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Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War?
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)."
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.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
She took a bunch of historical information about wars, built a model and then when run on that historical information it was 80% accurate.
Amazing stuff.
Hari Seldon, is that you?
Hindsight is 20/20. I would be more interested in what the odds of Future wars would be. Like against Iran or North Korea, simultainiously.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
pure historical data. At least it looks that way to me. I find it hard to believe that one can predict accurately the outcome of a war. Think about the super technologies that the involved parties may keep in secret just to have the surprise factor in a war. That could definitely screw up the statistics :)
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.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
"If it can be thought up, there exists at least one person trying to make it happen for real" - Phil
The Domino theory was a load of hogwash.
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.
Sometimes others will decide that you are going to play it whether you want to or not.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The problem with this is that the model was "trained" on the same historical data on which it is eventually tested. This doesn't prove anything.
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).
Yeah, this stuff looks like it's been retconned to fit conventional wisdom.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Can someone explain me how she can go on about conflicts between states, when the majority of conflicts are characterized by the opposition not being a state? I also have a hard time accepting the definition of victory. She defines it as "A state can attain its political objectives in war by rendering its opponent physically incapable of continuing to fight" (or make them believe that such an outcome is unavoidable). Given these criteria, how can an asymmetric war be won? Is it possible to render every terrorist/freedom fighter "physically incapable of fighting"? It probably isn't, so how many attacks are "just" violence and how many attacks constitutes an opposition?
I know I'm going to get modded offtopic at best here, but wasn't the point of the invasion to stop Iraq from deploying its extensive stockpiles of WMDs? Wasn't it supposed to be a pre-emptive strike to get him before he got America and its allies? Toppling Hussein was supposed to be a byproduct of that, but it was not the primary goal.
/because/ of the invasion? Then, erm... SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
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.
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:
- To stabilise Iraq with a government that will be a more reliable client of the US than Saddam was?
- To destabilise Iraq and the Middle East to prevent power accumulations that threaten the US regional aircraft carrier, USS Israel?
- To maintain high oil prices by creating instability, enriching the Bush family and their clients?
- To keep up pressure on other states by showing that the US will intervene and create anarchy if it wishes (The old "remember what happened to XXX country?" "There is no XXX country." "Exactly, that's what you need to remember")
My point is that for any desired outcome other than the first, the US Government would be achieving its strategic objectives. The fact that these objectives might be objectionable to the majority of the US population is irrelevant; for most of history, wars have been fought by military elites without reference to the interests of the majority of the population. In exactly this way, Vietnam can actually be seen as a victory for the US if the strategic objective was to stop the expansion of Communism. Personally I don't believe in the domino theory, but if you do you can argue that the example of Vietnam stopped other regional states from going Communist.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.)
Pining for the fjords
'Nuff said
How many people have walked past stonehenge since it was abandoned without realizing it can be used as an astronomical clock? When the roman empire collapsed it took Europe 1000+yrs to relearn plumbing ( some parts of the UK are still catching up :).
It's not the equipment that's irreplaceable, it's the people.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Bill Watterson said it best:
http://www.webskinz.com/photoshop_intro/projects/
What if - and I know how obtuse it may sound, but bear with me - there was a government, say of a country named Utopia, that had a certain amount of direct and indirect control of the military-industrial complex, the media and a huge chunk of the country's financial assets. Now what if the head of that government (let's call him G.W. Lush) was brought up in the believe that energy is one of the most important commodities and oil was the best available and usable source of energy. Now imagine the guy behind him, Mick Deney, had strong ties (financial and otherwise) to a company Ballimurton that specializes in building oil pipelines and other infrastructure. Furthermore there is a country called Biraq that not only has huge amounts of easily obtainable oil and a very weak military, but is also ruled by dictator Habbam Bussein that nobody really likes and who uses every chance he gets to piss off Lush and his buddies.
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.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Because we DO know the outcome, maybe not specifically, but generally, and those generalities are built into our assumptions, whether we use the specific data or not. That is especially true for historical studies. For example, we know that feudalism died out, so we're inclined to negatively weight a feudalistic society against a monarchy. Historically that is valid. However, if a future feudal society were to emerge so much would have changed that the assumptions for negatively weighting feudalism would no longer be valid - and the model would have no predictive power. It all has to do with subtle interactions between "independent" variables, and the impossibility from separating things like fascism from the other variables like depression in the 30s and 40s.
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.
How do we prevent the contamination of our precious bodily fluids?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
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
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?