Chances Are (40 page)

Barney Schauble points out that the flip side of this complacency is the irrational desire to do something—anything—in the face of probable loss. Some current proposals to tackle climate change combine this spasmodic instinct with a touch of von Neumann's heroic weather control: huge parasols between Earth and Sun, a new atmospheric layer of reflective aluminum balloons, and belts of mid-ocean fountains loading the winds with vapor. Even Stalin's plan to reverse the flow of Siberia's rivers and irrigate the plains of Kazakhstan has been revived in the name of arresting the decay of the polar ice cap. In America, some voices suggest steering weather by manipulating initial conditions—effectively poaching rainfall from our competitors by the judicious flap of an artificial butterfly. It seems the changing climate is not all we will have to fear in the coming century.

Our intimate but indirect connection with the workings of our environment mean our attempts to change things resemble, at best, riding a horse rather than driving a car: We are trying to make the aims of a greater strength coincide with our own. At worst, our poor abilities at reasoning in uncertainty—our impulsiveness, our selfishness, our shortsightedness—compound the effects of natural unpredictability, turning a complex system into a complicated one. In such a system, error and virtue are unevenly weighted: the error of one man, Thomas Midgley, gave the world atmospheric lead pollution and the destruction of the ozone layer, but undoing his error has taken the concerted effort of millions.

We talk about nature being “in balance,” as if it had a true mean state, to which—if not for our interference—it would always return. But this is an illusion born of our own adaptability and short memory. Nature is in motion, violent motion, all the time. Its future course is as impossible to predict with certainty as that of the ragged clouds scudding by the window. We may never be able to change that course for the better, but we can plot its shifting probabilities and their likely significance. Like Senator Ingalls' visitor to Kansas who, “if he listened to the voice of experience, would not start upon his pilgrimage at any season of the year without an overcoat, a fan, a lightning rod, and an umbrella”—we'll need to keep our wits about us.

10

Fighting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So wrote Rupert Brooke in 1914, celebrating the start of a war that would soon grow dirty and dreary beyond imagining—and, far from wakening Brooke, would kill him. War, for those who do not have to wage it, is existence purged of uncertainty, the gray shades of politics resolved into the absolutes of friend and foe, life and death. The deeds of war, however mundane, are marked by necessity and danger, which give them a vitality missing from the employments of peace. As Sloan Wilson, author of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
said: After four years soldiering, it seems very hard to return to meetings where you decide whether people would prefer a rubber spider or a tin frog as a prize gift in their breakfast cereal.

As men age, they become more interested in military history. Many otherwise peaceable souls, lovers of music, painting or good food, can relate the minutest events of Waterloo or Chancellorsville, a strange light kindled in their eyes. Why should this be, when death is always dreadful and war so rarely achieves the aims for which it was fought? The answer stems from that deepest human urge: to protest against randomness. Somewhere within us, we all think that war, like betting, is a test of character. We wager our lives and our countries' honors in the belief that victory endorses them. So in mastering war, we feel we are commanding chance, binding the uncontrollable. Few peacetime lives offer such definitive proof of meaning: there are no squares named for loving fathers; war leaders seem Destiny's true executors.

Generals, though, know better: war is a contest not with fate, but with another intelligence. Because the world does not care about us, we can assume it behaves according to the rules of classical probability; but war projects the power of thousands through the decision of a single mind: aware, speculative, devious. The business of a general is to know all that is in that mind—plus at least one thing more. “The enemy has three courses open to him,” said the great Prussian Field Marshal von Moltke, “and of these he will adopt the fourth.”

Chess was devised, so Indian fables say, as a model for war. We hear of rajahs accepting single combat over the board to spare their armies, but this was rare—perhaps because they suspected that, despite its complexity, chess is still a deterministic system. There is always a best move, regardless of your opponent. If your mind were sufficiently capacious, you would be unbeatable—assuming you played White. Success in war, on the other hand, depends on the
combined
intentions of the combatants. A battle takes one to win and one to lose, which makes it not only a matter of forces but of mutually affecting choices. It is a new kind of uncertainty with its own, separate laws.

 

“There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love-making, in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance. In all these things a man will strive sooner to win satisfaction than in war; but in this the Trojans cannot be glutted.” The
Iliad
is not just a glorious poem—it is a textbook, and was taken as such throughout the history of the ancient world. How should you defend a gate? Like Telamonian Ajax. How should you follow up an attack? Like Hector, “flame-like,” when he drove the Danaans back on their ships. How should you handle your most powerful weapon? Not, presumably, as Agamemnon handled Achilles.

Homer presents the hero's view of war, where to act worthily is the first aim, to act successfully the second. The Chinese general Sun Tzu produced the oldest surviving manual of war as a
realist's
pursuit, where retreat is as advisable as attack and the greatest prize is to win without fighting: “Hold out baits to entice the enemy . . . If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.” Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
is much in demand at airport bookstores, perhaps because its antiquity lends the luster of antique heroism to the necessary ruses and evasions of business. It was also a favorite of Mao Zedong's; but then strategy knows no politics.

These two works illuminate distinct faces of war, but there are many more; more theories than campaigns, more books than battles. Every successful general eventually moves from the battlefield to the desk, where he reveals for posterity the techniques he had kept secret when in action. Xenophon has his
Histories,
Caesar his
Commentaries,
the Maréchal de Saxe his
Rêveries,
Frederick the Great his
Instructions,
and Napoleon his
Maxims
. Even the most prosaic commander feels he has discovered something worth passing on: Field Marshal Montgomery told the world that “there are only three rules of war. Never invade Russia. Never invade China. Never invade Russia or China.”

War is movement—war is position; war is daring—war is planning; war is genius—war is discipline . . . and war is, as Napoleon pointed out, a study where every law has essential exceptions. Can there be something beyond all these proverbs? Is victory ever a
science
—something to be learned as a set of principles rather than quotations? The Roman Flavius Vegetius thought so, in part because he realized that it was training and system, rather than any innate superiority, that had allowed his countrymen to conquer the world: “Without these, what chance would the inconsiderable numbers of the Roman armies have had . . . ?” Well aware of the personal strength and bravery of the barbarians, Vegetius took a formal approach to conflict. He felt the gods favor not the hero but the legion—a structure whose collective performance outweighs the individual martial virtues of the enemy. He emphasized the unglamorous: logistics, accounts, forage, drill, entrenching. Yet he also pointed out the necessity of knowing the enemy, anticipating the opponent's expectations, habits of thought, and choices. No matter how disciplined your legions, no matter how four-square your encampments, war is not deterministic: you choose your strategy in the knowledge that your enemy chooses, too.

Vegetius wrote in the last century of Rome's glory, and the violent era that followed destroyed many of the assumptions behind his rational view of warfare; particularly the belief that the purpose of war is to secure peace. If you were a Frankish knight in the tenth century, your view would be very different. Here in your tiny domain, master of a hut marginally bigger than your neighbors', you are the only one not required to work the land; your business is the protection of those who do. Better fed, better trained, and better armed than any peasant, you lend your invulnerability to the village in return for deference and your keep; it is as if, in you, they owned a tank. Your only hope of improving your position is through seizing the cattle or harvest of the neighboring village—but it too owns a knight. But then, if it didn't,
your
villagers would not be threatened and would not need to feed you—your most dangerous enemy is also the essential justification for your existence.

Murderous struggle, pitiless, omnipresent, and perpetual—where all gain is another's loss—was the natural state. It was only when the Crusades offered the prospect of booty beyond the neighbor's barns that war became organized again. With that organization, and its assumption that by cooperation all could gain more than they had before, came a new concept of knightliness: the code of chivalry, adding to valor the ideals of obedience, loyalty, discipline, and self-restraint.

To be fair, it would make little difference to a Saracen or a Slav whether the mail-encased figure hurtling toward him were inspired by mere lust for slaughter or by devotion to Christ, admiration for Lancelot or service to the Lady Odile—but within Europe, the willingness of armed men to find value in intangibles was a vital first step on the journey back to civilization. It moved violence away from the center of existence, creating that essential division between fighting and things worth fighting for. Leaders of armies, applying force for a purpose beyond plunder, became gradually more professional. By the sixteenth century, the military once more studied and aspired to the ideals of Vegetius: the “disciplines of the wars” so revered by Fluellen in Shakespeare's
Henry V
. Once more, armies fought in order of battle, arranged by arms and responding to orders from a single commander. Once more, war became a matter of thought: the opposed strategies of careful minds.

 

War, love, and cards—why do the three seem so related? Because they are all
games
: that is, they are taken as if seriously, with rules confining the scope of action, where each step depends on the wishes of someone else, and where a broad gulf gapes between success and failure. What they do not resemble, though, are the games of chance studied by Cardano, Fermat, Pascal, and Jakob Bernoulli. In these, both players put themselves at the mercy of randomness: the contest is against the gods, not each other; and the calculations determine hope and fairness, not strategy and second-guessing. The early probabilists were not blind to this difference: Leibniz, correspondent of them all, said in 1710 that games
combining
chance with strategy “give the best representation of human life, particularly of military affairs.” He hoped that it might be possible to create a complete mathematical theory of them, but for this, as for his idea of simulating naval combat on a tabletop, he would have to wait a long time.

Only one figure in the early history of probability tackled a problem involving strategy: the first Earl Waldegrave, who described in 1713 a card game, “Le Her,” in which two players draw cards from a shuffled deck and the higher wins. Here, one player—Pierre—deals a card to Paul and then one to himself. If Paul is unhappy with his card, he can force Pierre to exchange with him (unless Pierre holds a king, the winning card); and if Pierre is unhappy with the exchange (or with his original card), he can draw a new card from the deck—but if he draws a king, he must put it back and accept what he holds. They then turn over their cards; if there is a tie, Pierre, as dealer, wins.

As in blackjack, there are some straightforward rules of thumb: Paul should exchange all cards lower than 7 and hold all higher; Pierre should change all cards lower than 8 and hold all higher. But what about those exact values—7 and 8? Here, the will of the opponent makes a difference: if Paul
always
exchanges when he draws a 7, Pierre should exchange when he holds an 8. But if Pierre always exchanges when he holds an 8, Paul gains an advantage if he
never
exchanges his 7. Here's the dilemma: one player gains if the two strategies are the same, the other if they are different. How can either plan to win?

Waldegrave realized that the problem is not in the probabilities of the draw but in the wishes of the players. Each wants the highest probability of winning regardless of the opponent; each wants to gain a certain amount, well knowing that anything better would be at the mercy of the man across the table. Waldegrave proposed, therefore, that Pierre should hold his 8 five-eighths of the time and change it three-eighths; Paul should hold his 7 three-eighths of the time and change five-eighths: a probability not of the cards but of the rules.