Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

LTC Fred Kennedy offers a stronger scientific basis to the study and understanding of war.  For the past several months, I’ve done little else than read about war, almost to the point that I’m becoming a pacifist.  Let’s stop reading today and reflect on his excellent Argument.

This summary gives up the nub:

To conclude, we have attempted to describe a three-step process for applying scientific principles to the study of war theory. The steps—collection of relevant data, development of falsifiable hypotheses, and rigorous testing to disconfirm the hypotheses—is a standard paradigm for understanding physical as well as sociological phenomena.

While I applaud something more systematic than Clausewitz or Sun-Tzu, I have to wave at those who would take this Argument and ride ahead of me galloping into the scientific future.  I wish you well and await your success, but I’m cautious.

The three steps in this Argument omit a key element of the final frontier for science:  the experimental method.  That means not only data collection (shout out), falisfiable hypotheses (hallelujah), and rigorous testing to disconfirm (amen), but also random selection of participants and conditions, plus systematic control of those conditions.  Randomization and control are the hardest steps in method and separate the interesting (observational research) from the compelling (experimental research).

The practical implications of experimentalism applied to war are crazy.  As a gods-like experimentalist war fighter, I could:  1) randomly select samples of military units from the population of all such units to randomly selected missions; 2) define a theoretical set of conditions that provoke war, then randomly select and initiate these provocations to randomly selected countries to see how they react; 3) randomly assign small units (company or smaller) to pursue randomly selected weapons and tactics against randomly selected enemies; and you get my drift.  It is madness to pursue the fundamental scientific method of experimentalism with war.  But, that method is the apogee of science.

We are thus forever trapped in the limitations of observational methods.  That is not a bad thing and in many cases is a better thing than an armchair theorist approach (although Clausewitz is an exception for me; he’s a sharp social scientist and I’m still working through the persuasion implications of “On War.”).  The observational Argument would certainly help resolve raging debates where two sources consider the same data point and offer opposed conclusions.

For example, during the past few days while I finished reading John Nagl’s “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,” I encountered an essay from Gian Gentile also looking at counterinsurgency.  Both writers looked at the Malayan insurgency, drew conclusions, and contradicted one another.  When this happens and one or the other writer isn’t struck by lightning, you have a field of study that is a bit less than scientific.  The observational Argument would help us here, although it might be hazardous for either Nagl or Gentile or both or possibly neither.

Yet, while observational research might help resolve cases like this, it would still leave us tentative, uncertain, and conflicted over many other larger issues.  Just consider other fields of study that are restricted to observational methods.

Economics, especially macro economics, observes markets, for example, and creates highly mathed up theories.  Yet, they still cannot predict huge market changes with any kind of certainty that generates widespread agreement before the event.  Consider, climate change.  Global warming may be manmade or may not, but climatology still has trouble predicting rain much better than my greatgrandfather did one hundred years ago.  Epidemiology led the way in asserting that hormone replacement therapy was safe and effective for menopausal women until large scale experimental research demonstrated that HRT actually killed some of these women.

Again, my point here is not that more refined research methods are bad, but that we need to maintain a balance between what we know and what we think we know.  Observational research is dangerous in that regard because it does generate knowledge that is wildly better than armchair theorizing, but also because it still generates beliefs that will be proven wrong in experience.  Add to this the inherent emotionality of war and war fighting and the need for certainty and solidarity that it generates.  You cannot go to war ambivalent.  You’re either all in, you’re all dead, or you’re dumb lucky.  Take that adamatine war spirit, mix in observational knowledge, and you will get your ass kicked badly someday.

Don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not criticizing the Argument for being wrong; I’m just cautioning about limitations to it.  Smart, well trained people (myself included) often get way ahead of themselves with the value of a New New Thing and optimistically foresee its bright future.

For now, let’s remember Patton’s slave riding with the hero as he triumphs through the crowd, whispering in his ear, “All glory is fleeting.”