Identifying the enemy's center of gravity is not hard. Each
situation and possible enemy course of action is analyzed. It is
important to think as the enemy commander thinks: what is he
relying on for success? Once identified, this center of gravity is
broken down into its parts or high value targets. With this
information, the commander and S3 can develop a plan that targets
the enemy's critical structure. If the S2 fails to or incorrectly
identifies the enemy's center of gravity, it dilutes the friendly
effort.
Captain Lisa Bennett and Captain Bruce Niedrauer
Fort Huachuca, Arizona
To the Editor:
Throughout history, formulaic thinking has been the
high road to military disaster. The French outnumbered the British
by odds of over 3:1 at Agincourt, but numerical advantage turned
out not to be the deciding factor, and the prevailing idea that
armored cavalry would always defeat infantry proved wrong.1 In
1806, the army of Prussia had one of the most impressive
reputations in Europe, but Prussia's mastery of 18th- century
"chessboard warfare" could not save it from Napolean's onslaught.2 The Wehrmacht
managed to smash through France's defenses in 1940, not because Germany possessed any
superiority in either numbers or quality of men and machines, but because the French had
anchored their strategy upon a rigid and misguided concept of warfare3 (the Maginot
mentality). A possibly apocryphal story tells that when President Nixon took office in 1969,
members of the new
administration applied a computer model to determine how long it
would take to win the Vietnam war and, after entering data
concerning body counts, kill ratios, gross national products and
the like, received the answer: "You won the war in 1964."4
This fallacy of rigid and abstract thought is not dead. In our
opinion, such false logic seems especially flagrant among the
political scientists who attempt to analyze strategic affairs using
what they call "formal modeling" or "quantitative methodologies."
In the April-June 1995 issue of the Military Intelligence
Professional Bulletin, Captain David Resch introduces readers to
those techniques. However, we urge military intelligence
professionals to approach academic theory with caution.
The Nature of the Theory
One should not confuse formal modeling with less pretentious
statistical methods, such as operations research. Those who
practice quantitative methodology would reduce all of war, indeed
all of human affairs, to mathematical equations. Quantitative
theorists aspire to formulate what they define as "scientific" laws
of human behavior, with the ultimate goal of answering political
questions in the same definitive way that natural scientists
discuss the activity of subatomic particles. This quest has taken
many forms, but all of its variants use the same underlying
technique. Researchers make a series of assumptions about the
nature of strategy and politics, so that they may then express a
real-world situation in terms of numeric variables. Then, such
researchers enter these variables into the formula they have
created and solve the equation in order to predict the outcome of
strategic events.
Mountains Without Molehills
Although quantitative modeling claims to be "objective" and
"scientific," all of its variants rest upon the assumptions of the
modelers. Furthermore, once one accepts a model, one gives up much
of one's ability to test these assumptions against reality. In
order to turn human events into numbers, researchers must translate
real-world phenomena into arbitrary symbols. Therefore, these
models inevitably reflect the intellectual prejudices of their
inventors. If, for instance, the French general staff had made a
model to predict the events of a German invasion in 1940, we can
safely assume that the resulting model would have produced results
reflecting the assumption that the defensive would always be the
strongest form of warfare.
The assumptions formal modelers make about human psychology seem
especially question- able. Most current theories in quantitative
political science rely on the idea that people behave as what
economists call "rational actors." According to the "rational actor
hypothesis," people make decisions by calculating the relative
costs and benefits of different options available to them and then
take the path which maximizes their own self-interest. Differences
in culture, political system, or individual character affect
military or political behavior only to the extent that they reflect
perceived self-interest. Moreover, political scientists tend to
interpret rational-actor theory in a rigid fashion, which denies
the existence of any altruistic motivations such as honor, duty, or
community spirit.
Furthermore, in the real world, the costs and benefits of each
"option" are often blurred. If commanders can improve their ability
to carry out operations, they can completely rearrange the
"cost-versus-benefit" analysis. Even if we accept the dubious
premise that all human options come down to economic calculation,
the real difficulty in military operations (or politics) lies in
the details of carrying out those options. This, perhaps, is the
meaning behind Clausewitz's remark that although everything in war
is simple, the simplest things are difficult.
Captain Resch sums up the opposition to quantitative analysis by
citing Mr. James Finley's intentionally narrow criticism of the
method. With all due respect to Mr. Finley's perfectly reasonable
observations, we prefer to invoke others in our critique. The
nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie, for instance, notes that while
intangible issues of morale, political ideology, and national will
may decide wars, these ideas do not fit nicely into models.
Therefore, those who find models appealing too often end up
shunting these factors aside. As Brodie wrote about his experiences
at RAND-
Within RAND itself there was a quiet but strongly-felt
differential between those who knew how to handle graphs and
mathematical symbols...and those who merely knew how to probe
political issues. Elegance of method is indeed marvelously
seductive, even when it is irrelevant or inappropriate to the major
problems.5
Professor Hedley Bull wrote what has become the classic modern
criticism of such methods. Dr. Bull notes that-
I know of no odel that has assisted our understanding of
international relations that could not just as well have been
expressed as an empirical generalization. This, however, is not the
reason why we should abstain from them. The freedom of the
model-builder from the discipline of looking at the world is what
makes him dangerous; he slips easily into a dogmatism that
empirical generalization does not allow, attributing to the model
a connection with reality it does not have....He has provided an
intellectual exercise and no more.6
Crystal Balls
Those who employ the quantitative approach to political science
readily admit that their explanations of events are
simplistic to the point of being ludicrous, but they ask us to
judge their work not by the realism of their models, but by the
accuracy of their predictions.7 Certainly all of us could use a
crystal ball. However, when quantitative theorists claim to predict
the future, intelligence professionals have every reason to be
skeptical.
Quantitative forecasts often appear successful because, after a
certain point, the outcome of any given event does indeed become
predictable. As Sun Tzu put it, "To hear the thunderclap is no
indication of acute hearing."8 However, if one wishes to control one's own destiny,
one must learn to act well before this point has arrived. One must learn not merely to make
decisions, or even to
predict the decisions of others, but to set the stage on which all
decisions will be made.
Captain Resch discusses the near failure of theorists to predict
the end of the Cold War. However, we observe that George Kennan's
"X Article," published in 1947, clearly foresaw the possibility
that a power with the economic weakness, ideological expectations,
and over-extended military commitments of the Soviet Union might
collapse internally. Furthermore, Kennan did not merely predict how
the Cold War would end, he proposed a philosophy of foreign policy
designed to ensure that it would end benignly. Kennan's insight
came not from the use of a rigid methodology, but from the wisdom
gained through an understanding of history.
In order to defend the relevance of their predictive approach, most
quantitative theorists refuse to admit that it is possible for us
to take this kind of active role in shaping history. Captain Resch
states that "respected historians" agree that "major historical
events" would have varied little with different actors.9 Although
it is difficult to respond to such vague claims by unspecified
authors, we find the first chapters of Liddell Hart's Defense of
the West relevant. Hart discusses the French collapse in 1940, the
German defeat after Stalingrad, and the success of the Normandy
invasion, noting that every time, there was a point when the
leaders of the losing side could have turned defeat into victory
simply by following a different strategic policy. If Hart is
correct, these leaders could have changed the outcome of World War
II.
Captain Resch also asserts that "switching Generals Robert E. Lee
and 'Stonewall' Jackson with Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh
Sherman would not have caused a different end state for the Civil
War."10 Perhaps not. However, it might be more pertinent to ask what would have
happened if one had switched Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis. With his simplistic historical analysis, Captain
Resch may inadvertently point to the weakness of his own predictive
technique. Formal modeling can affirm the fact that broad trends
will lead to their inevitable results, but it cannot provide the
depth of explanation necessary to determine how those trends began,
or how to change them.
Captain Resch does the opponents of quantitative analysis a
disservice by labeling them as that "large segment of the
community" which "detests science, statistics, and theory."11 We
opponents of the quantitative method value objective techniques as much as those supposedly
"scientific" analysts who practice formal modeling. In fact, we insist that our theories conform to
the facts of the material world in a way that quantitative models cannot. We feel that there is an
older science of war, which is as rigorous and objective as any other discipline. This is the
logical
science of determining what one's nation and its potential enemies
can do we do not wish to lose it to academic fashion.
Captain Resch began and concluded with a worthwhile point. Military
professionals may gain useful insights from the writings of
academic scholars. Academia has a wealth of invaluable sources to
offer our community, but we must remember that within this body of
knowledge there also lies writing that is worse than useless.
Endnotes:
1. The New International Encyclopedia, 1911, 201.
2. For a fine treatment of this episode, see Roger Parkinson's Clausewitz published in
1971.
3. Consult pages 3 through 13 of B. H. Liddell Hart's Defense of the West, 1950.
4. Cited on page 11 of Colonel Harry G.
Summers' On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, 1981.
5. Colin Gray's Strategic Studies, 1982, 129, 130.
6. Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau, editors,
Contending Approaches to International Politics, 1969, 31.
7. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957, 21.
8. Sun Tzu (translated by Yuan Shibing), Sun Tzu's
Art of War, 1987, 101.
9. Captain David Resch, "Predictive Analysis,"
Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June 1995, 27.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid, op. cit., 26.
First Lieutenant Kevin Falk, USAR, and Thomas M. Kane
Claremont, California.
