Jeffrey A. Friedman

Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?

Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for policy and scholarship, yet this debate has not moved from hypothesis to test. An assessment of the competing claims based on recently declassified data on violence at local levels and information gathered from seventy structured interviews with coalition participants finds little support for the cleansing or Awakening theses. Instead, a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required for violence to drop as quickly and widely as it did: both were necessary; neither was sufficient. U.S. policy thus played an important role in reducing the violence in Iraq in 2007, but Iraq provides no evidence that similar methods will produce similar results elsewhere without local equivalents of the Sunni Awakening.

Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine

How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaigns since World War I. These data provide insight into a range of important issues, such as how force size should be measured, whether it is related to counterinsurgent success, whether troop nationality matters, and whether the role of manpower varies across contexts. Of these findings, the most notable is that conventional rules of thumb for force sizing, including the recommendation put forth in official US military doctrine, receive no empirical support. These findings therefore challenge the prevailing wisdom, while laying the groundwork for a range of future scholarship.

Assessing Uncertainty in Intelligence

This article addresses the challenge of managing uncertainty when producing estimative intelligence. Much of the theory and practice of estimative intelligence aims to eliminate or reduce uncertainty, but this is often impossible or infeasible. This article instead argues that the goal of estimative intelligence should be to assess uncertainty. By drawing on a body of nearly 400 declassified National Intelligence Estimates as well as prominent texts on analytic tradecraft, this article argues that current tradecraft methods attempt to eliminate uncertainty in ways that can impede the accuracy, clarity, and utility of estimative intelligence. By contrast, a focus on assessing uncertainty suggests solutions to these problems and provides a promising analytic framework for thinking about estimative intelligence in general.

Handling and Mishandling Estimative Probability: Likelihood, Confidence, and the Search for Bin Laden

In a series of reports and meetings in Spring 2011, intelligence analysts and officials debated the chances that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Estimates ranged from a low of 30 or 40 per cent to a high of 95 per cent. President Obama stated that he found this discussion confusing, even misleading. Motivated by that experience, and by broader debates about intelligence analysis, this article examines the conceptual foundations of expressing and interpreting estimative probability. It explains why a range of probabilities can always be condensed into a single point estimate that is clearer (but logically no different) than standard intelligence reporting, and why assessments of confidence are most useful when they indicate the extent to which estimative probabilities might shift in response to newly gathered information.

Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size

Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations about what event data on armed conflict would look like if those data were complete. This technique is applied to estimate the number of Native American and US casualties in the American Indian Wars between 1776 and 1890, demonstrating how scholars can use power laws to estimate conflict size, even (and perhaps especially) where previous literature has been unable to do so.

Why Assessing Estimative Accuracy is Feasible and Desirable

The US Intelligence Community (IC) has been heavily criticized for making inaccurate estimates. Many scholars and officials believe that these criticisms reflect inappropriate generalizations from a handful of cases, thus producing undue cynicism about the ICs capabilities. Yet there is currently no way to evaluate this claim, because the IC does not systematically assess the accuracy of its estimates. Many scholars and practitioners justify this state of affairs by claiming that assessing estimative accuracy would be impossible, unwise, or both. This article shows how those arguments are generally unfounded. Assessing estimative accuracy is feasible and desirable. This would not require altering existing tradecraft and it would address several political and institutional problems that the IC faces today.

Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq

Americans are inclined to remember their nation’s wars victoriously. “Let it be remembered,” President Barack Obama told the Minneapolis American Legion veterans of the Vietnam War on August 30, 2011, “that you won every major battle of that war.”1 He repeated this message on May 28, 2012, during the commemoration ceremony of the aftieth anniversary of this war at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.2 How soon might we hear talk of winning the major battles in Iraq? Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro (hereafter Biddle et al.) caution that “[t]he decline of violence in Iraq in 2007 does not mean that the war was necessarily a success.”3 Their implication, however, is that the war was not necessarily a failure either. Biddle et al. write that the 2007 drop in violence from 2006 was a “remarkable reversal.” They ask, “What caused this turnaround?” (p. 7). Their answer is that the United States devised a strategy that stopped the violence in Iraq with a “synergistic” combination of the U.S. troop surge and the U.S. subsidized Sunni Awakening that “stood up” the Sons of Iraq (SOI). Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq

Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals

National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into falsifiable hypotheses which we evaluate through survey experiments involving national security professionals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that decision makers responding to quantitative probability assessments are less willing to support risky actions and more receptive to gathering additional information. Yet we also find that when respondents estimate probabilities themselves, quantification magnifies overconfidence, particularly among low-performing assessors. These results hone wide-ranging concerns about probabilistic precision into a specific and previously undocumented bias that training may be able to correct.

How Quantifying Probability Assessments Influences Analysis and Decision Making: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals

National security is one of many fields where public officials offer imprecise probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice is often justified with arguments about how quantifying subjective judgments would bias analysts and decision makers toward overconfident action. We translate these arguments into testable hypotheses, and evaluate their validity through survey experiments involving national security professionals. Results reveal that when decision makers receive numerals (as opposed to words) for probability assessments, they are less likely to support risky actions and more receptive to gathering additional information, disconfirming the idea of a bias toward action. Yet when respondents generate probabilities themselves, using numbers (as opposed to words) magnifies overconfidence, especially among low-performing assessors. These results hone directions for research among both proponents and skeptics of quantifying probability estimates in national security and other fields. Given that uncertainty surrounds virtually all intelligence reports, military plans, and national security decisions, understanding how national security officials form and interpret probability assessments has wide-ranging implications for theory and practice.

Autoimmunity to Tamm-Horsfall Protein

Although interstitial inflammation and fibrosis, and tubular damage are prominent pathologic features in a variety of renal diseases, the pathogenesis of these lesions has received much less attention than have mechanisms of glomerular injury. Recently, clinical and experimental studies have shown that, in addition to well-established roles of immunologic mechanisms in glomerulonephritis, such immune mechanisms can cause tubulointerstitial nephritis also. Primary antibody-mediated tubular and interstitial lesions may be caused by either antibodies to tubular basement membranes (TBM) or by immune complexes. Anti-TBM-mediated nephritis is characterized by a smooth linear pattern of immunoglobulin fixed along the TBM, and the pathogenesis of these lesions has been discussed in detail (McCluskey and Colvin, 1978). In this discussion, features of tubulointerstitial nephritis mediated by immune complexes and having a granular staining pattern will be presented with emphasis on the pathogenesis of renal lesions produced by antibodies to Tamm-Horsfall protein (TH), a urinary glycoprotein of renal origin.