1 DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION Constructing Ships: Testing Ideational Explanations for Capital Ship Design -by- W. Alexander Vacca Ph.D. Northrop Grumman Corporation [email protected] The views in this paper are strictly those of the author, and are not necessarily reflective of the Northrop Grumman Corporation, its employees, its shareholders, or its customers. DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION 2 With two wars concluding and defense expenditures in Europe and the United States under scrutiny, there is no shortage of speculation about “the lessons of history” with respect to military performance. Only slightly less popular than speculating about the lessons of history is speculating why others ignore lessons of history in their own actions. There is a tendency in analysis of military forecasting to understand “why they got it wrong” (or right). Methodologically this is problematic, because the analyst writing today cannot expunge the benefit of hindsight. This hindsight may color the interpretation of results, or even taint the research design. Thus I choose a different approach, and one not focused on finding out who was right and who was wrong, but instead documenting which lessons were drawn. But how do military leaders actually perceive the effectiveness of weapons in combat? Analysing the lessons of history in the Russo-Japanese War on land, General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote that “on the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms”1. Erskine Childers, a contemporary of Hamilton, viewed the same battlefields and wrote. “I propose to discuss this question, avoiding so far as possible everything tending to cloud the vision with prejudice or bias. When I illustrate from recent facts it is not with the barren and invidious purpose of apportioning blame or praise, but with the single aim of elucidating the truth”2. And Sir Julian Corbett wrote that “The general failure to appreciate the situation correctly is only to be explained by the darkening effects which are caused by the abuse of maxims, by the endemic tendency to use them crudely as solutions, instead of reasoning by the principles they purport to condense”3. This paper seeks to test contending approaches to how motivated learners assimilate new information into their beliefs by examining the writings of high level naval policymakers on technical matters of capital ship design following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-19054. 1 Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer’s Scrap Book During the Russo- Japanese War (volume one) (Edward Arnold, 1905), page i. 2 Erskine Childers War and the Arme Blanche (Edward Arnold, 1910), p 20 3 Sir Julian Corbett Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 (Volume 2) (originally a confidential publication of the Committee on Imperial Defence, 1914, republished by US Naval Institute Press, 1994), p 174 4 For a review of learning theory see Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping A Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48:2 (Spring 1994) page 283 3 I look at contending approaches to learning and see what they predict diverse learners should learn given exposure to the same data. Will their organizational or cultural affiliations distort learning according to predictable patterns? Will they converge on similar lessons? Will individual biases and heuristics thwart convergence as a whole or within specific groups? By focusing on predicted and actual patterns of lesson drawing, I can eliminate the effects of hindsight and evaluate the explanatory power of the predictive approaches to learning. The first section of the paper will outline these approaches to learning. Approaches to Learning There are two traditions with sharply contrasted differences and very little overlap, these are the rational choice theories and cognitive theories5. Briefly, rational choice assumes that individuals are efficient calculators of information that seek and are able to make the best estimates of the probabilities of events and the underlying causal mechanisms that govern interactions. Cognitive theories explicitly reject these claims. Instead individuals are flawed calculators (though in predicable ways), they inefficiently search for information, and they do not make valid estimates of probability6. In addition, two other often used approaches overlay the rational and cognitive research programs. Using cognitive and rationalist microfoundations, they superimpose the notion of organizationally structured or ideationally constructed groups that shift the level of analysis from the individual to the group interest or shared idea. Organizational theories look at the formal rules and incentives of interaction, which are imposed by formal groups, and which govern an individual’s decision making process7. Cultural theories look at the equally compelling, though often less formalized, rules of interaction that function within social groups8. 5 The controversies over rational choice theory and its discontents have filled many a special issue of academic journals and led to many books. Often the debates can get a bit heated, and the participants enthusiasm for the topic occasionally overwhelms proper debate etiquette. For good overviews of the theory, some of its more prominent applications, its critics, and its response to those critics see Kristin Renwick Monroe (editor), The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (Harper Collins, 1991); Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (Yale University Press, 1994); and Jeffery Friedman (editor), The Rational Choice Controversy (Yale University Press 1996). 6 Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” Science (1974). This was refined as Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (editors) Judgment Under Uncertainty- Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982). 7 Kaufmann, Chaim, “Out of the Lab and into the Archives: A Method for Testing Psychological Explanations of Political Decision Making,” International Studies Quarterly, 38:4 (December 1994) pages 557-586; Nancy Kanwisher, “Cognitive Heuristics and American Security Policy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 33:4 (December 1989) 8 International Security 19:4 (Spring 1995) contained an entire forum entitled “Does Strategic Culture Matter” which included Stephen Peter Rosen, “Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters,” Alastair Iain Johnston, “Thinking About Strategic Culture,” and Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine: France Between the Wars,”. Shortly thereafter these became Rosen Societies & [sic] Military Power: India and Its Armies, (Cornell University Press, 1996); Iain Johnston 4 Confusion arises because cognitive and rational choice theories seek to be universal explanations of human behavior in their own right and are pressed into service as the operational microfoundations for more complex theories of social and structural organization. By itself organizational theory says very little. Instead, it is by coupling organization theory with concepts such as a cognitive desire to minimize inconsistency (dissonance), or to seek out confirming data rather than disconfirming evidence, or to believe that the “necessary is possible”; and conversely linking the organization to rational microfoundations, explaining through principle-agency why organizations do not behave as rational unitary bodies but instead exhibit pathologies that produce suboptimal outcomes above the organization level, or why information flows are distorted to benefit vested interests that real explanatory leverage is achieved9. In the same way, culture by itself has difficulty formulating a distinct causal argument, at least in a positivist social science framework. Instead, merging culture with psychology suggests an emphasis on socially shared reference points which serve as cognitive anchors that inhibit rational updating of beliefs. Shared symbols become decision heuristics which allow individuals to simplify complex environments and classify phenomena. The critical insight is that these anchors and symbols are shared by social groups, and thus different social groups respond differently to identical external stimuli. In his original formulation of strategic culture, Jack Snyder was quite explicit about the cognitive microfoundations of his theory. [s]trategic culture can be defined as the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patters of habitual behavior that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy. In the area of strategy, habitual behavior is largely cognitive behavior. This is true not only of the development of strategic doctrines but also of the weapons acquisition process and of crisis decisionmaking, during which the possible use of nuclear weapons might be considered. Because analytic argumentation lies at the core of such behavior, this report will emphasize the cognitive component of the Soviet strategic culture. In particular, it will discuss the body of attitudes and beliefs that guides and circumscribes thought on strategic questions, influences the way strategic issues are formulated, and sets the vocabulary and conceptual parameters of strategic debate… We assume that strategic cultures, like cultures in