The book belongs to the “ASA-CRC Series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society.” It is devoted to consideration of possible alternatives of counterfactual developments in military history. The book consists of six chapters describing several events in “what if” scenarios estimated in mathematical, statistical, operations research, game theory, and combat modeling.
Chapter 1 “Could History Have Been Otherwise?” presents general thoughts on possibility of different ways of historic developments, role of personalities forming the flows of occurrences, junctures of critical moments in history, and reasonable hypotheses on imaginary counterfactual manifestations which could had been happened in place of near to them factual occasions. Multiple examples of the battles and wars are described as pivoting points in the human civilization. Structure of the next chapters and methods used in them are described, including Lanchester’s model, Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), and game theory in the modern probabilistic variants. As it is stated at the end of this chapter, “The object of this book is not to reinvent the past and imagine alternative futures. Rather we have used a mix of quantitative techniques and mathematical concepts–some established in this field, some not, but each appropriate to the limited context in which we apply it–to present a fuller picture of the dynamism of the historical process, acknowledging the pressures and uncertainties faced by historical actors contemplating their future and how they might shape it.” (p. 19)
Chapter 2 “Could the Germans Have Won the Battle of Jutland?” describes the biggest in history naval battle in the WWI between England and Germany in the North Sea near Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 1916. Commanded by British Admiral J. Jellicoe and German Vice-Admiral R. Scheer, the battleships lined in several hundred meters long with dozens of dreadnoughts had been firing shells up to tens of kilometers. Both sides claimed victory, with British losing more ships and men, but the German fleet was contained and lost access to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic. Winston Churchill, then the first Lord of Admiralty, and many English commanders widely used the Lanchester “square law” and geometry of the battle configurations in various estimations. The Lanchestrian stochastic modeling, where each side caused losses proportional to its numbers, and ABC evaluation are applied in this chapter to auditing the results of that battle in different scenarios of “What if we allow all possible improvements for the British in both deployment tactics and shipboard procedures?” (p. 60)
Chapter 3 “Could the Germans Have Won the Battle of Britain?” considers the WWII military campaign in 1940–41 by the Nazi Germany air force (Luftwaffe) against England, defended by the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) of the Royal Navy. Germany war aims were in British negotiations or capitulation, and their bombers attacked on the Channels ports, airfields, and finally on London. British Prime Minister Churchill inspired the nation for fighting the enemy. This chapter uses the real and counterfactual data in various bootstrapping estimations of shares between both sides air forces, and probabilities of wins or losses in different operations, taking into account the asymmetry between attacker and defender specific for aircraft, fuel, ammunition, tactics, intelligence, and other factors on individual days. The authors conclude: “We can, however, say now with some quantified justification that, for most historians and certainly for those who believe in the “narrow margin,” it was materially possible for Britain to have lost the battle, and therefore to have been invaded—although whether an invasion could have succeeded is another question entirely. Moreover, bootstrap methods enable us to quantify comparisons of contrasting views on differing decisions, providing a jumping-off point for qualitative analysis rather than reducing the debate to mere clashes of opinion. This is what mathematics does, of course—its truth is found in the argument connecting assumptions to conclusions, not in the conclusions themselves.” (p. 91)
Chapter 4 “Could the United States Have Prevailed in Vietnam?” deals with the American involvement into the South-East Asia wars, starting from helping French in their First Indochina War in 1950-ties, escalating in fighting the communist North Vietnamese forces in 60s, and developing to the military presence of more than 3.1 million Americans in Vietnam to the end of the conflict in 1973. The chapter presents a detail socio-economy-political analysis of the related problems and possible strategies of the U.S. Army in collaboration with the South Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). It discusses the big data of security classifications and evaluation systems used for scaling successes and fails in counter-insurgency operations and pacification results. The authors conclude: “Our counterfactual has two components: increased pacification and a declared readiness to profit from precipitate Communist offensives such as occurred in 1972, when the ARVN, supplemented by U.S. airpower, proved sufficient to defeat the Communist offensive without the presence of American ground troops. The final allied objective would still have been negotiations.” (p. 130)
Chapter 5 “The Road to Able Archer: Counterfactual Reasoning and the Dangerous History of Nuclear Deterrence 1945–1983” investigates the next key conflict of 20th century. The Cold War presented a real danger to the existence of civilization, with ballistic missiles and nuclear arms in the armies of both Western and Eastern blocks. The U.S. policy-making process was based on game theory, but both sides could have false or “counterfactual” assessment of their adversaries’ capabilities and aggressive intent, when calculations of game theory could yield not stability but appalling danger. This happened in the Able Archer crisis, with NATO exercise in November 1983, when the Soviet leaders decided that it was preparation to a genuine nuclear strike and became ready to the preemptive response, which could ignite the nuclear war. Fortunately, the misperception quickly became clear to both sides and created positive effects for their relationship. The chapter describes the related stand-off games and concepts, including Prisoner’s Dilemma, Pareto optimality, Nash equilibrium, dominant strategies, and asymmetric dilemmas in war games with different nuclear arsenals and bombers-missiles abilities. The authors conclude: “we return to our point about the streetlight effect–that there is a danger of using models because they are available rather than because they are right or enable a better decision to be made. We would certainly argue that game theory at least did not help to avert nuclear war. Rather, in the end, the lesson is a humane one–that mutual awareness and understanding have to be worked for but are always beneficial. Even when deception, guile and bluff are real possibilities, it helps to talk, and to think oneself into one’s adversary’s position.” (p. 178) That is still true nowadays.
Chapter 6 “Conclusions” gives a summary of the problems, particularly: “Finally, we are struck, despite our intentions, by the extent to which personalities matter once one moves beyond the most restrained and cautious of counterfactual possibilities. If nothing else our examples have enabled some level of unbiased identification of who these people are, and which decisions mattered at the critical juncture and by how much. This, in turn, can shed light on the broader context–doctrines that enable good decision-making, and data useful in supporting it.” (p. 189)
Appendix gives some mathematical background on the methods applied, without equations but with the concepts and their meaning. The book contains just a few formulae, but the restrained counterfactual modeling was performed by bootstrapping in Monte Carlo Markov Chain required powerful computers. The topics are illustrated by multiple pictures, figures, and numerical tables. The references are given in each chapter and at the end of the book, together with an extensive index.
The counterfactual terminology used in the book reminds but does not coincide with ideas and methodologies of the statistical causality analysis, potential outcomes, and counterfactual modeling. The presented analysis is rather similar to considerations often made after chess competitions by contemplating what could happen if one or another grandmaster would prefer each different movement. The book can be interesting for reading on history in a broader frame of comparison with other options which could occur in slightly diverse settings. Additional sources on these topics can be found in (Lipovetsky Citation2018, Citation2020a, Citation2020b, Citation2022; Lipovetsky and Mandel Citation2015).
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References
- Lipovetsky, S. (2018), “Causal Nets, Interventionism, and Mechanisms: Philosophical Foundations and Applications,” Technometrics, 60, 127.
- ———(2020a), “Prehistoric Warfare and Violence: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches,” Technometrics, 62, 132–135.
- ———(2020b), “Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research,” Technometrics, 62, 559–559.
- ———(2022), “Manhattan Project: The Story of the Century,” Technometrics, 64, 270–278.
- Lipovetsky, S., and Mandel, I. (2015), “Handbook of Causal Analysis in Social Research,” Technometrics, 57, 292–300.