All-in Preflop: ‘War and Chance’

A barrage of missiles fired, a convoy destroyed, an Iranian general dead — the killing of Qasem Soleimani adds to the long-running list of major American foreign policy decisions intended to secure the United States’ interests. Whether it be the funneling of hundreds of thousands of troops into Vietnam, sponsoring of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, locating “known knowns” in the heart of Iraq, or hunting Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, American leaders are forced to act under uncertainty. At the root of it all is an intelligence community dedicated to this very task. The question is: are they up for it?

In War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics, Dr. Jeffrey A. Friedman, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, answers this question in a rigorous, mathematical manner. By analyzing countless foreign policy failures but also exceptional successes, he seeks to evaluate the way in which American intelligence agencies assess risk to inform decision making.

Inevitably, the most vital locus of study is to understand where intelligence misguides policy choices. Friedman concludes that it’s not the intelligence community — consisting of thousands of analysts that commit themselves to research almost completely unknown to the general public — that is incompetent. Rather, the norms and standards codified by American agencies force ambiguity and rigidity, which makes it extremely difficult to provide meaningful “probabilistic reasoning” when gauging tense, time-sensitive situations abroad.

It was uniquely fascinating reading this novel during current American-Iranian hostilities. While the implications of President Trump’s decision are not yet fully realized, the minutes it took to assassinate Soleimani were months, years, and even presidential administrations in the making; and it’s in this preceding research and risk assessment that Friedman’s novel thrives in relevance and significance.

To preface, if from the title of the book you are expecting Michael Bay war fantasies, you will be utterly disappointed. Rather than taking the popular path of narrating the heat of war and conflict, Friedman chooses to take “the road less traveled” by analyzing the events that lead up to it instead. In reality, those decisions and assessments that occur before those action-packed events are the ones that truly take precedent.

When Friedman refers to “Chance,” it’s not for semantics. It seems that, too many times, American foreign policy relies on the metaphoric flipping of coins, playing of slots, and even all-inning preflop.  Lacking a normalized definition of uncertainty, intelligence agencies have operated under “idiosyncratic standards as opposed to common doctrine.” Specifically, ambiguous categories crafted by agencies to describe estimative probability made it nearly impossible to make direct assessments on issues both in present agencies and in those of the past.

The failures of intervention in Vietnam, for example, are popularized but little attention has been paid to the fact that seniors leaders, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who was one of the “most analytically inclined decision makers in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” paid very little attention to questions of risk probability. A lack of rigor or research was not what spiraled the United States into an unwinnable fight. Instead, senior leaders delegated a majority of analytic time to assessing the impacts of their choices but almost entirely neglected the most important factor of foreign policy making according to Friedman: uncertainty.

I was initially skeptical of such a claim. When evaluating costs and benefits, isn’t it a necessity to precisely analyze the probability of success of specific actions? That’s what the average person would think. What actually unfolded as relayed by Friedman through countless government documents, official quotes, and statistical analyses was a disease of ambiguity and vagueness in institutional standards and assessments. Explicit statements regarding success and uncertainty were scarce among the assessments of thousands of analysts studied, not only in the intervention in Vietnam but in numerous other decisions in which officials remained actively ignorant of the precise risk of their decisions.

Even if one action in times of war and tension is better than another, that doesn’t mean this alternative will change the outcome; yet government officials, Taylor and Rostow, defended committing troops to the Vietnam War effort, General Stanley McChrystal recommended the deployment of an additional forty thousand troops to Afghanistan, and many other analysts and leaders empirically proposed similar drastic decisions in foreign policy — framed under the pretense of the suggestions being better alternatives rather than successful ones according to Friedman. Ignoring the probability of achieving legitimate proposals in the international realm makes decisions moot. If a new proposal offers a miniscule percent chance of success compared to current policy, it is no better than the status quo when lives are on the line. It’s as if some of our top officials have routinely decided to apply the logic of the boardgame Risk, amassing troops in a territory to increase their number of dice and thus slightly boosting their meager chances of winning. Given this misframing—fueled by problematic norms, logical bias, fear of criticism, career and election decisions, and a litany of other factors—I find it difficult to trust foreign policy analysis that lacks such an important tenet. Every game, especially the game of war, requires understanding one’s precise (or as close to precise as one can get) chance of success. Without it, there would be no smart bet, no intelligent move — just a game of chance with human life and stability as the stakes.

To avoid making direct claims about the probability of achieving specific goals is to avoid proper analysis in the first place. Much of this problem as stated earlier comes from the fear of making wrong or complex evaluations. But isn’t that the reason why having intelligence communities is so crucial to our interests in international politics in the first place? To bear that risk and assess uncertainty head on. Hence, I completely agree with Friedman’s conclusion that it is a “mistake to believe that foreign policy analysts need to ‘dumb down’ their assessments of uncertainty (or avoid these assessments altogether) in order to make their judgements meaningful to decision makers.” Through vast amounts of statistical analysis, consisting of criteria such as the Brier Score to evaluate analysts and studies to assess leaders’ ability to process proposals presented to them, Friedman proves that officials are not incompetent. Simplification is not necessary in this sector of government, despite the stereotypes imposed by some of the media, critics, and even the general population. So what is the solution to the ills of vagueness and lack of explicit debate among analysts?

Ironically, subjectivity (but in a far more nuanced way than what the word suggests at face-value). The most exemplary aspect of Friedman’s work is his utilization of a massive body of research to support his words. His use of the objective to prove the significance of the subjective is an amazing academic feat. Without it, I would view his critique as presumptuous at best. The amount of studies accounting for error, variety, situation, context, criticism, and history supplemented with graphs, tables, and the collaborative efforts of numerous reputable survey and research groups make it hard not to believe Friedman’s research. While my one criticism of the novel is that is not palatable for the common reader, at the same time, it is through these statistics that Friedman’s work seems to be revolutionary in the field. Through statistics and mathematical probability assessment he, in my opinion, successfully delivers the necessary research to promote reform to the way current intelligence agencies operate. In his own words: “Subjectivity is ultimately the main reason why foreign policy analysts can articulate their assessments of uncertainty in clear and structured ways. It is in fact, the objective theories of probability that usually force analysts to irreducible ambiguity.” This could solve the “absences of warning” and “flawed assessments” that defined many foreign policy blunders — from 9/11 to the Iranian Revolution — that lacked efficient foreign policy assessments because analysts weren’t willing to be explicit in analysis and debate.

I truly support Friedman’s efforts to influence the intelligence community and see this novel as being vital to informing the codification of new standards for American government agencies to prioritize evaluating uncertainty first and foremost. Friedman recommends a variety of changes  — what he calls the “basic standard” — to the way in which the government operates in this regard, including making uncertainty a necessary part of every proposal, avoiding the biased argumentative logic of “relative probability” that involves proposing flawed alternatives, increasing clarity of assessments through numeric percentages, and “distinguishing between assessments of probability and confidence” by “providing [clear statements] of the chances that a judgement is true” through specific evidence. A reading of this novel will give you a far more specific understanding of the statistical basis and empirical nature of these proposals than this review can provide. If you are interested, a plethora of shocking information awaits you in Friedman’s book. Analysts are more capable than they get credit for and we must, as a nation, provide them with institutional support and guidelines to facilitate explicit, precise assessments. Only then can American interests be achieved most effectively. We cannot rewrite tragedies of the past and some decisions will inevitably be wrong, but the benefits of an improved international political apparatus far outweigh the status quo.