For MEB, forever and ever

There is a very intersting book recently out on war from an economists point of view by Juergen Brauer and Herman van Tuyll called Guns, Battles, and Bombs, How Economics Explains War, that is the subject of this contextual book review.

In essence, they give the reader a very well done introductory chapter on modern economics, including information economics, and then proceed to apply this mentality to war in history over the last thousand years.

For those interested in military matters, even if you are well read in this area, you will learn something new and interesting, just from the span of the book in a temporal sense.

More likely, unless you are an economist, you will certainly find Guns, Battles, and Bombs eye opening in the sense that most of military history is written from a very different conceptual point of view.

Military historians have been unjustly marginalized by the left wingers who dominate the "Higher Learning," maybe because most academics in the social sciences, corporate bees in office complexes, wonder in their heart if they are cowards who couldn't hack it on the battlefield.

And maybe that is dangerous male bs that doesn't survive contact with a child falling and crying and really gettin hurt to the hardest male.

On the other hand, maybe the acedemics think correctly that if we do not eliminate certain ideas, like Realism in International Relations, that we will one day use nuclear weapons because of the law of large numbers applied to repeated trials with non-measure zero probability: if something can happen, eventually, it will, so cut that crazy b.s. out.

Of course too , if you believe in God and know the Goedel theorem, then you might say that this talk of rationality and war is dangerous nonense, because given any collection of premises, or war plans at say STRATCOM, the PLA second artillery, the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces etc..., some surprise will come up, that all plans die on contact with the enemy, best laid plans o mice and men.

The Scots called this Murphy's Law: if it can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, like the Schliefen Plan and Plan 17, or, someday the SIOP or OPPLAN now?

But maybe it just is what it is, like Spengler said, Destiny, or is that real cowardice?

I think it is.

In response to their marginalization in the "Higher Learning," military historians operate either as popular writers, who are then really, really hated in the "Higher Learning" because people want to read something interesting rather than papers like say,  Napoleon as a Post-Modern bestiast-bisexual-gay-hetero-transgendered-I-am-making-this-up-for-grant-money, or, military historians function as grim warriors in defense of the correct interpretation of, say Stonewall in the Valley (mandatory as Mark Williams would say, if somewhat forced march read btw.)

As someone who is trained as an economist in part, but who also has studied war as a political scientist from the time I found out the Russians could kill lots of us, I would certainly use Castles, Battles, and Bombs in most of my classes, just to give economics and war examples that some students might find something to relate to more easily.

But then, maybe if we just burned Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and Musashi, we could just enjoy life, or, perhaps it is an unfortunate fact that absent a natural selection event that kills off the control freaks, it is what it is.

Having said that, the book Guns, Battles, and Bombs also demonstrates some of the dangers of crossing specializations, although not too badly, and which I will discuss in a minute.

I also wish they had focused on nuclear weapons more, although most people wouldn't, even though the chapter on the French nuclear arsenal is the best writing I have seen on that topic, economists or not, and which, after a brief overview, will constitute the main portion of this examination, in terms of nuclear doctrine and the evolution of the international system.

As to some of what is covered in the book, the chapter on castles, as in the title, is absolutely fascinating for anyone who has a knight errant in them, and a very good example of the principle of substitution in economics as applied to military affairs. tlaenzf :) in a different timeline

Castles, like modern missile shields, are expensive to construct, and given the economic principle of scarce resources conflicting with infinite desires, which implies that resources used in castle construction are not available for paying say, knights in shining armor.

What castles do take advantage of is the historic supremacy of the defense, up until the time of the Napoleonic Wars, which is the reason Mr. Clausewitz is in the title.

Long story short, twenty guys in a castle can hold off a lot of knights, and constitue a forward deployment as well, potentially, kind of like the space station under certain circumstances with weapons modules attached on a time urgent basis?

Similarly, the discussion about the condottieri in Dr. Braur and Van Tuyll's work is absolutely magnificent in terms of the economics literature on incomplete contracts and aysmmetric information.

As to the latter economic concept, basically, when two parties make a deal, like Milan and mercenaries in the 1400's, several problems typically arrive.

Most importantly, how do you know who you are dealing with, an honest mercenary, or someone who will change sides in the middle of a battle and then sack your town, kill alll the men of military age, rape all the women, and then sell them and their children into slavery?

The answer, historically speaking, is to try to write contracts that only good mercenaries would be willing to sign.

But would not a purely paid, or mercenary or euphemistically voluntary force not inevitably turn on you someday, in some sense, because the civilians are too divorced from military reality then, even if the Army really didn't really mean to, like they didn't see what they were really doing, until it was too late?

It would seem in fact that over long periods of time, the men with swords take often over, like Alexander in Greece, or especially Sulla and Caesar in Rome, or you get a Confucianist industrial complex or whatever religious rationalization for tyranny you want.

Staying with that former theme momentarily, their discussion at the end of the book about why the state should or should not outsource military services in terms of club versus public goods is very intriguing, if I think, lacking a little of the soul of war, or the negative possibiblities for a world militarist empire trying to become a monopolist in weapons of mass destruction, to which I return at the end.

Similarly though, the authors analyis of the U.S. of spies in the Civil War by Grant, again an asymetric information problem, how do you trust a spy, i.e. counter-intelligence, is great stuff, to a point.

To anyone trained or a student of intelligence, this part may seem a little like smashing a butterfly with the W-80 warheads taken from Minot Air Force in a game of Six Card AGM-129 monte, a very good and very bad idea at the same time, but, on the other hand, if it gets anyone with a quantitative bent to think about war, then, that is worth it by itself, if they have heart too, closer to the heart.

Before moving on to the last part, about the things that go boom, I also very much enjoyed their criticism of Allied bombing strategy during WWII in terms of the economic principle of diminishing returns in the sense of, once you have dropped 10,000 tons of firebombs on Hamburg, well, so many people have suffocated in the air raid shelters from the ensuing firestorm that you gottta ask, isn't that enough?

If that sounded sarcastic, it was, because although I will grant that Castles, Battles and Bombs is a tale of economic rationality in war, there is not much questioning about the ends to which war is put, of why we think we have the right to take life when not even women truly give life as does God in whatever sense you like that term, which is the Clausewitz part we are going to momentarily start, and more importantly, there is not much if any morality in this tale.

I do not mean to criticize the authors.

Now, economists offer the standard scientific approach that

 "We get paid to say how it is, not criticize, and besides, Marx said the point was to change things, and look how that turned out," which could be true enough."

It could also be an emotional, i.e. non-rational, defense for say, avoiding having a nervous breakdown when one part of you says launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike for national survival, and the other sees a schoolbus and says "God forgive me. Do we really have to do this?

Can we not Imagine?

Will We Ever Learn that God sends artists to see the Beauty of His Creation?

Is that not the point of Pushkin in Gold and Sword, and their self-destructive mentalities?

Maybe the mentality of economics, and more generally the mentality of Clausewitz in the sense of war as a continuation of policy by other means is the problem, the problem of Gold and Sword, instead of the Art you protected Volodya?

Politics by Other means.

Is that not a euphemism we use, like nuclear collateral damage in time urgent hard target kill strikes by Trident D-5 II W-88 warheads on Russian and Chinese silos, in order to emotionally distance ourselves from something we know is wrong at some level, but don't know how to stop?

Or is it just what it is, and God sorts out the aftermath?

Or is that not what the prison guards at Treblinka said, instead of "No."

Perhaps that was God's plan in that horror, to teach all of humanity that the bravest thing to do is sometimes to be Socrtates and Gallileo, and say, "I will not do or say that."

In other words as to the limitation of the mentality of the book, if you want to apply the "scientific method" to problems of war, in the end, do you not end up like Hoff and Lieber in the End of MAD, in which they generate a scenario in which the United States, by using AGM-129's of B-52's from Barksdale and Minot, and the B-2's from Whitman, altering the B-1's back to nuclear capable, and flushing the Ohio class quietly, and especially re-MIRVing the Minuteman III's on a time urgent basis, blah, blah, blah, with a ninety five per cent confidence interval, takes out Russia, and actually under my scenario using TAC Air and Spec Ops and the Navy loading cruise missiles from the Central Arsenal, takes out China, Britain, France, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, and eliminates enemy weapons of mass destruction while losing five American targets, because they were going to hit us first, so fuck them, and now we are a monopolist?

But is that not a very good very bad idea?

Would not Leonidas dismiss nuclear weapons as arrows, as cowardly?

The last scenario would be a euphemism for American supremacy forever, which was the problem in the first place, and would that not make the person who made that happen Genghis Khan or Caesar or Hitler, because there would be by my estimate 100 million enemy casualties under the good case, or, is it, just what it is, and God sorts out the living and the dead anyway, as usual?

Is not that mentality a cheap rationalization for following orders, like at Treblinka, in the end?

When you were young, and your heart was an open book...

Live and let live.

Moving back to the book and the most important chapter, on the French nuclear arsenal, in a narrow sense, the authors demonstrate the economics principle of substitution, namely, that the French substituted expensive nuclear weapons for expensive conventional forces in order to maintain their Great Power status, and the gloire of Marshall Ney so bravely earned with the Rear Guard.

We all do it now, substitute the flesh and bone of citizenry for nuclear capital.

This is why the Russian doctrine evolved the way it did after Kosovo, which was a very bad American mistake btw, to rely on nuclear weapons to prevail in regional wars, like with with NATO over Kaliningrad probably, which by definition would not really be a regional war at all, but a war for supremacy in the internationl system, a Great Power War, which would be a very bad Russian mistake, like 1914.

Now in their chapter on the French nuclear arsennal, there is a curious lack of discussion of nuclear doctrine, almost as if it is passe.

Nuclear doctrine should never be passe, because then the military industrial complexes of the world are like the mobilization plans of 1914, except a lot, lot worse.

I was a little miffed they didn't discuss the Master of Disaster Hermann Kahn, or Dr. Strangelove, for instance; see the real Art of War there btw?

Why was I miffed?

Well, now we come to Clausewitz and On War, and his theory of war, in which Book One Part One is the summation of his thought.

In this part, Clausewitz notes a paradox, namely, that although war is the continuation of politics by violent means, it has its own, in effect, game theoretic logic that divorces war from politics at the same time in its "Pure Form."

Clausewitz logic could be made into a differential equation,blah, blah, blah, although I personally think that is smashing butterflies with tactical nuclear weapons, and probably concealing a lack of verbal facility at times as well, in the sense that one side's sucess in an individual act in war would mean more success to that party and therefore to  the eventual extermination of the other party, unless the latter party continually upped the ante as well, which therefore drives war to its logical extreme, which no longer has anything to do with the political object at all, none whatsoever, and is therefore totally irrational, and has in fact become a homicidal golem, or a Somme a Verdun, a pointless, pointless if heroic disaster.

There are better ways now to find heroes than war: Imagine.

Now Clausewitz qualifies the Pure Form by noting that various forces would restrain war escalation in practice, and that Pure War would only arise in the following case;

 a)War is an isolated act in a historic sense

b)It has a temporally brief, like a day, total solution

c) We know what the political world looks like.

Now in one sense, thes conditions are not likely to really occur, which would be good news, if, as economics posits like the authors, that people are basically rational, and again, I really enjoyed Castles, Bombs and Battles, so not to nit-pick like the smart ass I could be at UCI; sorry about that.

I am not sure a is actually necessary however to the Clausewitz argument, and worse, given European history of 1812 and 1914 one might draw bad lessons, but in any event, even without a, if people are stressed enough and in enough fear to believe, probably falsely, that they actually understand condition b and c, which is the danger I see under the Great Powers current use of nuclear weapons beyond minimal deterrence, then you have a problem Houston, which leads to the last application of economics to war that is actually not in the book but is mine, but which was stimulated by it.

As to the problem with b and c, suppose that people are under a lot of stress; human nature being what it is, they want control back, and so make a correlated error as to the belief that they really know, like Hoff and Lieber, what a 95 per cent nuclear confidence interval is on a nuclear war, which is probabaly about as accurate as a confidence interval on a CMO right now.

The best plans die on contact with the enemy; Murphy was an optimist.

The best laid plans die on contact with the enemy is an old soldiers saying, and yet the emphasis on "rationality" that so pervades things right now might make people think they could calculate the political situation afterwards, as in c, which joined to a false belief in really knowing what has only been simulated in b would generate possibly a correlated error, because no one knows what a MAO would look like in terms of public order, for example.

That leads to the last part of this essay, the question of proliferation.

It sounds bad, but is it?

To economists, originally, the "nuclear market" was a monopoly; Americans liked it that way, but of course, the Russians did not, so, thanks to good revelation of asymmetric information, i.e. spying, we got a duopoly in the nuclear market, i.e. two competitors in the nuclear market.

Of course, the British, French, and Chinese came hopping on down nuclear Malthusian Bunny lane, and we have the begininngs of an nuclear Oligopoly, like the car market.

The interesting question is, which way next in terms of the market structure for nuclear weapons,or, put another way, the structure of the international political order in terms of American dominance?

It would seem that the relative costs of production of nuclear weapons in relation to overall national wealth have probably fallen, which, other things equal, would mean that we are headed towards a perfectly competitive market in nuclear weapons, i.e. there are lots of nuclear armed states, or, the old players in the market try to prevent that, which might be a very good bad idea given Murphy's Law.

Now, here, I think the economists like Brauer and van Tuyll misss something a little, which is well discussed in Donald Kagan in On the Origins of War, and which ties us back into Clausewitz in terms of nuclear war and the potential Napoleonic War of Mistake.

Kagan sees three reasons for war, namely interest, pride, and fear; only one of those is rational, which is a warning.

Why?

I think you could argue that human beings are basically Malthusian Bunnies with nuclear weapons.

One wonderful woman I will always love, tladr :), pointed out to me rather casually that,

"Oh yeah, when people get economically desperate, they fuck like rabbits to try to continue the species, even if it makes no sense."

Malthusian Bunnies with nuclear weapons to me seems kind of risky in the long run, because maybe in a time of economic stress someday, the Few Power Elite Bunnies look at the Many Mass of Unemployed Bunnies and say, "There are just too Goddamn many bunnies," and besides, those Iranian Bunnies are crazy, while all the other bunnies look at the American Hegemonic Bunnies and say, I know it is crazy, but I fucking hate those American Bunnies, and I am feeling kind of suicidal with population and economic decline relative to East Asia, so maybe I can take them with me at least if it doesn't go according to plan, like Murphy's Law, which would yield as the "optimal solution" to the Malthusian Bunnies with High Unemployment Rates and Nuclear Weapons to be All In, and with lots of dead bunnies, when really, we ought to do something totally different, which the Arts and Prophets as Inspired by God, YWH, the Great Spirit, Heaven, Allah and Praise be His Beloved, whatever you will, have been warning us about for a long time now, with which we conclude.

Think of the end of Planet of the Apes; was that a warning, to say to nuclear games, no?

Think of On the Beach; was that not a warning to just say no, to not do it?

Think of the end of the Fifth Element; was that not trying to say, Love? Don't do it. Just say no, like they should have at Treblinka.

And finally, think of Gene Roddenberry, and whichever Generation you liked of Star Trek; I loved both, especially with Picard as Captain, a much better version of glory, even though one should always honor Montcalm, and Ney and Massena, and they shall not pass.

Like, how about we have a labor intensive economic stimulus package with a new global monetary system to reflect changes in power based on energy as measured in British Thermal Units, and begin to prepare to put the Arab bunnies on this nice planet, and over on the other side of the solar system, we put these nice Israeli and Jewish bunnies, and every body accepts and loves you btw, and then we have Polish bunnies in one solar system, and Russian bunnies in another one, you get the idea, even a glorious British and French Empire in space, and then we can take out our predatorial instincts other her species, instead of on ourselves?

But, in any event, Castles, Battles and Bombs sure covers lots of ground, makes lots of good points, and I think provides lots of insights, especially if you remember the movie Swingers and think,

"You know, yeah, he needs to get laid, so he has to kill the Bunny, but, he isn't really going to hurt the bunny, because he always loves the bunny."

finis peace shalom mir

just say no

Imagine Space Like in Contact, the Better Angels of Ourselves are probably waiting there, and would that not be the best next thing for the country that can still be New World?