Military adventures and skin in the game
Why would anything change if there are no consequences?
One overlooked aspect of the Taliban returning to Afghanistan is that there will be no consequences for those in charge.
Sure, there may be electoral defeat in the midterms for some politicians. And there may even be a Senate hearing. If some military officials had affairs, they may even be demoted to taking consulting jobs as private equity firms.
But there will be no real consequences for those that as late as July 2021 said this would not happen. Or those that encouraged aggressive military posturing for the last two decades. Or those that promised a democratic beacon in the middle east. Don’t worry, the president of Afghanistan is safe and may even hit the lecture circuit soon.
Who are these people anyway? I don’t know. Most people don’t know. You’ll read newspaper articles and they’ll mention the current or former president. They’ll mention a spicy tweet from some social commentator. But they won’t mention those that whispered into the ears of officials for the last twenty years.
Apart from the president, the decision makers don’t change. They’re revered as being apolitical, simply executing orders, making recommendations and giving their best assessment with the information available to them. Thousands have built there careers on this war.
This reminded me of an interview Nassim Taleb gave on Econ Talk in 2013 in which he talks about risk taking and military conflicts (slightly edited and abbreviated):
[Taleb] But if someone got to take the risk, you're the one who takes it. And that's sort of like the idea was not to die in a nursing home with tubes coming out of your nose. The idea is to die in battle.
So and that I think was preventing a society. But today when the gentleman who was the head of the CIA was a big military person when he was busted, was Petraeus. I thought, I mean look at his Wikipedia page and there were all these decorations. Hundreds and hundreds of decorations. I thought that the fellow jumped from helicopters at night, climbed walls… No, it turned out that the seller had never been in battle.
So here we have a generation of people who have never had to take risk for the sake of others. And society cannot function when you have an imbalance between the first column is people who make others risk for them. And then you have the right column people to take risk for the sake of others. You see, and you can't function that way. You cannot have too many of the Petraeus and George W Bush who have never taken personal risk. But there's others in war. We need the reverse and we had plenty of these variation earlier.
Taleb goes on to mention a simple heuristic for war proposed by Ralph Nader:
[Taleb] I mean, people have occurred to voice their opinion, but we can protect ourselves just like the ancient by finding very simple heuristics like Ralph Nader has a heuristic for war. He said, if you're gonna vote for war, you should have a member of your family, a descendant, a son or grandson on the draft, then you can vote for war.
And in a way it's liberating on both sides when I manage money and, and you know, of course I lose money very frequently, I lose every battle, but ended up getting worse. But so you lose money every day and clients would call you, you pick up the phone, you're not even uncomfortable because I've lost 10 times more. At least 10 times up to 50 times more. So it's liberating on both sides is you don't feel guilt if you have skin in the game.
[Roberts] So that the investor sleeps well at night knowing that the manager is sleeping with the same portfolio is he is and you don't have the guilt.
[Taleb] Exactly. And then, and the manager doesn't have the guilt because he has 50 times the relative exposure
This doesn’t even go far enough, because with today’s modern warfare, casualties are increasingly imbalanced. With drone warfare, it’s possible that risk on the US side could be minimal from a human life perspective. And many hawks do have family in the military, although maybe not on the front line.
But if there were some skin in the game where the leaders would have to bare the fate of the occupied country, or have to commit their personal fortune to the endeavor. Or increase taxes proportionately to pay for the conflict outright rather than financing it through debt, money printing or reallocation from other places.
All I know is if we had more skin in the game, perhaps we’d have less military adventurism, and that would be a good thing.