Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover

Christopher Shea

American overconfidence on the road to Baghdad has been well catalogued, but it is worth remembering that the United States hardly monopolizes military hubris. Why, for instance, did Saddam Hussein conclude that he could survive a showdown with the United States? And why did the Taliban, rather than turn over Al Qaeda leaders, roll the dice on war with America?

Dominic D.P. Johnson offers a bio-political answer to such puzzles in his book "Overconfidence and War," which was published this year by Harvard University Press. "By virtue of human psychology," Johnson writes, "we should fully expect a bias toward overconfidence by all sides in conflicts today, whether they are superpowers, small states, freedom fighters or terrorists."

To reach this conclusion, Johnson applies the logic of evolution to international relations. Following one of his mentors, the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, he suggests that overconfidence might once have been helpful in war and conflict. On the ancient African savannah, it was actually rational to misestimate your own capacities: a fearsome appearance and bold tactics could intimidate the enemy and help carry the day during lightning raids on enemy camps. But today, given modern weaponry, bureaucratic planning and mass armies, a cocky disposition is as likely to be suicidal as it is glorious.

Military overconfidence, in other words, is a psychological holdover -- a cognitive appendix -- from an earlier period in human history. It is perhaps most dangerous when it prompts a decision for war in the first place. And it could be the X-factor explaining the otherwise inexplicable in recent military history: French faith in the Maginot line, Hitler's drive into Russia, the American failure to heed the lessons of French defeat in Vietnam.

Most humans are prone to overestimating themselves, but leaders (who are inordinately ambitious and, by definition, have suffered few recent professional setbacks) are especially susceptible. Fittingly, the cover of Johnson's book features George W. Bush in the famous flight suit, flashing an exuberant thumbs-up.


The Soccer Model of Warfare

Jeff Z. Klein

For decades, the American military's war-fighting paradigm has been provided by football: the massing and coordinated movement of overwhelming force, replete with a playbook of long bombs, end runs, blitzes and, most explicitly, the "Hail Mary" maneuver that sealed General Schwarzkopf's victory against Iraq in 1991. But this year, American defense experts debated the heretical possibility that the United States armed forces could learn more from soccer than from the Super Bowl.

Late last year, The Armed Forces Journal published "Football vs. Soccer: American Warfare in an Era of Unconventional Threats," an article by Joel Cassman, a career Foreign Service officer, and David Lai, a professor at the United States Air War College. Soccer, they wrote, is the model for unconventional forces like terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgencies: like a soccer team, they use finesse, patience, surprise attack, improvisation and low technology and make a virtue out of decentralized control and execution. "Contemporary U.S. adversaries who use soccer strategies tend to look at the entire world as their playing field, taking action at openings where the United States and its allies are vulnerable," Cassman and Lai wrote, citing as examples the Sept. 11 attacks, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

The solution, according to Cassman and Lai, is for the American armed forces to become far more soccerlike themselves by developing small, flexible units that can operate autonomously to meet the elusive enemy wherever it appears. "The United States needs to reorient its thinking about war," they wrote, "not as a series of discrete battles ('plays') marching down a field to victory, but rather a continuous struggle" involving "a shifting combination of offense and defense" that takes place "over a long period."

Throughout 2004, rebuttal articles appeared touting "the football advantage" over what was sometimes sniffily referred to as soccer's "more continental nuances." They argued that the "gridiron approach" keeps American casualties down and is generally superior as a war-fighting strategy. But according to John Roos, editor of The Armed Forces Journal, "the military is trying for a more mobile, flexible force in Iraq, so at least for now it's leaning more toward the soccer side."