"First, I've occasionally used this kind of data, and I sure as hell do it to get tenure."

I hope this is a typo...

:-)

“that very few graduate students in security studies have ever served a day in uniform yet probably know more about the causes of war than those squad leaders do.”

I had a good laugh reading this! It reminded me of (not always so) good old times in gradschool when a very gracious young lady, active duty in the US armed forces, was sharing with so much candor her concerns about the lack of understanding of her “comrades in arms” regarding “why are we sending people to war...” this was a puzzle to her and she wanted to break the ranks and understand “why on God’s green earth we send people to die?!”

I really admired her for the courage to ask the hard questions and for trying to bring light into the minds of her fellow servicemen (as she was hoping), but at the same time I sadly realized that those hard questions should have been asked A Priori by each of those who joined the armed forces “Why do we fight wars? Why are people sent to die? Why will I be sent to die? Is it worth the candle?”

But as the saying goes “it is never too late…” and I can only hope that she made good use of gradschool education to figure out the answer to those hard questions and kept her grace while trying to raise the level of awareness of her fellow “squad leaders.”

...I will comment here. I made a similar comment over at Drew's blog:

Exum comes off as a rather snarky social scientist. Frankly, I could care less about his status as a leading thinker on counterinsurgency. When you willfully flaunt your ignorance of a methodology–all the while denigrating it–you don’t exactly pain a flattering picture of yourself.

Methods are like tools–not every tool is appropriate for every job, but lacking fluency in all tools severely limits one’s ability to tackle different jobs as they come along (or to tackle certain jobs well). Carpenters don’t use lathes for every project, nor do they use a sawzall. But they need how to use both and understand when it is appropriate to use either or both. It is the same for social scientists. Understanding which methods are most appropriate for separating relevant information from noisy observations is key. If you willfully ignore an entire set of these methods you risk reaching erroneous conclusions in your own work, and will fail in your attempt to legitimately criticize the work of others.

I know Walt's criticism of statistical and game theoretic methods well. Sometimes, he does risk slipping into the same category as Exum, since the problem isn't with statisticians, it is with ANYONE that refuses to be humble about their methods and the conclusions they draw from their analysis. Qualitative, quantitative--it doesn't really matter.

As I commented on Abu's post, I think quantitative analysis usefully informs the reading of military history. A leading practitioner of this sort of analysis, the late Trevor Dupuy, created a quantitative model that attempted to capture as many variables as possible, and in his only attempt to apply it to a future event (Desert Storm) his forecast outcome missed by a lesser margin than many other pundits who prognosticated during the Desert Shield period.

Obviously quantitative methods will have less applicability in situations like Iraq or Afghanistan, where variables are extremely hard to nail down and quantify. But of course straightforward historical analysis should have given us plenty of clues about probable outcomes.

Interesting post!

The only thing I’ll add is that Clausewitz was, actually, directly attacking an empirical tradition among military writers of his era. These writers, like Jomini, used which used mathematical equations (in the form of strategic lines) to demonstrate flanking manouevers that would allow generals to outwit their enemies before they really had a chance to fight.

This, (according to Anzer Gat’s wonderful book on the subject, “The Origins of Military Thought” ) is what angered Clausewitz. It was the inspiration behind his phrase “Let us not hear of Generals who conquer without bloodshed.” He wasn’t talking about humane generals – he was attacking theorists who felt that you could apply trigonometry to the battlefield to win without really getting your hands dirty.

I had lunch with an Foreign Office friend at ISA this year who expressed his frustration with those who sought to understand suicide terrorism through quantitative methods. The conclusions, he felt, were either testing the obvious or had crunched the numbers in such a way to be useless.
I don’t speak math, so I won’t comment. But I do feel that there is an important place for quants. Exum sounds like a bit of a dork here.