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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
I notice that the probability of success in Iraq correlates well with George's approval rating.
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.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
As in all projects, when you let the scope blow out, then the costs blow out proportionately. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the initial scope was to topple Saddam Hussein. Scope then changed to include installation of democracy.
Nobody wrote up a scope change request, let alone getting it signed off...
Hari Seldon, is that you?
That 74% of war historians think that 26% of war historians have less than 10% of a clue clue about more than 90% of what they are talking about, when it comes to statistics. This assessment of course is subject to adjustment depending on perceived public opinion and verified by use of the retrospectoscope.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Actually, with her model hindsight is only 16/20.
Ah, the joys of revisionism...
Let me see, what happened in Vietnam (and eerily enough, Korea didn't go that differently either.)
1. Actually refused to allow elections and backed an inept dictator that was hated even by the south. That's a funny way to spread democracy, you know.
2. It lost its chunk of Vietnam to the communists.
3. It actually created such an anti-american sentiment in Laos and Cambodia that they went Communist too. You know, let's bomb some countries which aren't our enemies, just because the communists smuggle arms and supplies through their territory. In fact, let's bomb a country that's our _ally_ FFS. If you trace the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it went from a fringe group that noone really supported, to _massive_ support in the zones bombed by the Americans.
At any rate, voila, two more countries lost to communism as a result of inept American meddling in the area. Way to stop the spread of communism, buddy.
4. That and Korea scared China into flipping from a country just licking its wounds and wanting to be left alone, to becoming a lot more politically and militarily active. Just because some idiot generals wanted to push the border all the way to China, and at least one idiot actually advocated attacking China.
5. It takes some massive dose of revisionism to call it some spread of communism in the first place, when it was just a country (two, if you count Korea too), that just wanted to reunite. And that the _only_ reason it escalated to war is because the USA didn't allow elections.
Contrary to Domino theory bullshit and McCarthist propaganda, the USSR was _not_ your enemy at that point. The only reason why there was, say, a north and south Korea was because the Russians actually stopped their advance at the exact spot where the USA asked them to ask. The USSR was still licking its wounds after WW2 anyway, and it knew it's in no condition to start a world war.
You know what the USSR and China wanted at that point? They just wanted to have no border with NATO, if possible, because the USA had suddenly flipped from being their ally to treating them like mortal enemies. That's one reason why, for example, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite if it stays neutral and doesn't join either pact. The wars in Korea and Vietnam just convinced them to rearm faster and help start the Cold War sooner.
And if you want something which stopped both sides, that was the rise of long ranged nuclear weaponry and the mutually assured destruction.
Redefining it as, basically, "nah, see, they calmed down because of the war (USA lost) in Vietnam" is pretty laughable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've posted the text below to today's thread on vegetable oil, but I think it's relevant for this thread, so here goes a copy:
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this [the message I was replying to suggested USA simply stopped using foreign fuels] isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
[PS for this statistics thread: if you consider that the actual goal is to stop OPEC countries from accepting currencies other than the US dollar, then so far it's being successful. Maybe not 100% so, but nevertheless more than if there were no war. Add this consideration to the statistical analysis and I bet its result would be very different.]
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.