Weapon of Math Deduction: A Statistical Formula for Conflict Evaluation
IT'S NOT THE SIZE OF THE ARMY; it's how you use it. That's the conclusion of a recent study by Patricia Sullivan, a professor at the University of Georgia, who has devised a simple yet effective statistical formula that correctly predicts the outcome of 78% of the conflicts plugged into it.
Pr = probability that an intervening nation will achieve its goals
Limited goals mean better odds. Sullivan calculates the U.S.'s chances of success in Vietnam were 22%. The 1991 Gulf War had a 93% chance of succeeding. The invasion to overthrow Saddam had a 68% chance of working; as for routing insurgents and installing democracy, chances of success are 1 in 5.
x, y = variables
ß = magnitude and direction of variables' effects
Sullivan's formula has several variables, including war aims, troop levels, alliances, and length of conflict. She found that as troop levels increase, the probability of successfully achieving political aims through force decreases.
Pr(yi=1|xi) = 1/(1 + exp(-xi ß))
i = intervention in question
Sullivan tracked 122 military interventions involving the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K. between 1945 and 2003. Overthrowing governments is easy, but using military intervention to get nations to do what you want has only a 17% chance of success. Propping up foreign regimes works just 40% of the time.
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Brilliant stuff, but it only tells us what we knew all along; the occupation was doomed from the start. Of course, GWB & co. will decry this as "fuzzy math" and continue leading our armed forces deeper into the quagmire.
it doesn't take a pocket calculator to figure those probabilities. just pay attention history as it passes by. works for me. wonder if she tried using lanchester equations?
pete saussy
here's a link to an article on Sullivan
Great. Let's see it work. Could it be used in future war planning and, therefore, guarantee success and a higher proud morale for Americans--or any empirically minded nation? Duh. Stupid article because it basically is a comment about something.
Would that military strategy could be reduced to mathematical certitude. This equation is dependent on very subjective measures of inexact quantities. How do you quantify ‘war aims’? Furthermore, increase in troop levels seemed to work for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe after WWII. Isn’t that a counterexample to the law’s implications? Of course length of occupation may be another, perhaps more crucial, variable in calculation of the probability of success. On the positive side, no MJ bloggers have made crude jokes about Bush being hung over during this math class or Cheney having other priorities that prevented him from learning this level of math. Even if this equation had been known prior to Iraq, they wouldn’t have been able to gain from it. No, I didn’t say that.
Please do a more detailed article on this subject. I was quite intrigued to read the little that was provided in this issue and would love to read more about this.
What use is a formula that's only right 78% of the time?
Another example of junk science!
Bush and his pack of war lovers should have investigated the religious beliefs of the Arab culture first.He would have learned of the hate they possess for each other and what they call infidels[us].He would have come to the brillant deduction that democracy would be impossible for such a culture that has a very long history in the mid-east.
Bush will go down in history as the worst[and the dumbest] president that this country has ever elected to office.
That is just the equation for logistic regression. Without knowing what the independent variables (x) are, and what their coefficient (Beta) is, the formula itself is not informative.
78% sucsess rate makes me think this is still a theory, of course, if not an indication to a general trend in accedemic thought. Sinse we view hisotry as "stagnant" facts, then I see no reason not to pathologizes history into a mathmatical discourse. Yet, as we all know, there are many paths to history. And not one of them is a single pathology to any phenomenon with-in-itself. Isn't it always the "relationships" between currents in thought and understanding of one owns place in history that creates any notion of history with-in-itself. Shouldn't we study the relationships between these many paths rather than to reduce history to a mathmatical equasion that attempts to point to an epstimelogical "truth"? Further, how then can any "science" stemming from the Enlightenment, aim to produce any ontological "truth" to human nature. Since it (science) always requires a speaking subect to declare and define the "truth" in any discourse. What is ontological about the human being?
Christopher Clough-Hunter
University of Amsterdam
AMS Master's Student
I THINK THIS WHOLE WAR IS STUPID BUT IT'S ALREADY STARTED SO IT NEEDS TO BE FINISHED SO FINISH IT AND GET OUT AND LEAVE THEM ALONE AND IF THEY COME BACK FOR MORE GIVE IT TWO THEM
