At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He said his team was authorised to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership….
Asked if so much care is being taken, why so many civilians are getting killed, Garlasco said because the Taliban were violating international law and because the US just does not have enough troops on the ground. “You have the Taliban shielding in people’s homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs,” he said.
“I don’t think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the US military goes through in order to make sure that they’re not killing civilians,” Garlasco said.
(link)
Making a calculation about how many civilians you’re willing to kill sounds completely outrageous, but such an approach is still better than bombing indiscriminately.
This reminds me of first term at IIMB, when one of us had to make a presentation about acceptable defect levels for our communications course. He was questioned on why he thought it was acceptable to pass any defect on to the customer at all, which sounds similarly outrageous (without obviously being as outrageous as civilian deaths).
Unfortunately, the English language (and most other natural languages) make it difficult to get the statistical point across. The idea is not to calculate how many deaths or defects you can get away with, but to assign a cost to defects to ensure you feel the pain of making each one.
(Note 1: I haven’t been very clear. In the unlikely event I find time, I may go back, pull out my Levin and Rubinstein and explain more clearly.)
(Note 2: This of course, holds good in the context that you assume that the goal of the war and eliminating Saddam are justified in the first place. Which is a whole other argument. Please do not bring it up in this post.)
” The idea is not to calculate how many deaths or defects you can get away with, but to assign a cost to defects to ensure you feel the pain of making each one. ”
When one says that no defect should be passed at all, isn’t one implicitly saying that the cost of each defect is (should be) arbitrarily high?
Ritwik,
yes. You are creating an infinite cost. The problem is that with a finite benefit, this will screw up all your tradeoff calculations.
Put it another way. If you do have a defect, the marginal cost of further defects becomes zero (because you have already borne infinite cost, and you cannot bear any more).