Tancredo: Bomb Muslim Holy Sites

[Nat Wilcox]

In extensive games (that is, games that unfold over time, sequentially), people frequently talk about the credibility of a threat...the formal development of the theory of credible threats is associated with a German, Reinhard Selten, who received the 1994 Nobel prize in part for that. Here's a nice picture of Reinhard:

selten.jpg

One interesting thing about Reinhard is that aside from being a theorist of the first order--one of the main developers of "high game theory". that is "super-rational game theory"--he was also maybe the primary proponent of experimental methods in the European economic community, and a strong proponent of empirical discipline in understanding how people actually do play games, as opposed to how they ought to according to the maxims of high game theory. Reinhard believes very sincerely that a lot of how people do in fact play games is highly psychological. So I think he would agree that for a frightful threat to really be credible, we have to think about the psychology of people who would carry out the threat.

My impression is that you military folks have understood all this very well, for a long time...that credibility depends strongly on the automaticity of retaliation, and of course that was one of the main themes in Dr. Strangelove: The reason that the "Doomsday Machine" was credible is that it was automatic and could not be tampered with. Retaliation was guaranteed--taken out of the hands of human decision makers who might fail to carry out the frightful retaliation. Yet the belief that it would be carried out is of course essential to making sure it never has to be.

Anyway, my impression is that in the frightening world of real nuclear strategic deterrence, you military folks had to confront this credibility issue head-on, creating elaborate layers of checks on "human weakness". And sensibly so. I cannot imagine being the person commanded to turn a key that would obliterate any city, even a Soviet target after a first strike on us.

Yet I can imagine the psychological training of the soldiers given these frightening responsibilities. In part, it would have to be based on "good reasons," that is some sort of clear understanding of the connection between the intended targets and the decision makers who are responsible for the awful first move. In the nuclear standoff of MAD, the required connections can perhaps be made reasonable (Your industrial city for ours; our cities, society and leadership are one, and so it is with the enemy.) Soldiers entrusted with those kinds of heavy responsibilities in some sense need to know why--extremely clearly. They need a plausible "moral script" if you like. Without it, if and when the time comes, how can they be depended on to do the awful deed?

I cannot see any easy way to establish these kinds of connections for the purpose of deterring nonstate actors with the threat of destroying (say) Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām. Is it actually possible to train soldiers to believe that such an action is based on "good reasons?" The connection between (say) OBL and (say) Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām is at best tenuous. OBL does not direct Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, and he does not receive directions from it. Could you even depend on airmen to carry out such a frightful command?

If not, there is no credible threat, and non-credible threats cannot deter.

So, I wonder if in this sense there is just something deeply flawed with even the idea of such threats, at least for the purpose of deterrence. I know that soldiers have successfully carried out frightful commands in the past--we can all think of obvious examples from the last few years of WWII. But all of the examples I can think of have two characteristics: (a) They follow a long period of successive escalations of the scale of destruction, and (b) they also involve targets that fit into some plausible "moral script" for the action.