Daily Alert Archives

The Science of War

(Ynet News) Prof. Yisrael Aumann, 2005 Nobel Prize Winner - I'm constantly asked whether game theory can bring about a resolution of the conflicts in the Middle East. Game theory cannot provide a magic formula that will suddenly resolve a century-old conflict. No academic discipline can do that. Game theory isn't about the resolution of conflicts. It's about understanding conflicts. Once we understand conflicts, perhaps we can use some of these insights to try to resolve them. Up to now all our efforts have been put into resolving specific conflicts. I'd like to suggest that we should shift emphasis and study war in general. War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war. It's a phenomenon, not a series of isolated events. Efforts to resolve specific conflicts are certainly laudable, and sometimes they bear fruit. But there's also another way of going about it - studying war as a general phenomenon, studying general characteristics, identifying common denominators and differences. Why does homo economicus - rational man - go to war? Can war be rational? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. It is a big mistake to say that war is irrational. Once we understand that war is rational, we can at least somehow address the problem. If we simply dismiss it as irrational, we can't address the problem. To prevent war, an obvious solution might be to disarm, to lower the level of armaments. But in fact the opposite might be true. In the long, dark years of the cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, what prevented war was the existence of nuclear weapons. Disarming would have led to war.
2005-12-30 00:00:00
Full Article