thedrifter
01-11-04, 06:54 AM
The Terror War's Inevitable Fog
By Arnold Kling
Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him.
"What's that?" Humphrey asked.
"I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was," Ridgway said.
-- David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam's post mortem of the bureaucratic process that took the United States into the Vietnam war influenced me profoundly. My outlook on business, investing, entrepreneurship, software development, technology, and public policy all have been affected by his book, which I first read thirty years ago when I was an undergraduate.
What I took away from reading and re-reading Halberstam was the view that human beings make decisions in the context of incomplete information. We suffer from inadequate knowledge, cognitive biases, and conflicting expert opinions. I call this human condition The Inevitable Fog.
The remainder of this essay (which is long -- it may be easier to print it out rather than try to read it on line) is a tour of the world of inevitable fog. First, I describe the way various aspects of life are affected by fog. Then, I review David Halberstam's thinking about Vietnam. Next, I look at the various fogs of Iraq. Finally, I discuss the fog of the overall war on terror.
The Prevalence of Fog
The familiar expression "fog of war" refers to the difficulty that generals have in seeing all of the relevant forces on the battlefield and beyond. In fact, everyone involved in a war suffers from its fog. During World War II, many American GI's, aware only of the mistakes on our side, were convinced that the United States was going to lose. What they saw were logistical mishaps, waste, unexplained changes in direction, and other signs of incompetence on the part of their superiors. The very term SNAFU is an acronym coined by grunts for "situation normal: all f---ed up."
One sees the same phenomenon in business or civilian government organizations. The leaders never see the entire picture. Meanwhile, as grunts we gather around the water cooler and trade stories which supposedly demonstrate that our bosses are idiots and our co-workers on the other side of the building are jerks. A business organization makes a seemingly suicidal amount of mistakes every week, but in the fog of business its competitors are committing errors at roughly the same rate.
Stock market investing takes place in a fog. At any point in time, there are plausible future scenarios under which the fair value of the market indexes could be double what it is today, and other scenarios which suggest that the market's true value is half its current level. Similarly, there are plausible scenarios under which particular stocks or groups are screaming buys, and equally plausible scenarios under which those same stocks are must-sells.
No one lives in more of a fog than an entrepreneur. Almost by definition, you are the only one who believes that your business idea makes any sense. Nine times out of ten, the skeptics are right. I describe my own entrepreneurial career, which turned out better than most, as A Sequence of Miscalculations.
Software development takes place in a fog. In a project that follows a textbook "lifecycle" process, coding does not begin until the developers have a final, precise written set of requirements. Nowhere in the history of software has a program been developed according to that model. Instead, the Geeks begin work in a fog about what the Suits really want. They make their best guess, deliver a prototype, and then the Suits and the Geeks start to argue. When the two sides reach a point of being hopelessly deadlocked, a version gets released.
Technological progress has many sources of fog. We do not exactly know which scientific studies will lead to interesting results. When something important is discovered, we do not necessarily know which are the most promising applications. We do not know which promising applications will actually be successful in the market. Thomas Edison thought that a phonograph would be used by business executives to record and ship speeches to workers.
No wonder venture capital investing seems like a shot in the dark. Given the fog that surrounds innovation, a venture capitalist that happens to back a couple of winners with one fund may have a string of losers with the next.
Perhaps the most important point of all is that government officials operate in a fog. If one looks at all of the imperfections and shortcomings of the market, then there appears to be a nearly infinite set of opportunities for the government to improve on private sector outcomes. However, it is important to remember that the information that government has is often no better than what is available to private individuals.
For the private sector, one of the most important signals that cuts through the fog is the profit and loss statement. If nothing else, a company that makes too many mistakes will find itself out of business. Government programs are insulated from such signals. I believe that as the pace of innovation has increased in our society, the relative inefficiency of government has gone up. Both private-sector operations and government programs become anomalous and obsolete more rapidly. However, government anomalies persist, while in the private sector market discipline serves to weed out failure. The more dynamic the economy, the larger the drag exerted by the government.
Vietnam, Halberstam, and Fog
Much as I admire The Best and the Brightest, I believe that David Halberstam himself is not above the fog. His account of the Vietnam era suffers from cognitive biases which are evident, even though Halberstam had mastered the New York Times reporter's subtle art of injecting his opinions via adjectives. Thus, American hawks are described as "rigid" and "hardline," while he introduces doves as "nuanced" and "flexible."
When Halberstam discusses our South Vietnamese allies, they are "feudal," "corrupt," and remnants of a "dying order." On the other hand, our adversaries are characterized as "modern," "indigenous," and a "revolutionary force." I long to grasp Halberstam by the lapels and ask him: if the Vietnamese Communists were so in tune with the general population, why was their regime so repressive? Why did they have to murder and drive out so many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese when they took over? Why is it that in the middle school near where I live in suburban Maryland the most common name in the PTA phone directory is Nguyen?
One way to appreciate the fog that still surrounds the Vietnam war is to look up "Krulak" in the index of Halberstam's book as well as in The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot. Both Halberstam and Boot describe Victor Krulak as a Marine Corps Major General, short in stature, with the nickname "Brute." There, the similarity ends.
Boot describes Krulak as "a first-rate fighter and thinker." Boot presents Krulak as the bureaucracy's Rambo, a man who could have won the Vietnam war had the civilians not held him back. Boot describes his approach as follows:
"It would take aggressive small-unit foot patrolling, especially at night, to gather intelligence and disrupt guerilla operation. Above all, it would mean training local people to defend themselves... Krulak wanted to combine this pacification strategy with the bombing and mining of Haiphong harbor."
Halberstam sees Krulak as "the military's most skilled bureaucratic player... where his special assignment was to destroy any civilian pessimism about the war and to challenge the civilian right to even discuss military progress, or lack thereof." Krulak was active in what Halberstam views as the military's conscious effort to deceive civilians about the prospects for success in Vietnam.
" as the official minutes of the special counterinsurgency group reveal for that crucial period ('February 7, 1963 Krulak says real progress is being made in the struggle. Vietcong morale is deteriorating... March 14, 1963 Krulak says Vietcong activity is at a level 50 percent below last year... May 9, 1963 Krulak, back from a Honolulu meeting with Harkins, says that all trends are favorable... May 23 Colonel Francis Serong, Australian guerilla fighting expert, expresses doubt on the Strategic Hamlet Program saying it is overextended, and that it has left vast areas from which the Vietcong can operate freely. Krulak immediately and violently challenges him...')" (ellipses in the original)
Halberstam's Krulak is a vicious hawk, painting a falsely optimistic picture in order to stiffen the resolve of the civilians to maintain the war effort. Boot's Krulak is a sophisticated counterinsurgency fighter, trying to substitute a patient, population-centered strategy for the costly "search-and-destroy" approach used by U.S. commander William Westmoreland.
I am in no position to pass judgment on which writer has captured the real Krulak (perhaps there is a grain of truth in each). The point is that much about Vietnam remains unclear. Even after the fact, the war is covered in fog.
continued......
By Arnold Kling
Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him.
"What's that?" Humphrey asked.
"I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was," Ridgway said.
-- David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam's post mortem of the bureaucratic process that took the United States into the Vietnam war influenced me profoundly. My outlook on business, investing, entrepreneurship, software development, technology, and public policy all have been affected by his book, which I first read thirty years ago when I was an undergraduate.
What I took away from reading and re-reading Halberstam was the view that human beings make decisions in the context of incomplete information. We suffer from inadequate knowledge, cognitive biases, and conflicting expert opinions. I call this human condition The Inevitable Fog.
The remainder of this essay (which is long -- it may be easier to print it out rather than try to read it on line) is a tour of the world of inevitable fog. First, I describe the way various aspects of life are affected by fog. Then, I review David Halberstam's thinking about Vietnam. Next, I look at the various fogs of Iraq. Finally, I discuss the fog of the overall war on terror.
The Prevalence of Fog
The familiar expression "fog of war" refers to the difficulty that generals have in seeing all of the relevant forces on the battlefield and beyond. In fact, everyone involved in a war suffers from its fog. During World War II, many American GI's, aware only of the mistakes on our side, were convinced that the United States was going to lose. What they saw were logistical mishaps, waste, unexplained changes in direction, and other signs of incompetence on the part of their superiors. The very term SNAFU is an acronym coined by grunts for "situation normal: all f---ed up."
One sees the same phenomenon in business or civilian government organizations. The leaders never see the entire picture. Meanwhile, as grunts we gather around the water cooler and trade stories which supposedly demonstrate that our bosses are idiots and our co-workers on the other side of the building are jerks. A business organization makes a seemingly suicidal amount of mistakes every week, but in the fog of business its competitors are committing errors at roughly the same rate.
Stock market investing takes place in a fog. At any point in time, there are plausible future scenarios under which the fair value of the market indexes could be double what it is today, and other scenarios which suggest that the market's true value is half its current level. Similarly, there are plausible scenarios under which particular stocks or groups are screaming buys, and equally plausible scenarios under which those same stocks are must-sells.
No one lives in more of a fog than an entrepreneur. Almost by definition, you are the only one who believes that your business idea makes any sense. Nine times out of ten, the skeptics are right. I describe my own entrepreneurial career, which turned out better than most, as A Sequence of Miscalculations.
Software development takes place in a fog. In a project that follows a textbook "lifecycle" process, coding does not begin until the developers have a final, precise written set of requirements. Nowhere in the history of software has a program been developed according to that model. Instead, the Geeks begin work in a fog about what the Suits really want. They make their best guess, deliver a prototype, and then the Suits and the Geeks start to argue. When the two sides reach a point of being hopelessly deadlocked, a version gets released.
Technological progress has many sources of fog. We do not exactly know which scientific studies will lead to interesting results. When something important is discovered, we do not necessarily know which are the most promising applications. We do not know which promising applications will actually be successful in the market. Thomas Edison thought that a phonograph would be used by business executives to record and ship speeches to workers.
No wonder venture capital investing seems like a shot in the dark. Given the fog that surrounds innovation, a venture capitalist that happens to back a couple of winners with one fund may have a string of losers with the next.
Perhaps the most important point of all is that government officials operate in a fog. If one looks at all of the imperfections and shortcomings of the market, then there appears to be a nearly infinite set of opportunities for the government to improve on private sector outcomes. However, it is important to remember that the information that government has is often no better than what is available to private individuals.
For the private sector, one of the most important signals that cuts through the fog is the profit and loss statement. If nothing else, a company that makes too many mistakes will find itself out of business. Government programs are insulated from such signals. I believe that as the pace of innovation has increased in our society, the relative inefficiency of government has gone up. Both private-sector operations and government programs become anomalous and obsolete more rapidly. However, government anomalies persist, while in the private sector market discipline serves to weed out failure. The more dynamic the economy, the larger the drag exerted by the government.
Vietnam, Halberstam, and Fog
Much as I admire The Best and the Brightest, I believe that David Halberstam himself is not above the fog. His account of the Vietnam era suffers from cognitive biases which are evident, even though Halberstam had mastered the New York Times reporter's subtle art of injecting his opinions via adjectives. Thus, American hawks are described as "rigid" and "hardline," while he introduces doves as "nuanced" and "flexible."
When Halberstam discusses our South Vietnamese allies, they are "feudal," "corrupt," and remnants of a "dying order." On the other hand, our adversaries are characterized as "modern," "indigenous," and a "revolutionary force." I long to grasp Halberstam by the lapels and ask him: if the Vietnamese Communists were so in tune with the general population, why was their regime so repressive? Why did they have to murder and drive out so many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese when they took over? Why is it that in the middle school near where I live in suburban Maryland the most common name in the PTA phone directory is Nguyen?
One way to appreciate the fog that still surrounds the Vietnam war is to look up "Krulak" in the index of Halberstam's book as well as in The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot. Both Halberstam and Boot describe Victor Krulak as a Marine Corps Major General, short in stature, with the nickname "Brute." There, the similarity ends.
Boot describes Krulak as "a first-rate fighter and thinker." Boot presents Krulak as the bureaucracy's Rambo, a man who could have won the Vietnam war had the civilians not held him back. Boot describes his approach as follows:
"It would take aggressive small-unit foot patrolling, especially at night, to gather intelligence and disrupt guerilla operation. Above all, it would mean training local people to defend themselves... Krulak wanted to combine this pacification strategy with the bombing and mining of Haiphong harbor."
Halberstam sees Krulak as "the military's most skilled bureaucratic player... where his special assignment was to destroy any civilian pessimism about the war and to challenge the civilian right to even discuss military progress, or lack thereof." Krulak was active in what Halberstam views as the military's conscious effort to deceive civilians about the prospects for success in Vietnam.
" as the official minutes of the special counterinsurgency group reveal for that crucial period ('February 7, 1963 Krulak says real progress is being made in the struggle. Vietcong morale is deteriorating... March 14, 1963 Krulak says Vietcong activity is at a level 50 percent below last year... May 9, 1963 Krulak, back from a Honolulu meeting with Harkins, says that all trends are favorable... May 23 Colonel Francis Serong, Australian guerilla fighting expert, expresses doubt on the Strategic Hamlet Program saying it is overextended, and that it has left vast areas from which the Vietcong can operate freely. Krulak immediately and violently challenges him...')" (ellipses in the original)
Halberstam's Krulak is a vicious hawk, painting a falsely optimistic picture in order to stiffen the resolve of the civilians to maintain the war effort. Boot's Krulak is a sophisticated counterinsurgency fighter, trying to substitute a patient, population-centered strategy for the costly "search-and-destroy" approach used by U.S. commander William Westmoreland.
I am in no position to pass judgment on which writer has captured the real Krulak (perhaps there is a grain of truth in each). The point is that much about Vietnam remains unclear. Even after the fact, the war is covered in fog.
continued......