Every Attempt to Make War Easy

That the president thought Iran would be easy should have been the biggest warning

“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” -- William Tecumseh Sherman.

I first heard that quote from General James Mattis. I profiled him several years before he served as Secretary of Defense for a series I wrote about risk.

At the time Mattis was known for his famously efficient and successful command of the ground invasion of Iraq. When the war went to hell after the insurgency rose up in Fallujah, he was called in to fight again. Later he co-wrote with David Petraeus the book on how to fight an insurgency.

The key insight for counterinsurgency is that might does not make success. You can have all the tanks and guns in the world, which the Americans did in Iraq, but it was not able to subdue the insurgents. In Iran, American military dominance has not ended the war.

What I learned from Mattis was that certainty about risk is itself a warning sign. When you think a battle is going to be quick and easy, be worried.

“It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action,” said Mattis. “To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.”

The Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow arrived at the same place from a different direction. “Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty,” he wrote, “our knowledge of the way things work, in society or in nature, comes trailing clouds of vagueness.”

Arrow came to learn the danger of false certainty as a weather analyst during World War II. He was assigned to the Long Range Forecasting Group, charged with predicting the number of rainy days in particular combat areas — a month in advance. Being rigorous men, his team tested whether their forecasts were any better than random guessing. They were not.

When they asked to be relieved of the useless duty, superiors responded: “The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

In the Wall Street Journal Sunday, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey write about President Trump’s evolution on the Iran war:

After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place.

Here’s how Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman write about the same period in the New York Times:

[General Caine] also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that. The president appeared to think it would be a very quick war — an impression that had been reinforced by the tepid response to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

Venezuela was not a credential. It was a warning.