracts for rebuilding.
I'd like to see a return to common sense, diplomacy, and compromize when dealing with conflicts.
Re:The study and interpretation of history (Score:1, Insightful)
Besides, the US failed to spread democracy to Vietnam by simply refusing Uncle Ho when he asked them for support before he turned to the communists. The US involvement in Vietnam has been just a big mountain of failure. Anyone trying to suggest that it has been successful in any way is fooling themselves. Well, it was successful in providing a lot of opportunity to develop from mistakes, and a lot of new military hardware got live-tested.
anyway: But what my model could say was that if the population was not supportive of whatever new regime we put in power
means that her model is useless. The US administration was swearing black and blue before the invasion that the Iraqis would be dancing in the streets and welcoming them with open arms. Even the best models can't survive bad data.
Re:strange game (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
TWW
This mistake has been made before. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an example, a defence contractor once built a system that would recognize wether or not a tank was in a picture. First the system was trained on half the "with tanks" and half the "without tanks" pictures. Next the system got a good percentage correct on the second half of the pictures. It turns out the "with tanks" pictures had been taken on a sunny day, and those without on a cloudy day. So the system was actually telling "sunny" or "cloudy".
In this case, it could very well be that her system predicts the outcome of the war, based on the weather in tokyo 6 weeks before the start of the war. This example was chosen so that you, not an expert in this field, immediately can dismiss this as a nonsense predictor. But as the model gets more complicated, and you feed it lots of parameters that might seem relevant, even the experts will no longer be able to see the value of such complicated predictions. At some point you just have to "trust the computer".
Aerodynamics: Yes. We understand the underlying principles, we've verfied the predictions made by the models in real life, and found that it matches very good.
In this case: No. Before I trust such a model, it would need to be verified (as is, no modifications allowed!) against say at least 20 wars that haven't started yet. If it preditcs the outcome of those correctly, the model has merit.
I'm not going to wait around (I hope).
Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:2, Insightful)
So I am stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Statistics can never predict the outcome, they can only give you a probability of an outcome. That is, of course, unless the probability is 0 or 100%.
Re:Project Management (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, statistical prediction is unlikely to suceed if every couple of months the goal of your war changes, but its next to impossible if even the initial point of the war gets retconned. How far can this go?
We're going into Iraq to stop Saddam and his WMDs.
No WMDs found? Oh, then we came to Iraq to stop Saddam and free the Iraqi people.
Saddam gone and there's still fighting? Then we came to Iraq to fight the terrorists there so we dont have to fight them here.
Terrorism worldwide increasing despite, or possibly
How far can you push this? No statistical model, no battle plan can succeed if the people in charge can't even make up their mind what they are fighting for.
Statistics predict nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I find this very unconvincing. And why? Because it is actually very hard to measure the outcome of a conflict, especially when the actual strategic objective of the conflict may be a state secret on the side of the aggressor. Put simply, we do not really know, in the case of Iraq, what the real objective of the US Government is. Is it:
In the past, wars usually ended when one side ran out of resources, whether provisioning, human, strategic or geographical. The constraint on warmongers in democratic societies is that society can ultimately strangle the resources of its internal warmongers without, necessarily, killing anybody. It is also possible for democratic societies to change the playing field so that strategic objectives change or become irrelevant. (e.g. by doing so much business with other countries that it becomes impossible to pursue strategic objectives without doing more harm to yourself - which you could say is happening with the US and China.)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Winning a war is an oxymoron (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:0% (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the equipment that's irreplaceable, it's the people.
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:2, Insightful)
I said usually, not always. Are you suggesting there wasn't a better outcome that could have been negotiated without having a war? There's no way to tell if the world would have come out better or worse had the colonies not declared independence. The world would probably be completely unrecognizable and it's absurd to try to consider the possibilities of what would have happened had the American Revolution not taken place.
Of course the world might have turned out "better" (whatever that means), if Western Civilization simply exterminated Communism in a nuclear conflagration shortly after WWII ended. Of course the world in 2050 might be "better" (at leasr for us) if we simply kill all the Muslims and take over their oil.
I'm advocating the construction of a future in which we don't slaughter each other anymore. We are human beings, not lions or baboons. We're able to exchange knowledge to better ourselves and thereby avoid conflict through negotiation and compromise.
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think we're just doing it wrong.
horse puckey (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, success if you ignore the fact that the country is falling apart, has become a haven and catalyst for terrorism, has worse access to health care/clean water/safe streets/medicine/electricity than when Saddam was in power, and their current government also uses torture, detention without trial, death squads, etc. But even if what we're doing is making things worse, more of the same will no doubt constitute improvement.
Okay, sorry for the diatribe. I'm sure you can use stats to analyze who will win a particular armed conflict--the fact that the USA represents half the global arms expenditures might be relevant. But Iraq isn't a war, but an occupation, which is of a completely different nature. If you just tasked the US military with killing Iraqis all day long, they could do that without any impediment. But asking them to make Iraq into a USA-loving western-style freedom-loving democratic republic, by the brilliant combination of the force of arms and handing out candy to kids, is a bit daft.
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:3, Insightful)
But it is a good example of the allies variable. The American Revolutionary War probably would have been a regrettable historical episode causing many deaths and gaining nothing if France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Misore wouldn't have sided with the US against the British.
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the guns and bombs I have a problem with. It's the massive amount of profit made by manufacturing them. It gives a certain, very powerful segment a society an incentive to choose war over diplomacy.
Calvin and Hobbes (Re:strange game) (Score:1, Insightful)
Bill Watterson said it best:
http://www.webskinz.com/photoshop_intro/projects/
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
HAAAhahahaha! What a hoot! I always like to start the day with a good laugh, and this one's a belly shaker. Can I have some of the air your breathing on your planet? 'Cause it sure isn't Earth.
For those of us who need to live in THIS reality, here's an idea: War is a result of *being* human, not a relic from our bestial past. Animals don't go to war. They fight, individually and as a family or pack, but that's it. War, with tactics, strategy, and politics, is uniquely human construct. War will ALWAYS be with us, at least as long as we remain "human". Perhaps Homo Sapiens will evolve into Homo Pacificus (pardon my Latin, it's been over 20 years), but we won't act, or probably even look, like we do now.
There is a quote that goes something like "'Peace' is a fictional condition, posited from the fact that there have been periods of relative inactivity between wars." An individual or tribe may not be fighting, and a nation or state may not be in battle, but *humans* will always have war.
(BTW, $5. for whoever can tell me where that quote is from. Really - Paypal or cash in an envelope. I've been searching for the source and exact text for years.)
Re:Generally the reasons for war (Score:4, Insightful)
And now, yes I know how ridiculous this scenario may seem to some, imagine a terrorist attack on Mr. Lush's country, which could, with the right amount of propaganda (albeit blatantly dishonest), be blamed on Habbam in order to justify a retaliation in form of an invasion that would make Lush (securing of oil-rich country and building military bases in a region where a lot more oil lies around for the taking) and Deney (no-bid contracts for Ballimurton, revenues are soaring) and their buddies (private contractors that do a lot of things the military does, get paid by the government far more than the 'official soldiers' get and here's the kicker: have no accountability whatsoever, nor are casualties reported to authorities, which always make for bad press) very happy. - If it went the way they would want it to go, that is..
In this, I admit, a bit of a far-fetched scenario, "the suffering and death that will likely happen if you don't go to war would not exceed the certain suffering and death of the war itself", because the casus belli here was not national security, not a direct thread of any sort against Lush's country's population, but simply an abuse of the power invested in that government in order to make themselves and their buddies richer and more powerful. - In this unlikely scenario your conjecture does not hold true.
Re:Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Israel is a democracy like Apartheid South Afri (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a question for you to ponder; could Israeli Arabs vote themselves equal rights? Something as simple and basic as equal rights is out of the question for Israel's majority.
You forget the main issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:100% likely outcome (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like saying eating cheeseburgers is uniquely human--true, because only humans are intelligent enough to make cheeseburgers, but completely evasive as the primary issue. What is war, other than humans fighting each other as packs? The fact that we're capable of applying our intelligence to the act doesn't mean the act itself is fundamentally different. Human beings make sex very complicated, but you're not going to go around saying that sex is a uniquely human construct.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Iraq's political leaders have failed to reach agreement on nearly every law that the United States has demanded as a benchmark.
Yes, insurgents. And inter-tribal disputes. And intra-tribal disputes. And general lawlessness.
If foreign troops leave the country, the insurgency loses its relevance. Then you simply deal with the other three problems, and you get your booming skyline. What a wonderful world it would be. They can all hold hands and sing the Coke song.
Quite a generalization you're making there.
I would love to see a peaceful, America-loving Iraq, but that train left the station about 4 years ago and nobody was on it.
Re-establishing law and order after it completely breaks down is a whole different thing than maintaining order without letting it completely break down.
No offense, but you missed the point (Score:3, Insightful)
The point was that US's war in Vietnam was a failure, not some glorious act that stopped communism. It was something self-produced and then lost abjectly. It actually pushed two _additional_ countries to communism: Laos and Cambodia.
How the heck can _that_ count as having won the fight and stopped communism? That's what I'm primarily ranting about. Because that's the kind of boast I was answering to. Basically, "yeah, see, if you look at the big picture, we actually won the war, 'cause we stopped the communist expansion." Not an exact quote, but that was the gist of it.
That said, if you want to get bogged in further details:
You mean just like the USA did in Vietnam and Korea? Or the way the USA couped the neutral Cambodia just because they needed a yes-man at the helm who'd allow the Americans to bomb his country? (Surrealistic as that may sound, that's just what happened there.)
Or do you ever wonder why Iran hates the USA and the west now? Because the CIA couped their democratically elected government and re-installed the brutal autocratic shah. You know, better have a dictator as your puppet than a democratic government with delusions of self-determination rights. (Unfortunately, all that hatred against the shah and the westerners who installed him, then got harnessed by the islamists in a bloody insurrection.)
Or a few other places? Believe it or not, the USA was _very_ active in installing and supporting banana-republic dictators left and right. The suicide keyword was "left". Just say that your views are left-side, and you'd get couped by the CIA in no time. And then they'd teach your successor how to torture dissidents. Literally.
Heh. That's champions of democracy and human rights at work for ya. _Obviously_, that's so morally superior compared to the Soviets
hindsight is always 20/20 (Score:3, Insightful)
So what does she say out odds are of winning the 'war on terrorism'?
Hmm, first we had 76% chance of winning the war in Iraq, and now it is 26%?
I'm not trying to be a troll, but this post sounds more like reviewing historical data and coming to obvious conclusions about what is already known. I've always heard that statistics can be used to say anything.
What are the odds of my post being modded up to a 5? What are the odds of my post being modded down to a -1?
Re:No offense, but you missed the point (Score:3, Insightful)
It is entirely possible for the US to have done bad things and still have been superior to the USSR. I would in fact argue that's actually the case. The US did terrible things that were both mistaken (i.e., counterproductive) and wrong (i.e., unethical). There's a lot of blood on our hands and it will take decades to get clean, if it's even possible. All of that said, you have to be out of your mind to argue seriously that the USSR and the USA were moral equivalents. And as someone else pointed out, perhaps the best proof is the extreme effort required by the Soviets to keep their citizens in. The flow of people was overwhelmingly East to West.