{"id":88106,"date":"2024-07-31T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T20:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=88106"},"modified":"2024-07-30T20:21:58","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T10:21:58","slug":"warning-and-decision-intelligence-policymaking-and-rumours-of-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/warning-and-decision-intelligence-policymaking-and-rumours-of-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Warning and decision: intelligence, policymaking, and rumours of wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There has been much discussion recently in Australia of the expiration of \u2018strategic warning time\u2019. In the absence of significant shifts in policy, such discussion runs the risk of being performative rather than substantive. It is certainly being conducted euphemistically. The only credible threat to peace in Asia is an aggressive and unchecked China. This is not ever uttered or implied in official Australian discourse.<\/p>\n

This is understandable, for the present. However, the time will come soon enough when euphemisms will no longer mask clearly evident trends, which a curious Australian public will want to better understand, especially as they are being increasingly informed by well-credentialled think tanks, commercial satellite imagery services, and geopolitical risk reporting services, amongst other open sources of intelligence and assessment.<\/p>\n

The strategic problem of dealing with China has much in common with the historical problems of dealing with Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union after the Cold War. When political leaders and policymakers speak of the expiration of \u2018strategic warning time\u2019, they are euphemistically drawing attention to this reality.<\/p>\n

If strategic warning time has expired, then history will judge: were the warning signs heeded, and were policies shaped and pursued accordingly? It is doubtful that history\u2019s verdict will be that there was a \u2018warning failure\u2019. On the open record alone\u2014and drawing no inferences as to what the classified record might one day reveal\u2014history will find a substantial body of warning signs to suggest that we faced the credible prospect of war with China. It is likely that history\u2019s verdict will be that there was a \u2018decision failure\u2019. That is, warning signs were not heeded, or to the extent they were, policies were not effectively shaped and pursued.<\/p>\n

Should it come to pass, an Indo Pacific war will be one of the most forecast strategic events in history. Of course, the possibility of failures in operational warning (measured in months or even weeks) or tactical\u00a0 warning (measures in days or even hours) cannot be discounted. Surprise attacks can succeed even when strategic warning is to hand. For all of its vigilance, Israel was caught by surprise in October 2023 when it was attacked by Hamas. A \u2018standing start\u2019 surprise attack by China would be difficult, but not impossible to achieve, where its preparations would be masked by good deception and the use of plausible cover (such as large-scale military exercises). In a Taiwan scenario, such a ploy would be designed to catch US and allied forces unprepared and out of position, with perhaps up to 21 to 28 days being required before sufficient US and allied forces could arrive to contest such an attack on Taiwan.<\/p>\n

For this reason, recent calls in the pages<\/a> of The Strategist <\/em>to re-invigorate warning capabilities make sense. As occurred in the Cold War, indicators and warning (I&W) systems should be enhanced. Full-time analytical teams would look for signs of PLA readiness changes, national mobilisation, increased defence production and stockpiling, economic resilience measures (such as a rapid sell-off of US securities and the hoarding of gold), preparatory moves in cyberspace and space, changes in the content and intensity of Chinese discourse (aimed at laying out the case for the use of force), and so on.<\/p>\n

As these efforts are pursued, we would do well to re-examine the question of warning, and \u2018warning failures\u2019, which is explored in the substantial literature on the intelligence aspects of surprise attacks and crises, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), the North\u2019s invasion of South Korea (June 1950), China\u2019s intervention in Korea (November 1950), the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), the Tet Offensive (January 1968), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (August 1968), the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979), and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (August 1990).<\/p>\n

The classical model for understanding \u2018warning failures\u2019 was set out by Roberta Wohlstetter in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision<\/em> (1962). Richard K. Betts built on her work in Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning<\/em> (1982). While the former focused on a failure by analysts to connect and make sense of signals as against noise, specifically in the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the latter focused on the disposition of decision makers to rely on their own experience and judgement to assess strategic situations, and to infer adversary intentions\u2014often exhibiting a sceptical wariness of the intelligence process.<\/p>\n

Intelligence regarding the prospect of war is necessarily an estimative activity, dealing in probabilities rather than certainties. Unlike many other areas of public policy, there is no readily applicable actuarial model, although we should not shut our minds to the possibility of improved predictive tools emerging in this field. Christopher Joye, for instance, has written on the issue of better measuring the empirical probability of war, drawing attention to possible models, and suggesting techniques such as aggregating expert opinions, and building risk indices of leading signals.<\/p>\n

The estimation of the prospect of a war will always be a complex process of trying to forecast the interaction of numerous independent, co-dependent, and integrated variables. This endeavour will be increasingly assisted by the rapidly accumulating oceans of data, the rise of \u2018superforecasting\u2019 techniques, and the AI-assisted mapping of causative relationships, which will see improvements in predictive capabilities in this field.<\/p>\n

For all of these improvements, there will always be the irreducibility of uncertainty and unpredictability when it comes to questions of war, but as Carveth Read cautioned more generally in Logic: Deductive and Inductive <\/em>(1898), it is better to be vaguely right, than exactly wrong.<\/p>\n

In the spirit of attempting to be \u2018vaguely right\u2019, one might proffer the following probabilities for three scenarios over the course of 2024-30:<\/p>\n