Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

Remember, history is written by the survivors

We are urged to learn from history. But what if the history is biased? Here’s a case showing how slanted history can lead to bad decisions.

In October 1962, the Administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy faced its most serious foreign policy crisis.¹

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted to bolster relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba and act on its promise to defend Cuba from attack by the United States. In May 1960, the USSR began shipping ballistic missiles to Cuba and technicians to operate them. Khrushchev believed that President Kennedy would not confront the Soviets over the move.

'THE BRINK OF WAR'

But he was wrong. Kennedy engaged in extensive consultation with his foreign policy and military advisers. Then, the U.S. blockaded Cuba, putting the two sides on the brink of nuclear war. A chastened Khrushchev capitulated six days later, after back-door negotiations. The Soviet missiles were dismantled. In return, the U.S. disbanded its already obsolete missile sites in Turkey.

The above telling of the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is derived from how it is presented on the U.S. State Department’s and other web sites.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is usually presented as a case study in “courage, wisdom, and fine-tuned signal sending on the part of Kennedy and his aides.” Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., part of the Kennedy administration, wrote in 1965 that President Kennedy had “dazzled the world” through a “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.”²

Yet, a deeper examination of the official history shows this depiction was incomplete and misleading.

ACCOUNTS AND FACTS DIFFER

Important to note is that Kennedy and his aides made sure their actions were presented in the best light, through interviews, articles and books. Differences between their accounts and the facts that subsequently emerged include:

• Claim: The standoff ended because of stalwart brinkmanship by the U.S. Reality: The standoff ended because of backdoor diplomacy. Kennedy led an intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort involving the USSR, other countries and the U.N. secretary-general.³
  
  
• Claim: Kennedy was a tough negotiator who stood down Khrushchev. Reality: The deal for a Turkey-Cuba missile swap was kept secret for about 25 years. Rather than being “tough,” Kennedy yielded to make the deal for a U.S.-Soviet settlement.⁴
  
  
• Claim: The President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was a dove who opposed an airstrike on Cuba and who stood up to other advisors who advocated for military action. Reality: To the contrary, his first instinct was to advocate an invasion of Cuba.⁵
  
  
• Claim: Robert Kennedy wrote a response to Khrushchev that ignored Khrushchev’s call for a Turkey-Cuba missile swap and instead accepted what appeared to be his previous offer to remove the missile sites in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba. Reality: The letter was a group effort and along with it the President had his brother tell the USSR’s ambassador that the U.S. would withdraw its missiles from Turkey.⁶
  
  
• Claim: The deliberations of the ExComm, the informal group of advisors who determined U.S. actions during the crisis, were organized and exhaustive. Reality: The ExComm paid little attention to likely Soviet motives for siting the missiles in Cuba, to view the situation from the USSR’s perspective. The ExComm mostly ignored the not small possibilities of strategic error, such as one side or the other accidently launching nuclear missiles.⁷
  
  
• Claim: Discovering the Soviet missiles in Cuba was a great intelligence coup, showing that U.S. intelligence was on top of Cuba-USSR actions and possibilities. Reality: Four pre-crisis intelligence estimates revealed little concern by U.S. intelligence officials about risk of a military threat from Cuba or the USSR, despite increasing intelligence showing a massive arms buildup in Cuba.⁸
  
  
• Claim: The U.S. was the winner. Reality: Both sides won. The USSR got the missiles removed and a guarantee that the U.S. would not invade Cuba.⁹
  
  
• Claim: U.S. and Soviet ships were “eyeball to eyeball” in the most tense and dangerous moments of the crisis. Reality: Soviet ships carrying nuclear equipment were already 200 miles distant, re-called by Khrushchev, by the time the blockade was established.¹⁰

Interesting, but why does it matter, you might ask? Here’s why. This biased initial history of the U.S. success in standing down the Soviet Union led to great U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and loss of that war.

VICTIMS OF HUBRIS

Analysts Eliot A. Cohen, in “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,” and Michael Dobbs, in “Why We Should Still Study the Cuban Missile Crisis,” both persuasively make the case that the members of the ExConn including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Counselor Walt Rostow were victims of hubris: They thought they could handle complex politico-military situations without military advice.^{11 12}

Just as Kennedy quarantined Cuba to signal U.S. determination to Khrushchev, they tried to use U.S. air power to signal North Vietnam about U.S. determination not to stand down. But North Vietnam did not back down and instead matched U.S. escalations of the war with their own. The defense secretary who replaced McNamara, Clark Clifford wrote, “Their success in handling a nuclear showdown with Moscow had created a feeling that no nation as small and backward as North Vietnam could stand up to the power of the U.S. They possessed a misplaced belief that American power could not be successfully challenged, no matter what the circumstances, anywhere in the world.”^{13 14}

MISLEAD BY FALLACY AND BIAS

Thus U.S. advisors were mislead by the fallacy of silent evidence, that is, not seeing the full story when looking at history, just seeing the rosier parts of the process reported by the “winners.” U.S. policy was tragically misguided because of survivorship bias, that is, concentrating on and giving undue credit to the people, things or interpretations that "survived" the process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their invisibility.

---

NOTES

1 https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/cubanmissile

2 https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/sr205.pdf

3 https://www.salon.com/2012/10/13/cuban_missile_crisis_beliefs_endure_after
_50_years/

4 https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2012-10/reconsidering-perilous-cuban-missile-crisis-50-years-later

5 https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/sr205.pdf

6 https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/sr205.pdf

7 https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2012-10/reconsidering-perilous-cuban-missile-crisis-50-years-later

8 https://www.hoover.org/research/cuban-missile-crisis-intelligence-failure

9 https://www.salon.com/2012/10/13/cuban_missile_crisis_beliefs_endure_after
_50_years/

10 https://www.salon.com/2012/10/13/cuban_missile_crisis_beliefs_endure_after
_50_years/

11 Eliot A. Cohen, “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,”
National Interest, Winter 1985/86

12 https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/sr205.pdf

13 Eliot A. Cohen, “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,”
National Interest, Winter 1985/86

14 https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/sr205.pdf

Beliefs about members of a group matter

Here’s a story about what can go wrong when we hold beliefs about a group and attribute these beliefs to the members of the group.

The Battle of Little Bighorn, also called Custer's Last Stand, took place in Montana Territory on June 25-26, 1876, between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army.¹

George Armstrong Custer’s fame began as a daring major general of calvalry in the Civil War a decade earlier. Now commissioned as a lieutenant colonel, Custer had been chasing and fighting Indians in the western plains since 1866. He was part of a push to clear all Plains Indian tribes from the territory so the U.S. could take possession of the Black Hills.²

THEY USUALLY FLED

Usually the Indians fled from the soldiers, so it was unusual that at Little Bighorn Custer and his 800 troopers found an estimated 3,000 Indians in a valley near the Little Bighorn River, called together by Hunkpapa Lakota holy man Sitting Bull to discuss what to do about the whites.³

When Custer's scouts spotted the Indian encampment, he decided to attack immediately and divided his forces into three battalions. Custer rode his troops north, hidden to the east of the encampment by bluffs. When Major Marcus Reno’s battalion had to take cover after a failed charge, part of Custer's troops tried to ford the river but were driven off by Indian sharpshooters. The soldiers were pursued by hundreds of warriors onto a ridge. The U.S. troops were prevented from digging in by Chief Crazy Horse, whose fighters had outflanked them and were at the crest.⁴

Custer's men appear to have been deployed in a skirmish line. When the Indians charged through the line, according to Lakota accounts, many soldiers threw down their weapons and rode or ran towards the knoll where Custer, other officers, and about 40 men were making a stand. The warriors rode them down and then overwhelmed Custer and his companions.⁵

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a stunning victory for the Native Americans. The 7th Cavalry, casualties numbered 268 dead, including Custer, and 55 wounded.⁶

WHY DID THE INDIANS WIN?

Why did the Indians win? Objectively, they had better weapons obtained from traders and were better sharpshooters. They held the high ground and had strength of numbers. And they were better hand-to-hand fighters than the U.S. troops.

But why did Custer not think defensively when he knew he was greatly outnumbered and did not have the advantage of better terrain? Why, even when it should have been clear that running would have saved lives, did Custer continue his attack?

IN HIS HEAD

Clearly, how Custer viewed the Indians opposing him led him astray. Custer stereotyped Indians as backward and unsophisticated. Stereotyping is the mental error of sharing in a widely held but over generalized and oversimplified belief about a particular category of person or thing, with the expectation that what we believe applies to every or nearly every person of the particular group. In the case of the Plains tribes, this stereotype did not apply.

Further, the potential of smart leadership by Sitting Bull and the other chiefs was likely discounted by Custer because of ultimate attribution error, that is, making an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group. Custer likely thought that it just was not possible for Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to out-general him because they were Indians and Indians were not that intelligent, and, in any case, he had never encountered Indian leaders who could beat him.

He was wrong, fatally wrong.

---

NOTES

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

2 https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/george-armstrong-custer

3 https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/battle-of-the-little-bighorn

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armstrong_Custer

5 https://military.wikia.org/wiki/George_Armstrong_Custer

6 https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/battle-of-the-little-bighorn

 

Not knowing we don't know

To lack relevant knowledge without realizing it can have disastrous consequences. Consider, for example, the underestimation of the risk of a nuclear accident when constructing the Fukushima power plant in Japan.

By Digital Globe - Earthquake and Tsunami damage-Dai Ichi Power Plant, Japan, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14630274

By IAEA Imagebank - https://www.flickr.com/photos/iaea_imagebank/8657963646/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56218685

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan's Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture was sited on a high bluff over the ocean. The seawall around the reactors was 10 meters (33 feet) high.¹

In siting the plant, the power company TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear regulators relied on a risk assessment that concluded that there was an infinitesimal chance of the region suffering an earthquake greater than magnitude 8.0, the strongest earthquake previously recorded. Further, the 10-meter seawall was deemed sufficient because there was no history of a tsunami exceeding that height.²

MORE POWERFUL AND HIGHER

Sadly, the Tohoku earthquake that hit the region on March 11, 2011, was magnitude 9.0, 10 times as powerful as the maximum earthquake that the power plant was built to withstand. And the resulting tsunami peaked at 13-14 meters (43-46 feet), 3-4 meters above the seawall.³

The active reactors were automatically shut down when the earthquake occurred. When the electricity supply failed, emergency diesel generators powered pumps to circulate coolant through the reactors' cores to remove decay heat.⁴ 

The resulting tsunami that hit 50 minutes later flooded the Units 1–4 reactor buildings and knocked out the emergency generators. The loss of coolant resulted in three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions and the release of radioactive contamination. Radiation released to the atmosphere forced the government to evacuate 154,000 residents from a 20-kilometer radius around the plant.⁵

Large amounts of radioactive water were discharged into the Pacific Ocean. The long-term health effects of the disaster are as of yet unclear. In any case, decontaminating the affected areas and decommissioning the plant will take 30 to 40 years, according to TEPCO.⁶

TOO SMALL A SAMPLE

The nuclear plant had been built to withstand the strongest past earthquake, with TEPCO and the regulators not envisioning worse. In retrospect, the evidence relied on for siting the plant was insufficient. Evidence was missed that would have changed the plans for siting and protecting the plant: Subsequent research has shown that a wave high enough to overtake the reactors had hit the coast a millennium ago. Further, a probabilistic approach - asking what were the odds of it happening rather than had it ever happened in recorded history - would have dictated against siting the plant on the bluff.⁷

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster offers a stark example of what can go wrong when we reply on a small and biased sample of data.

We are prone to display insensitivity to sample size, that is, we expect too little variation based on what we see in small samples. We tend to use insufficient statistics, that is, we draw a statistical conclusion from a set of data that is clearly too small. We are trapped by biased generalizing, that is, we misassess the situation by drawing a conclusion from a biased or insufficient sample.

In short, a handful of historical observations of earthquakes and tsunamis are not sufficiently predictive of the nature of future earthquakes and tsunamis. 

But why did engineers and regulators, supposed experts, fall prey to the trap of relying on insufficient and biased information?

SWAYED BY BELIEFS AND THEORIES

One explanation is that they, like all humans, are prone to making the fundamental cognitive error. We tend to underestimate the contribution of our beliefs and theories to observation and judgement. We often don't recognize when we've made an interpretation and that there are other ways that the information could have been interpreted.

The problem is that our past experiences color how we interpret evidence and new experiences. If we have never seen nor heard of an earthquake above 8.0 on the Richter scale and a tsunami higher than 10 meters, why should we expect these conditions in the future?

The belief that the worst had already occurred was disastrous.

NOTES

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/world/asia/tepco-admits-failure-in-acknowledging-risks-at-nuclear-plant.html

3 https://www.livescience.com/39110-japan-2011-earthquake-tsunami-facts.html

4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_
(Unit_3_Reactor)

6 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/fukushima-japan-will-have-to-dump-radioactive-water-into-pacific-minister-says

7 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/opinion/fukushima-could-have-been-prevented.html