In a previous entry: 001081.html I tried to introduce the subject of "effects." Effects thinking tries to tease out "cause" by developing an imagined view of a desired effect. For example military people will look at precisely how much explosive it takes to destroy a bunker buried 100 meters beneath the ground and made with so and so amount of Concrete. To image such effects military thinkers try to calculate how much explosive it will take to get that effect, what kind of "vehicle" is needed to deliver it, etceteras.
Effects thinking is useful in developing scenarios or images for solving problems. Though it flows out of the military orientation towards accomplishing "objectives" it can be used for solving any sort of engineering type problem, not just military ones. The design for accomplishing such an effect is usually called an "architecture." The architecture of a bomb is analogous to that for a house or a cathedral. In all these cases one tries to anticipate what it takes to make, deliver, and use the system one is looking at.
There is an ethical and cognitive component to human behavior that is subtle, but very real and that must be considered when trying to imagine effective strategy and outcomes or the unintended "effects" of the methods used to attend ones ends will lead to very different outcomes from those intended.
The way that an effects approach generates results is that it starts with an ideal picture, compares it to reality, images an ideal picture, images the current state, and then seeks to image what is needed to get to that ideal state. This works really well when designing architectures such as Buildings or Airplanes. Not always so well when developing political strategy. This is because the scenarios envisioned all reflect contingent reality that contains assumptions about motivations and how people will respond to events that are not always true.
An effects approach is a highly effective (pun) way to go about envisioning an architecture (designs) for solving a practical problem. When thinking in terms of effects one envisions an idealized "effect." Say enlightenment, Heaven, Heaven on Earth, and then works back through a chain of causation to try to figure out how to get to that effect.
The problem with effects thinking is that when people focus on "effects" they often get misleading ideas about cause, not just at the engineering level, but from a moral view. This is because architects sometimes become so focused on "ends" or "effects" that they miss the importance of process (means) in getting to those ends. Or they fail to grasp the role of serendipity, luck, probability, risk, and human complexity in the "effects" they wish to achieve. That is why architects and other otherwise very intelligent people often make such poor quality moral leaders.
The effects approach can be used to design quite beautiful outcomes, but it also can produce less than ethically satisfying results. Indeed ends thinking can generate highly unethical behavior. In past posts I've been trying to explain why Christian and Moslem fundamentalism produces highly unethical behavior despite preachings about universality and peacefulness. The reason is that they adopt a really shallow reasoning to get to their ideal state. It's not rocket science why they arrive at exactly the opposite outcomes from those they imagine. People who "believe" in such visions tend to believe that the ends justify the means used to get there -- despite the fact that their means violate all the rules that their own systems create. God hasn't told anyone that mass murder, tyranny, and dogmatism is good behavior -- these people distort their source material to justify deeds on the grounds that they will produce desired effects which they won't do.
Ends thinking tends to color how people look at cause. The thinking may seem "objective" because it is focused on objectives, but it is not objective because it is colored with bad assumptions. In the complex causality that is the real world, even a particular cause that produces an effect in some cases may not always produce that particular effect in even the most slightly different circumstances. What "worked" in one circumstance may produce a disaster in similar circumstances. For ends thinking to produce predictable results the cause must be universal and when dealing with people it is not. People learn from each other. For every "counter-insurgency" play-book, there is a similar "insurgency" play-book, and vice versa.
War is the ultimate expression of ends based thinking. And war just doesn't really solve long term problems very well. Sometimes people are forced to go to war. Sometimes people are only happy defining themselves as "war-fighters" but warfighting only produces an endless cycle of war-fighting. To get to better results, one has to find better means, and those means involve considering cognitive, psychological, and yes even spiritual factors in designing policy and resolving conflict.
For example Robert MacNamara talks about this approach as used by General Curtis Lemay during World War II. In the "Fog of War" R. MacNamara tells us (in a PBS presentation) that Curtis Lemay wanted to minimize air-flier casualties. He decided that since a certain number of soldiers were going to die anyway, that he could best do this by minimizing casualties by making them a function of enemy casualties. In order to minimize human casualties he began to fly B-29's over Japan, first out of China (which was a disaster) and then out of Islands. Curtis Lemay and R. Macnamara solved massive logistics problems to get B-29's that could fly high high over their targets and destroy them from the air -- an altitude which most Japanese fighters couldn't fly high enough to shoot down.
However, the B-29 bombers weren't accurate enough. In order to hit those targets LeMay needed to bring them down lower. The trouble is that this would cause increased casualties to his troops and defeat the value of the B-29. So he decided that the way around this was that his pilots would fire-bomb Japan. Japan was mostly a wood based economy. If a fire-storm could be started entire cities could be burned down, factories and plants with them. So that is exactly what he did. He firebombed Tokyo, Yokohama, nearly every city in Japan. He skipped Nagasaki and Hiroshima and a couple of others. In the process he killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in each attack and millions in the aggregate.
The problem was that this was highly unethical. MacNamara and Lemay both later agreed that had the US lost WWII they both would have been tried successfully as war-criminals. It minimized American Casualties but maximized civilian casualties. It was disproportionate and barbaric. We justified it that these people would have killed US Marines later -- but that was not true -- these were mostly women and children. Our targets were the factories, war-fighting capabilities and the military men manning those capabilities. To him an effect of killing millions of innocent lives did not justify the cause because of the principle of proportionateness.
Even if a strategy is effective in the short run, if it is so unethical and disproportionate then it may still not be a good strategy.
Now Macnamara is still a believer in using effects based thinking. To him the attacks violated the principle of proportionality. The problem with effects based thinking is that it often leads to misapprehension of causality.
But the real issue here is that regardless of Macnamaras or LeMay's attitude what they did was barbarous. MacNamara doesn't blame Truman and notes that had the US not won the war he and LeMay would have been tried as war criinals. But this is too easy. Regardless of proportionateness or non-proportionate behavior, the calculations were based on the goals of the US, which were to beat the Japanese into submission. And given that over-arching goal, the means used to attain it were ruthlessly and diabolically effective. Nobody gets off the hook here. Not MacNamara, not the Presidents (Roosevelt and Truman), not the Japanese and not the US people either. War itself is an evil, and when nobody is living by any kind of "rules of war" then it is an ultimate evil and those sucked into part of that evil and soon caked in cloying sticking oily blood.
MacNamara later was Secretary of Defense for both Johnson and Kennedy. During his entire tenure he was less than enthusiastic about Vietnam, but like Colin Powell with Iraq, he was a good soldier and obeyed orders. He crunched the numbers according to the policy given him. The policy was flawed and the "intelligence" was flawed, and the South Vietnamese we were trying to help were never winning, and we undermined their chances by the decision to help them.
(note I started this post on June 18 2006, but just now finished it)