Mystics & Statistics

Economics of Warfare 6

Examining the sixth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

In this lecture, Dr. Spagat works from three existing database from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (run by a group in Sweden). We were aware of these when we were doing our work on insurgencies, but never tapped them. We probably would have at some point, if the work had continued.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat continues with his analysis of civilian casualties in conflict. We certainly could have done something useful with his Civilian Targeting Index (CTI — defined on slide 3) and looking at whether it effected the outcome of an insurgency. Slide 4 is worth noting, as is slide 8.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%206.pdf

On slide 6 is his four “key take-home” points. They are:

  1. “First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting…”
  2. “Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some degree of civilian targeting (CTI > 0), as opposed to none (CTI = 0), if they participated in armed conflict for three or more years rather than for one year….”
  3. “Third, among actors that targeted civilians (there were 88 of them), those that engaged in great scales of armed conflict concentrated less of their lethal behavior into civilian targeting and more into involvement with battle fatalities…”
  4. “Fourth, an actor’s likelihood and degree of targeting civilians was unaffected by whether it was a state or a non-state group.”

Now, granted this is a snap-shot of only five years, but it is one with more than 88 cases in it, but it is still interesting to note. None of the work we did support nor contradicts any of these results.

Slides 9 to 13 is a discussion of logistic regression and linear regression, which is something that I think everyone should understand, but won’t be surprised if our readers choose to skip it. There are some interesting (as always) Slides are pages 14, 16, 17 and 21. In fact, slide 21 is a pretty good to use in an argument with someone who thinks things are only getting worse. It is worth your while to look at it.

Starting on slide 22 to the end (slide 34), Dr. Spagat takes on counter-arguments developed as a result of examining World Health Surveys (WHS), which is a point worth noting. Lots of people like to throw around figures. These figures are not always very accurate.

Anyhow, these lectures are great to flip through, and if you actually carefully (and painfully) read through them, it is probably a better use of your time than most things you will do this week.

U.S. Relations with Russia

Suspect the basic nature of U.S. relations with Russia is going to be a issue for while. Note that in early December 27 Senators (12 Republicans and 15 Democrats) sent a letter to Trump: “The senators urged Trump to maintain sanctions against Russia “until key provisions of the Minsk Agreement are met,” and, notably, urges providing “defensive lethal assistance” to Ukraine.”

Link: 27-senators-12-republicans-statement-trump-ukraine-russia

Republican Senator John McCain spent this New Years in Kiev: us-ukraine-crisis-McCain

Earlier this week he was in the Baltic States (which are members of NATO).

The Senate is split 52-48 (Republican/Democrat). It takes only a handful of Republican senators working with the Democrats to influence, modify or overturn something they disagree with that the incoming administration would do. Trump, has indicated a more favorable position relative to Russia, as have several of his advisors like Flynn (nominated National Security Advisor) and Tillerson (nominated Secretary of State). This could end up generating an interesting (perhaps behind the scenes) tug-of-war between the President and Congress over our Russian policy. And then there is also the Russian hacking allegations.

…

P.S. A few more quotes from the early December letter written by 27 Senators:

Almost three years after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and military aggression in eastern Ukraine, daily ceasefire violations along the line of contact make a mockery of the Minsk Agreement and demonstrate that this conflict in the heart of Europe is far from over. 

Quite simply, Russia has launched a military land-grab in Ukraine that is unprecedented in modern European history. These actions in Crimea and other areas of eastern Ukraine dangerously upend well-established diplomatic, legal, and security norms that the United States and its NATO allies painstakingly built over decades.

Demographics of Israel and Palestine

  1. Population of Israel: 8,585,500 (2015)
    1. Jewish population: 6,119,000 (75%)
    2. Arab population: 1,688,600 (21%)
    3. Others: 349,700 (4%)
      1. This includes around 140,000 Druze
    4. Note: This equals 8,157,300 as data is from 2013 (I think).
    5. Annual growth rate: 2.0%
      1. Growth rate of Jewish population: 1.7%
      2. Growth rate of Arab population: 2.2%
    6. So Jewish population is around 8,585,500 times .75 = 6,439,125?
  2. Population of West Bank: 2,862,485
    1. Growth rate: 2.59%
    2. In 2014 population was 83% Arab, 17% Israeli Jewish and other
      1. 80-85% Muslim, 1 – 2.5% Christian, 12-14% Jewish.
    3. Jewish population is included in the Israeli figures
    4. So 2,862,485 x .83 = 2,375,863 Arabs?
  3. Population of Gaza Strip: 1,819,982
    1. Growth rate: 3.41%
    2. 98-99% Muslim, 0.7% Christian
  4. Population of East Jerusalem: (192,800)
  5. Total Palestinian Arab Population: 4,192,845 or greater (see below)

1. Total Jewish population in Israel and Palestine: 6,439,125

2. Total Arab population in Israel and Palestine: 5,884,445 or more

    A. Around 6.08 in 2014 according to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics

    B. Around 6.2 million according to Israeli statistics

 

This is all drawn from two Wikipedia articles:

  1. Demographics_of_Israel

  2. Demographics_of_the_Palestinian_territories

  3. I will let you all sort out the details…as I am sure I made an error somewhere

Anyhow, the main point is in the areas of Israel, West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip there are over 6 million Jews and a little over 6 million Arabs (of which 1.7 million are Israeli Arabs). At some point in the near future (2020 according to one article I saw), Israeli and Palestinian Arabs will outnumber Israeli Jews across the area of Israel and Palestine. Right now there are effectively three states covering this area: Israel, Palestinian Authority (West Bank) and Gaza (under Hamas).

Top Defense Priorities

As of 1 December, according to a memo from the Trump transition team, the top defense priorities were (only four listed):

1) Develop a strategy to defeat/destroy ISIS,

2) Build a strong defense [Eliminate caps from Budget Control Act; improve force strength/size/readiness],

3) Develop a comprehensive USG cyberstrategy,

4) Find greater efficiencies [pursue/build on ‘great work’ led by DSD Work; open to new ideas from the Department].

 

Article is here: trump-administrations-top-defense-priorities

Now, I believe #1 is already being done…except maybe for the emphasis on “defeat/destroy.” “Contain, disrupt and reduce” may be more viable consideration. Pretty hard to “defeat and destroy” a guerilla movement that spans across multiple countries and continents. It will also take a decade or two (or more). It is kind of like “defeating and destroying” the anarchist movement or the communist movement a hundred years ago.

“Finding greater efficiencies” is an effort that many administrations have pursued. Traditionally there has been no significant impact from these efforts, although it is hard to argue that they don’t need to be done. I suspect it will be hard to fundamentally improve the system without significant changes in the civil service system, addressing means and methods of government management, and addressing the oversight of government programs by uniformed personnel. It may also require the restructuring of the contractors. Like any truly challenging problem, there are multiple aspects to addressing this.

I might also have a few other things on my top defense priorities list.

Economics of Warfare 5

Examining the fifth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture is about regressions and logistics regressions. Now, I think everyone should take a econometrics course….but just a warning, this is all pretty dry stuff. So, if you choose to skip it, don’t blame you.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%205.pdf

On the other hand, what he is discussing is using regression models to analyze the nature of the civilian casualties, including in the Rwandan genocide. This gets a little hard to discuss. On slide 11, you can learn that in the Kibuye Prefecture in 1994 there were 31,117 people killed by machete, 9,779 killed by clubs and 442 burned alive. Not exactly relaxing reading.

Slide 20 tracks Israeli and Palestinian deaths from 2000-2005, which is a lot less.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat’s work often focuses on civilian casualties. These are often a significant part of warfare, even if we don’t particularly like to address it. For example,. the United States lost over 4,000 troops in Iraq 2003-2011. Iraq lost over 150,000 people during that time. The same pattern for Vietnam, where the United States lost over 58,000 people in what was the third bloodiest war in our history. Vietnam lost one to two million people !

I did attempt to address civilian casualties in our insurgency work. It is also addressed in my book America’s Modern Wars in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality” and Chapter 15 “The Burden of War.” I am not sure that this attention to civilian casualties was fully appreciated by our DOD customers, but it was there because sadly, it is always a significant part of warfare. Tragically, sometimes so is genocide, as recently demonstrated by ISIL. Dr. Spagat, in a course on the “Economics of Warfare,” is quite correct to focus on civilian casualties.

P.S. I have been informed by Dr. Spagat that he still has another ten lectures to post up on his blog.

 

Year Two

By the way, the blog is now a year old, with our first posts having been made on December 27, 2015. In this last year we made 259 posts and received 104 comments that we posted.

Going forward, we would like to tell you about all the new great new things we are going to do with the blog, but in fact, right now we have no plans to do anything different. Our focus is going to remain on quantitative analysis of warfare, we are going to avoid being a daily news blog (because they are several blogs that already do this and also it takes a lot of time), and we will continue to discuss whatever strikes our fancy. We do try to stay away from politics, but there is a point when it crosses over with policy, so hard to avoid entirely.

The one thing that is missing is “guest bloggers.” We only had one such blog post this last year. We hope to have a few more this year, but have not aggressively sought it out. We would like to invite any of our erudite readers out there to contact us if they have something they feel is worth posting.

This blog is supposed to be a “not to interfere” effort, in that we have various writing, marketing and analytical efforts on-going, and the blog is not supposed to subtract any significant time from those efforts. These other efforts are our primary focus. This blog is something that we are supposed to be doing in our “quiet moments.”

Anyhow, wish you all a happy New Year and hope that 2017 will be a good year for you all.

Fresh Advance in Mosul

By the way, there is still a war going on in Iraq, and it is going slowly. The Iraqi’s actually made a good timely advance up to the city, isolated the city, entered east Mosul….and then things have slow down…considerably….immeasurably: Fresh Advance in Mosul

To summarize:

  1. They have 1/4 of Mosul.
  2. They will start advancing again in a couple of days.
  3. Americans will be deployed in the city and with the units.
  4. It was a planned “operational refit” (should I take this statement at face value?)
  5. “A heavily armoured unit of several thousand federal police was redeployed from the southern outskirts two weeks ago to reinforce the eastern front after army units advised by the Americans suffered heavy losses in an Islamic State counter-attack.”
  6. Three U.S. servicemen have been killed in northern Iraq in the past 15 months.
  7. The article states that there are up to 1.5 million people still in Mosul. This is higher than some other estimates I have seen.

Economics of Warfare 4

Examining the fourth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This one is on “opportunity costs,” linear regression, comparing unemployment rates to violence, and the effectiveness of some civil action problems in Iraq to violence. This discussion does get into the weeds, so to say. It is not casual reading.  The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%204.pdf

To summarize:

  1. On slide 9 there are links to two papers by Dr. Eli Berman and others: 1) Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines? (2011) and 2) Modest, Secure and Informed: Successful Development in Conflict Zones (2013).
  2. Conclusion on Berman’s first paper: It is a little more complicated than a simple trade-off between violence in an insurgency and unemployment (slides 11-13). In fact the relationship is “negative.” As Dr. Spagat notes (slide 26): “In summary, I would say that the relationship between unemployment and violence in Iraq is not tiny, but it is not big either.”
  3. Conclusions on Berman’s second paper: This one look at levels of funding versus insurgent attacks. There are of course problems with trying to determine cause and effect here (see slides 29-30). As Dr. Spagat notes (slide 41): “Again, we wind up with a statistically significant effect that does not have enormous practical significance.”

Now, I did discuss civil works briefly in Chapter 14 of America’s Modern Wars. It is a grab bag chapter called “Other Issues” that looked at 1) Duration of Insurgencies by Type of Insurgency, 2) Outcome of Insurgency by Type of Insurgency, 3) Winning Hearts and Minds, 4) Decapitating Insurgencies, 5) Early Suppression of Insurgencies, 6) Wounded to Killed Ratios, 7) Exchange Rates, 8) Bleeding an Insurgency to Death, and 9) Focus on Population.

In the section on “Winning Hearts and Minds” we ended up noting (on page 151) that:

As much as people talk about winning hearts and minds (a Vietnam-era phrase, which of course, was not entirely successful), there is no program, theory, agenda or list that tells the counterinsurgent what he must do to achieve this….

In the long run, there needs to be a focused analytical effort that looks at what efforts in other insurgencies have actually worked in the long run to gain support from the population, and what efforts in other insurgencies have not made that much of an impact. Considering the large amount of money being spent on these efforts, it is surprising that nothing systematic has been developed on this.

I do start the Chapter (page 147) with a great quote written by Bernard Fall in 1967:

Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of anti-malaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, “Land Reform,” and the other side say, “Better culverts.” One side says “We are going to kill all of those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says, “Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments just do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.

Anyhow, it does not look like this has all been resolved yet. The line to remember is: “One can’t fight an ideology, one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies.”

Economics of Warfare 3

Examining the third lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%203.pdf

This one starts with the war in Kosovo (1998-1999), which was actually a successful invention although very poorly done. It does pick on a constant theme of Dr. Spagat’s, which is how to get the correct counts of actual people killed in the conflicts, including civilians. For those of us who actually try to do things like quantitative analysis of insurgencies (for example America’s Modern Wars)….this is very useful. A lot of other people don’t particularly care, sometimes because a particularly high or low number serves their political agenda (or cosmology).

Starting on slide 11, Dr. Spagat discusses Iraq casualty estimates. This, along with Colombia, were the two areas we discussed with him when we were working on our Iraq and insurgency material (2004-2010). He was one of the few people out there doing work similar to ours. He points out that there were two estimates of deaths in Iraq, one of 150,000 and one of 600,000. Needless to say, the lower one was closer to correct. The higher number got heavily broadcast. This whole section is worth reviewing and remembering for any future conflicts. I like the picture on slide 14.

Sorry about this abstract look at some very sad and gruesome statistics.

P.S. Merry Christmas

Economics of Warfare 2

Examining the second lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%202.pdf

It is all good stuff, but we don’t do a lot of work on terrorism, so don’t have any insights to add. We actually don’t have a category for “terrorism” so this is filed under “insurgencies.”

The point that got my attention was on slide 13 where he states: “Mueller and Stewart estimate that the US is spending about $75 billion per year more on terrorism after 9/11 happened than it was spending before 9/11. The real number is almost certainly bigger than this and, possibly, a lot bigger.”

Hmmm…..16 years since 9/11 times $75 = $1.2 trillion. Is this really the whole cost for the Global War on Terror?

Slide 12 gives economic “losses per incident.” The financial losses from 9/11 is estimated at $200 billion. Of course, there was considerable human life lost. Not sure how that is “costed.”

Anyhow, it is always interesting to see what the economists are looking at. It is worth flipping through the entire lecture. It is pretty interesting material.