Warning and decision: intelligence, policymaking, and rumours of wars
There has been much discussion recently in Australia of the expiration of ‘strategic warning time’. 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.
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.
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 ‘strategic warning time’, they are euphemistically drawing attention to this reality.
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’s verdict will be that there was a ‘warning failure’. On the open record alone—and drawing no inferences as to what the classified record might one day reveal—history 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’s verdict will be that there was a ‘decision failure’. That is, warning signs were not heeded, or to the extent they were, policies were not effectively shaped and pursued.
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 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 ‘standing start’ 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.
For this reason, recent calls in the pages of The Strategist 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.
As these efforts are pursued, we would do well to re-examine the question of warning, and ‘warning failures’, 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’s invasion of South Korea (June 1950), China’s 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).
The classical model for understanding ‘warning failures’ was set out by Roberta Wohlstetter in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962). Richard K. Betts built on her work in Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (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—often exhibiting a sceptical wariness of the intelligence process.
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.
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 ‘superforecasting’ techniques, and the AI-assisted mapping of causative relationships, which will see improvements in predictive capabilities in this field.
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 (1898), it is better to be vaguely right, than exactly wrong.
In the spirit of attempting to be ‘vaguely right’, one might proffer the following probabilities for three scenarios over the course of 2024-30:
- A crisis in the Indo Pacific region, similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: at least 50 per cent;
- A military clash between US and Chinese forces involving an exchange of fire, followed by rapid de-escalation, which would be unlike anything that occurred in the Cold War: at least 30 per cent;
- A major war, similar to the Pacific War of 1942-45: at least 10 per cent, but with different assumptions about risk thresholds (as discussed below), possibly 20 per cent.
If these estimates are ‘vaguely right’, then we should be preparing urgently, lest we find ourselves being proven to be ‘exactly wrong’ and thereby surprised, and worse.
The prospect of war challenges the intelligence process and policymaking alike. War challenges widely-held assumptions about rationality and the assumed benefits of peace. The deployment by the Soviet Union of missiles in Cuba in October 1962 was a warning failure on the part of the CIA’s estimates staff. They judged that such a deployment would not be ‘rational’, which is to say not in keeping with Soviet interests, and they therefore discounted the possibility of it occurring. They were wrong. Some thought before the First World War that economic interdependence would reduce, or even eliminate, the risk of war. They too were wrong.
These cases are a reminder that we have to be careful to ensure that analysts are not so confined and constrained in their worldview that they miss the bold gambles that are taken by those whom Hegel termed ‘world historical individuals’—and whose motivations, biases and thought processes are outliers in terms of expected human behaviour. Analysts are trained to judge capabilities, doctrine, and intentions, with a presumption that ‘rational’ behaviour sees an alignment of means consistently with ends. However, how is risk-taking of an ostensibly ‘irrational’ kind to be judged by a midlevel analyst working in an intelligence agency in Canberra?
There are other biases in analytical work. As before the First World War, analysis today could be distorted by the idea that the economic cost of war is so great that no power would rationally start a war in the face of its probable consequences. The related notion that economic interdependence between powers typically acts as a brake on war does much to explain why peace might endure, but nothing to explain why war might yet still occur. Often the probability of war depends not only on the actual dangers and costs of war to the attacker, but also on their perceptions of the dangers of the peace. While we often speak of the ‘fog of war’, we too little speak of the ‘fog of peace’, a term that Betts coined in his aforementioned 1982 book on surprise attack.
There is yet another analytical bias—that of the idea of ‘war by accident’, where war occurs in the fit of an absence of mind, as a result of sleepwalking, blundering or stumbling. However, history teaches that powers pursue aggressive policies that risk war in a knowing fashion, because the sought-after prizes of war exceed the perceived costs of war. They might well misjudge the reactions and responses of others, but that is not the same as saying that actions, and responses, are ‘accidental’, or that they lead to ‘accidental’ outcomes which are outside of all contemplation.
It is to be hoped (and there is no way by which to judge this from outside of government) that these analytical problems have been addressed, and that any such biases in the analytical process have been surfaced and mitigated. It is to be also hoped (and, again, there is no way by which to judge this from outside of government), that the policymaking process is being guided by the analytical process, without the latter being ignored, or worse being compelled to modify its judgements, when they are inconvenient to policy.
In the Australian model, national intelligence assessments are as a matter of law the product of a dialogue between the intelligence process and policymaking, insofar as while they are issued independently by the Director-General of National Intelligence, she or he is required under law to advise the Prime Minister and others where there are differences of opinion, including with policy departments. It is to be hoped that this contestation by design is being employed regularly, and that assessments are being produced in the face of differences of opinion, with the appropriate dissemination of dissenting or alternative views being done, as required by law. This should be occurring on the greatest strategic question of the age: will there be an Indo Pacific war?
Political leaders and policymakers should of course probe intelligence assessments, especially where they might to relevant to the question of going to war. These are, after all, estimative questions, and the problems are probabilistic in nature. Such would not represent ‘interference’ in the intelligence process, or an impermissible transgression of the supposed ‘separation’ of the intelligence and policy functions. It will be of great interest to see whether the Independent Intelligence Review by Heather Smith and Richard Maude, which was due to report by 30 June 2024, has anything to say on the issue of contestability and, more generally, on the relationship between intelligence and policymaking.
If it is accepted that strategic warning is to hand, biases in the analytical process have surfaced and been mitigated, intelligence and policymaking are working together as they should, political leaders have been informed (and warned), and the problem of operational or tactical surprise is being addressed as effectively as possible, we are left still with the ‘decision problem’. That is, if political leaders and policymakers are unwilling to be persuaded, or are disinclined to act meaningfully, then no amount of process improvements will make a material difference to the outcome.
In part, this might be a problem of professional dissonance (something that Henry Kissinger explored at length in his academic research before he joined Nixon’s White House—research which still bears up today). Political leaders typically do not have a deep background in strategic and defence affairs. Their frame of reference for considering and weighing the assessments that they receive are unlikely to be grounded in long experience in dealing with intelligence, defence and military data and information.
They will also naturally have an eye to their domestic agenda and political prospects, especially in relation to what might be involved in winning acceptance, and rallying public support, for the hard task of preparing for war. Quite often, the methods which might see someone attain high political office are not suited to being applied to decisions which are related to the unfolding of world history.
Typically, decisions regarding pressing strategic and defence matters do not get made until they appear as a bureaucratic imperative (perhaps, when something has to be decided because world events are unfolding, and officials are seeking direction—or, more prosaically, when decisions have to be taken because of upcoming international meetings, for instance). However, the question of a possible Indo-Pacific war requires dedicated time to be set aside for consideration of hypothetical scenarios, where policy success cannot be measured readily—partly because it is conjectural and related to things that might never happen, and partly because the very decisions taken conjecturally might materially contribute to things never happening.
None of this is to suggest that political decision making should simply derive prescriptions in a linear fashion from the analytical process, without the political leader and policymaker applying their own perspectives and convictions during the policy formation and decision process. On the contrary, and thanks to scholars such as Keren Yahri-Milo, in Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (2014), we can better understand how political leaders and policymakers typically rely on heuristics, especially in a crisis—that is beliefs, perceptions, emotions, reputational concerns, and their personal cognitive models. Whatever we might think about their decisions, they certainly think that their theories, ideas, and choices are consistent and logical (for instance, think of Chamberlain in 1938 clinging to the idea that he could dissuade Hitler).
If political leaders and policymakers do not bring to the task deep strategic expertise, it is to be hoped that at least they bring to their decision-making conviction and some degree of historical perspective, and that they are willing to engage in contested, intelligence informed conjecture, when having to make decisions before knowing enough about the future to fully justify them. In questions of war, it is always better to be ‘vaguely right’, but that still means dealing with vagueness.
These questions are especially pertinent to today’s strategic challenge. China’s (and really this means Xi Jinping’s) decisions will depend on a series of contingent calculations regarding, amongst other things, China’s prospects of success in any move against Taiwan, as well as US and allied resolve, and Xi’s own assessment of the national mood about China’s ‘great rejuvenation’—the tally of which is not conducive to strategic forecasting that is ‘exactly right’.
Xi might, for instance, decide that the ‘dangers of peace’ outweigh the cost of war, and that risking war is preferable to living with an unacceptable status quo. He might test the responses of the US and allies with a blockade. Or he might test by initially seizing Taiwan’s offshore islands. And of course Taiwan’s own actions will affect Xi’s decision making.
War is certainly not inevitable, and indeed diplomatic initiatives have a place among the many contingencies in this strategic environment. The peacemaker should always continue to labour even as the first bombs are falling.
In the anarchic world of geostrategic politics, it is the brutal calculus of power that ultimately determines the fate of nations. That calculus is always contingent—both on the interplay of the vast and impersonal forces, and the decisions and actions of Hegel’s ‘world historical individuals’, which can nudge, deflect, accelerate or even disrupt the playing out of those forces.
In this contingent world, crises, confrontations, and possibly war in our region will not occur as a result of ‘warning failures’. Rather—should they occur—the question to be asked will be could they have been avoided through better and more timely decisions.
One way in which to better inform the Australian public of what might lie ahead would be for a rigorous independent and public strategic assessment of the prospects of war to be conducted outside of government. Such a strategic assessment could be based on publicly-available material, and would not have to rely on classified information. Conducted with an eye to Australian perspectives and interests, such a strategic assessment could make a real difference to public understanding, by raising awareness of the relevant issues and choices.
The strategic assessment would be tasked with answering three broad questions:
- Using an estimative process, what are the probability ratings of crisis, confrontation and conflict (including major war) in the Indo Pacific between now and 2030?
- Using scenario-based gaming techniques, how might such a war be triggered and unfold, how might it be conducted, and how might it end?
- What would be Australia’s strategic interests in these contingencies, and flowing from those interests, what courses of action would be open to Australia, including in relation to both lessening the risk of war, and preparing for war, should it come?
Such a strategic assessment exercise could be conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (this being core business for ASPI), perhaps in partnership with the National Security College and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, both of the Australian National University. The assessment team would consist of the best and brightest Australian minds from think tanks and academia, as well as serving Australian Public Service and Australian Defence Force members (who would be authorised to participate in a personal capacity).
Ideally, the project would be overseen by a group of eminent persons. Perhaps ASPI could enlist all living former deputy secretaries of defence strategy and former Vice Chiefs of the Defence Force (those two positions being the partnership in Defence where defence policy meets military strategy) as an ‘all-star’ group to guide and mentor the project. Such a list would include Paul Dibb, Ric Smith, Hugh White, Richard Brabin-Smith, Peter Jennings, Peter Baxter, Rebecca Skinner, Peter Tesch, Chris Barrie, Ken Gillespie, David Hurley, and Mark Binskin—a group which would bring a range of different perspectives to the project, along with a deep collective reservoir of knowledge, experience, and judgement.
This is but an idea. Better ones might be suggested. Anything would be an improvement on the tiresome and reductive commentary by categorisation (namely the trope of ‘hawks versus doves’) that dominates and blights Australian strategic discourse. By bringing different perspectives together, and engaging in a contest of estimates and ideas, we might stand a better chance of being vaguely right, rather than exactly wrong, on the question of war and peace in our region.
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