Center for a New American Security

"First, good research is

"First, good research is good research, regardless of method."

Not to be a pedantic jerk, but how can that be so? If the method is a poor one, how can the research that follows be meaningful?

But I don't study these topics, so I don't know.

All I meant is that there is

All I meant is that there is lots of good research out there, regardless of method, and it usually shares more in common with other good research using different methods than bad research using the same method.

Ex, I say we butt fuck these

Ex,

I say we butt fuck these nerds and show them some qualitative dominance boinking, prison style.

There's no more DADT, we don't have to whisper no more, we just take it and hump it like pit bulls.

Let's show them how Rangers lead the way. Soon enough, these goddamn nerds will be saying,

I can't quit you.

LOL! Put down your Latte Mocha you non-serving theoritical pussies, your ass is mine.

How are you going to quantify all my sperms up your asshole, nerd?

Abu M: You *do* realise that

Abu M: You *do* realise that your post coincided with the author of "The Quants", Jon Patterson, appearing on Jon Stewart? (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/jon-stewart-interviews-th_n_487...) Might have caused some cumulative effect, since you use the same termset in a loose, sound-bity kind of way. And the basic critiscism is more or less the same, the lads who think the map defines the terrain.

Foust: I think there is a big difference between a site being a joke and having a sense of humour. Its a blog.

hep.

On Quants. Reason:

On Quants.

Reason: Robert.Strange.McNamara.

Mind you going thru downturn II - the Bufoo continues isn't selling me either...especially as we are watching Downturn III - Carry Trade - unfold before us...I will grant you their pretty charts and models are being used by crooks. But at what point do you realize you're are acting as the straight man for their not funny punch lines? The Priest can only baptize so many of Micheal Corelone's nephews to give Mike an alibi before he should become suspicious.

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@JF - mock time..."mock my pretty ruthlessly"

GAME ON

*Wow. Is that what you call him? You then proceed to use "throw us a bone" and "cheeky" in the same breath?

A second reading of the post

A second reading of the post lent the following:

"or if it's true what Kissinger said about how university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small"

I don't know if the stakes in this are so small. Who gets the best parking space, absolutely. How to understand the causes of war initiation, duration, conduct and termination - perhaps not so small.

ADTS

Andrew, FY Amusement,

Andrew,

FY Amusement, Regarding K's analysis, "The Babes of Hizb'allah":

http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=110

One of the outstanding blosogphere contributions, something one would never see from quants or in journals.

Quantitative or Qualitative

Quantitative or Qualitative its tomatoes or potatoes really. Find a method that you best suit and apply that with rigor and honesty.

The main problem with all forms of research is sloppy research, research that does not address the actual situation. Now that's not to say that one cannot research from an armchair with your laptop. Christ knows that of the 25 odd essays I have penned in the last few years, none had actual field research. (benefits of being an undergrad), however as someone who relies on the works of others to validate my often tenuous arguments,I need to have faith that their research has been done with precision and honesty. Otherwise its back to Wikipedia!

If its numbers or words I don't care, as long as there is a good graph.

Can we see Am and Fick as Lego men?

aside from the useful

aside from the useful proctological comments above, these quant folks live in a very strange world.

Back in Vietnam days the basic grunt was severely numerically challenged, but it didn't appear to make a whole lot of difference. I also rather doubt that the NVA had statistics courses for the winning side grunts either.

Artillery surveyors, FDC and FOs were about the only ones able to do even simple trig. The Few, The Proud

Now, through the assistance of GPS, even the most numerically deficient grunt has a chance of not blowing himself up when calling a fire mission.
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Exum says:
I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do

By Drew Conway, on February 27th, 2010
Though I will expose my own ignorance to the training of military leaders, I fail to understand why squad leaders would not be given a basic class in statistics, or furthermore why this lack of training is seen as efficient. Withholding all of one’s pretense for the value of quantitative research in conflict, would these squad leaders not benefit from a basic understanding of probability theory, the law of large numbers, or the fundamentals of regression analysis? Perhaps Exum is pointing this out in an attempt to motivate policy makers to provide this type of training, but from the text it seems he presents this ignorance as a badge of honor when surly it should be viewed as a critical deficiency.

"Second, there is a

"Second, there is a difference between empirical social science research and policy analysis. Social science research, which lays out theories/hypotheses and then (mostly) uses evidence to test those theories/hypotheses, is potentially a useful input for those interested in specific policy recommendations. Good social science research suggests what is most likely to happen in a certain situation, based on what has happened before in similar situations. But that’s not a substitute for specific, in-depth information on the question of the day, whether it’s the consequences of implementing new sanctions on Iran, whether or not Obama’s surge in Afghanistan is likely to succeed, or something else. Social science research is one tool in the policy maker’s toolkit. And perhaps, as Drezner and others have argued, it should be used more often. But it’s not, and it shouldn’t be, the only tool."

Scott Wedman:

This seems like a strawman or irrelevant argument. You're not debating whether good theory informs good policy - you seem to concede that it does - and you're not debating whether good theory should inform good policy - you seem to concede that it does - but rather that writing policy prescriptive work requires knowing facts. Whoever said it does not? Of course arguing about sanctions in Iran today requires information about the state of affairs in Iran today. Of course using social network theory to understand North Korean trafficking networks, and make recommendations about how to stop them, requires facts about North Korean trafficking networks. Of course evaluating whether Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz requires facts about the military capabilities of Iran. The argument you're making - facts are irrelevant to current policy debates - is one I haven't seen before. Now, I've seen arguments, or hints, that one ought to focus more on theory rather than policy (good theory underlies good policy, because it provides the causal foundation upon which to make recommendations), and vice versa (van Evera, S., for example, at least just a tad). But once more, you seem to be getting away from the core issue of the qualitative-quantitative divide: does one exist, and should one exist.

ADTS

Not to monopolize the

Not to monopolize the comments, but comparing my two last comments, I guess I didn't screw up in the heat of passion.

ADTS

It was a pretty stupid post

It was a pretty stupid post though.

Quants without checks kill.

What this means, I have no idea.

. . . . Think I would like

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Think I would like to suggest that the nerds and the front line troops swap places for a week in Afghanistan for a few months.

Then have this discussion over again.

Then maybe the nerds will talk about which MRE flavors they like rather then restaurants. Remember the buddy that was Kennedy's color guard? His brother got a grenade thrown in his lap in one of those most talked about beer halls.

ADTS - with regards to what

ADTS - with regards to what you said about Hein Goemans, I'd add that, in his own research, his qualitative work has been quite good in the past. For his War & Punishment book, he did primary source work in several languages on World War I.

Madhu - great point. Yeah

Madhu - great point. Yeah these things are very different from discipline to discipline.

Scott Wedman: ADTS - I

Scott Wedman:

ADTS - I apologize for the confusion. I didn't mean to imply facts are irrelevant from policy making. If you read it "straight", Ex's original post implied that quantitative work is flawed because it doesn't tell us what to do in a specific situation of warfare (which someone in the military might know better). But his underlying argument was more an indictment of social science versus policy making than it was quantitative work versus policy making (this was one of the things I didn't get into in my post since other commentators on other web sites already covered it). My point was only that he's right in that specific way, but that doesn't mean quantitative work on warfare lacks value. At it's best, it can suggest what will happen in the large majority of cases within some confidence interval. Then you add the actual details of what's going on on the ground to get the complete picture. Both are good to have for the policy maker.

Or put another way, my argument there is that political scientists, whether qualitative or quantitative, most often are looking at history (whether you mean history as "data" or history as specific cases) to find trends, patterns, or what have you. Policy analysts are trying to figure out what to do about problem X in country Y. These things are related, and should inform each other, but they are not exactly the same thing.

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Scott Wedman:

We agree a lot more than we disagree.

I think they are indeed related and should inform each other, and they are not exactly the same thing. So I'm in agreement. The only things I'd add or note are the following. First, just because quantitative work uses confidence intervals or p values (or the more important measures of substantive statistical significance whose value no one seems to understand) does not mean it cannot be used for policy work vis-a-vis qualitative work. Needless to say, small-n qualitative work has its own confidence interval problems to work through, and those are possibly if not probably greater than quantitative work. Would you like to make a policy recommendation from a universe of 250 cases or five cases? It probably depends on how the cases are treated (i.e., the quality of the methodology?). Second is the value of translation. As Daniel Drezner noted, I think, a lot of people we cite were quantitative scholars who wrote in plain English, e.g., Thomas Schelling or Robert Axelrod (or this year's Nobel Prize winners, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson). Robert Pape to me is not a quantitative scholar, so maybe he's a bad example, but his ability to assemble a database and turn numbers into data into information into knowledge into words is a good one to have. For perhaps a better example, I think I saw Jack Goldstone do a policy writeup on the causes of political instability for the USIP, undoubtedly drawing on quantitative work done by the Political Instability Task Force. Third, and most importantly, is the cost tradeoff involved between theory and policy. Good theory underlies good policy, and I don't think you'll ever persuade me otherwise, nor do I think you'd try. You need understandings of causal linkages to make policy prescriptions. How do you do that? You go back with a research question, examine the past using the relevant data and the appropriate method(S) (not a typo, at least not necessarily), and then you state why you think A does (or does not) cause B. The present resembles the past, so the less time you spend doing that, the less well-founded your prescriptions for today will be because you spent less time studying the lessons of the past. So I do think there's a trade-off. If you and/or AM said so already, I apologize.

I think the empirical chapters (read: qualitative) of "War and Punishment" were the only ones I read :) - I suspect you can guess which side of the divide I stand on? - and thought they were absolutely phenomenal. I was more annoyed that AM insinuated Goemans didn't now how to drink - a clearly falsifiable proposition.

ADTS

Scott Wedman and Madhu (and

Scott Wedman and Madhu (and AM):

Madhu:

Here's a concrete example. A scholar said, "You can't prove anything with a case study" (qualitative piece of work). Obviously, he does quantitative work. The obvious rejoinder is, "But can you prove anything with a regression or some similar exercise?" (and remember that game theorists don't even have to prove anything). His rejoinder would be, "Probably not, but you can be more sure whether or not you're wrong or right - whether your argument has been falsified - in quantitative work - and by how much you're wrong or right." I'm not sure what the qualitative rejoinder would be, at least off the top of my head, but there is one - probably, "But you don't understand why you get the results you do; you don't understand the *process* by which your results manifest themselves" - and undoubtedly such a confrontation could probably go on ad infinitum.

Scott Wedman and Madhu (and AM):

This may amuse - it gives a sense of the bickering and status struggles within the field:

http://www.gotterdammerung.org/humor/medieval-ir.html

NOTE: In this, the qualitative scholars are the nobles, the quantitative scholars the peasants.

ADTS

If you're really interested

If you're really interested in this topic - it's - as you discovered - one of the most explosive and upsetting to the academic economist - political scientist groups. The problems is, they adopted the mathematics of physics without understanding the physics, then thought that the mathematics could somehow stand alone. Here's the background:

he physical theory that the creators of neoclassical economics used as a template was conceived in response to the inability of Newtonian physics to account for the phenomena of heat, light and electricity. In 1847 German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the conservation of energy principle and postulated the existence of a field of conserved energy that fills all space and unifies these phenomena. Later in the century James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and other physicists devised better explanations for electromagnetism and thermodynamics, but in the meantime, the economists had borrowed and altered Helmholtz’s equations.

The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline.

Strangely enough, the origins of neoclassical economics in mid-19th century physics were forgotten.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-economics-violate-th

The record of failure is pretty impressive - for example, econometric modelers predicted NAFTA would enrich U.S. laborers as well as Mexican ones - oops. The fact here is that these models are so floppy that anyone can design a model to fit their agenda - if you want more, look at the electricity demand forecast models used by the World Bank to justify bloated loans for idiot projects. There's no shortage of examples.

Nevertheless, no media economist or media quant will discuss this fundamental failure. Here's a typical example of "criticism" - a nice liberal apologist for the economic quants:

krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/mathematics-and-economics

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic

Of course, the gurus for the economic quants are well-known: Milton Friedman & Alan Greenspan... maybe a little Ayn Rand for flavor, right?

"I have about as much

"I have about as much interest getting involved in these scholarly disputes as I do catching the Ebola virus."

C'mon. Ebola isn't that bad. It only causes you to hemorrhage to death. Political science turns your brain into a vegetable, thus turning you into something intermediate between (a) a pseudo-zombie who spouts nonsense to others in order to turn their brains to vegetables and (b) an undead non-vampire that sucks up federal grant money rather than blood.

And no, a tomato is not a vegetable, so don't even go there.

Everyone needs to check the

Everyone needs to check the six year quantitative analysis research released in the Dec 2009 Nature magazine
"Ecology of Human Warfare" and then tell me there is no place for "quants" in the area of insurgency research.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/the_healthcare.php

Gourley is totally

Gourley is totally unimpressive.

What about "Military Power", Ex?

Again to the topic of

Again to the topic of quantitative analysis of warfare and especially addressed to VIM and G.D.

And gentlemen where is your quantum analysis of warfare? Unless you are driving your own models or are debating the values of the math then where are you coming from as anyone can blog a critique or have a personal opinion. Either test the theory with opposing datasets and then peer release your results for a challenge or basically stop complaining.

You failed to see the tie-in to the theory of open source warfare which the researchers knew nothing about until after they released their research or if you had spent literally hours in interrogation of AQI or ASA insurgents "hearing" their experiences which dovetailed exactly to the listed 14 charateristics then you can blog with authority.

Again this came out today which actually inadvently ties into their research which I point out you has not scienticially been torn apart and I will state the fact that the author "knew" nothing about Sean's research.

Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?). Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis. Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge314.html

Outlaw 7: If you google

Outlaw 7:

If you google Scott Atran and terrorism and Powerpoint, you can come up with some of his slides presentations.

ADTS

A summary of Scott's points

A summary of Scott's points are as follows and they greatly parallel/reenforce the "open source warfare" work done by John Robb since 2004 and the 15 characteristics formulated out of the results of the "Ecology of Human Warfare" research that also points to the validation of "open source warfare".

Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.
•The threat today is from a Qaeda –inspired viral social and political movement... which is particularly contagious among Muslim youth who are increasingly marginalized — economically, socially, politically — and are in transition stages in their lives, such as immigrants, students, and those in search of friends, mates and jobs.
•Economic globalization, which has led to greater access by humankind to material opportunity, has also led to a crisis, even collapse, of cultures, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Today's most virulent terrorism is rooted in rootlessness and restlessness.
•Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies. They do so mostly in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.
•Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.
•The boundaries of the newer terrorist networks are very loose and fluid, and the internet now allows anyone who wishes to become a terrorist to become one, anywhere, anytime. More and more, terror networks are intertwined with petty criminal networks: drug trafficking, stolen cars, credit card fraud, and the like.
•Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.

So why is the IC/DoD so darn quiet about the Ecology research---can it be that is challenges the current views of COIN and the need for the Human Terrain System---for the first time the Ecology research gives Cmdrs on the ground the ability to analyze their decisions and the follow-on 2nd, 3rd or even 5th degree level of effects without risking troops lives with bad decisions.

But wow absolutely no comments on the research from DoD and the IC-granted that many Cmdrs do not hold Ph.Ds but at least show some interest.

Outlaw 7, Stop

Outlaw 7,

Stop hyperventilating. I am not g.d. Please do not conflate our comments. It should be obvious from my previous interjections that I do not object to quantitative analysis per se. In fact, I think that it is very useful, and that Exum's criticism is not coherent.

Gourley is simply regurgitating old research. The fact that the magnitude of conflicts follows a power law distribution was first noted in “Variation of the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels With Magnitude" by Lewis F. Richardson sixty odd years ago.