Stabbing Caesar

 

                                           The last exit?  Photo credit: Al Drago, The New York Times

Should Joe Biden quit the Presidential race? Two questions are in play.

The first is whether he is too sick to be President. Of the three branches of government, the Executive is unique for being just one person, and an extremely powerful one. He doesn’t just manage the agencies. He commands the armed forces, makes foreign policy, issues pardons, and advises the nation in speeches that are the most influential of any American. The Supreme Court notes that he cannot do his job if he decides feebly. Indeed, the Court’s grant this week of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official Presidential assumes that fending off criminal charges would leave him little time for big decisions. The Court wrote that, as with civil suits, criminal prosecution might “chill” the President “from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive.”

But surely feeble reasoning also leads to feeble decisions. In a debate last week for which he himself proposed the rules, Biden struggled for thought and sometimes ended in non sequiturs (“We finally beat Medicare”). This was not just one bad night. In an interview with David Muir of ABC News just before his D-Day speech, Biden again spoke barely above a whisper and was virtually impossible to understand. In his first two years, Biden gave fewer press conferences than any President since Reagan, reported The New York Times. He met with journalists 54 times; Trump in his first two years, 202 times. On Monday night, Biden passed up the opportunity to show that he could think on his feet. Instead, he read from a teleprompter his statement about the Court’s immunity ruling and refused to answer questions. His recent faux pas include saying in February that he had just met François Mitterrand, a French President who died in 1996, rather than President Emmanuel Macron, as well as meeting with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, who died in 2017, rather than with former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

On the other hand, Trump in a January speech confused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with his own United Nations Ambassador and chief rival for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley. And in 2020 he proposed on TV to cure Covid-19 by injecting bleach into the blood.

Is Biden mentally incompetent as President? The Constitution has a way to answer this question – the 25th Amendment. The President can be removed if the Vice President and a majority of Cabinet officers agree that he is not fit to serve. There is no evidence that Biden is anywhere near this point. By Constitutional standards, he is competent. At the moment.

But we have faced this problem before. When President Woodrow Wilson fell to a neurological illness in 1919 while campaigning for the Versailles Treaty ending World War I, his wife Edith was said to have secretly made decisions for him. Aides to President Ronald Reagan considered the 25th Amendment when his attention flagged in his second term. Yet the Constitution recognizes only the Vice President as the successor to an incapacitated President.

What about informal standards for Presidential competence? Every person will answer for herself. I think that most of Biden’s decisions have been reasonable, although, as a fiscal conservative, I disagree with most of them. I have not seen an increasing trend toward ridiculous decisions, aside from his threat in May to withhold smart bombs from Israel if it invaded Rafah by land, a threat with no obvious connection to American national interests.

Trump, on the other hand, has proposed to use the military as mercenaries, which demonstrates feeble reasoning. He brought this idea up in a 2017 meeting in the “the Tank” of the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff met, wrote Leonnig and Rucker. And he returned to it in last week’s debate, when he said he would consider pulling out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization if NATO members did not pony up to their funding pledges. That amounts to using the armed forces to make, or save, money.

The second question is whether Biden’s poor speaking will cost him the election. In national polls, Biden and Trump are in a dead heat. In a few battleground states, Trump leads, according to the newspapers. But they have overstated the number of states in which he leads, because they apply to state polls too small of a margin of error.

For example, The Washington Post declared on June 26 that Trump was winning in four of seven battleground states (North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia), assuming a 3.5% “normal-sized polling error.” The other three battleground states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—were too close to call.

How did The Post decide that 3.5% was a “normal” error? Its technical notes say: “We found in the last few presidential cycles that the average modeled polling error in competitive states was 3.5 percentage points, so to account for this, our averages factor in the 90th percentile possible error (i.e., how bad would the error be in the worst 10 percent of cases).”

The point to note is that The Post is allowing for a potential error of 10% in identifying the winning candidate, not the usual 5% maximum error. Because The Post is unusually tolerant of error, it uses an unusually small margin of error in determining whether the candidate leading in the poll is actually winning the race. This means that Trump may not be winning in all four states by the usual criteria. For a state poll, and a potential error in identifying the winner of 5% or less, a margin of error of 5% would not be surprising. Using this margin of error, Trump led in only one of the seven battleground states—Georgia, where his margin over Biden was 6%.

The Post did not explain why it had doubled the conventional tolerance of error. Nor did it tell the general reader that it had done so.

To the Post's credit, it did try to go beyond the standard margin-of-error analysis, which, as you have pointed out, assumes that the polled sample is randomly drawn from the population of likely voters and therefore a reasonably accurate reflection of it. The Post mentions measurement error and frame error. 

(A note for readers who have better things to do with their time than pore over statistics: Measurement error arises from one's attempt to measure a process. For example, if I use a ruler marked off in centimeters to estimate the length of a cockroach -- hey, I've got to have some kind of hobby -- my answer will probably be off by several millimeters. In political polling, measurement error may occur because the interviewers are poorly trained, and so forth. 

(Frame error occurs because the makeup of the sample differs from the makeup of the population studied.  If my sample is 70% women and the population is 50% women, then the sample might not accurately depict the population.) 

But The Post doesn't make clear exactly what it did about particular errors. 

I worry especially about nonresponse error in Trump-Biden polling. Nonresponse error may be growing: The Pew Research Center said that in telephone surveys, its response rate in surveys had dropped from 36% in 1997 to 9% in 2012. It is reasonable to think that potential respondents whose favored candidate is losing are less likely to take part in a survey. That would bias the sample in favor of the winning candidate. I suspect that many Biden fans will be too depressed to talk to interviewers. 

(Here is a nice article on political polling:  When You Hear the Margin of Error Is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

(On nonresponse rates, see Assessing the Representativeness of Public Opinion Surveys | Pew Research Center/)

But Biden is certainly not winning the race. In a post-debate CBS poll, 72% of the respondents doubted that he could think clearly enough to be President. In a flash poll after the debate, CNN found that two-thirds of the respondents thought that Trump had won the debate. Roper and Gallup, which have been polling reactions to Presidential debates since the 1940s, have not yet released their results.

Biden has committed to the second and last debate on September 9, hosted by ABC News. I assume that it would follow the same rules as the first. Given the visible deterioration in Biden's speaking over the past month, I do not see why he would do better in two months. And losing a second debate two months before the election cannot help him.

In sum, I worry less about his fitness for office than about his chances of winning, although I worry about both.

This question bears upon Central Asia because Biden strongly supports Ukraine in its war with Russia. The American support of Ukraine has led to sanctions against Russia, and these indirectly create a black market for military exports from Central Asia to Russia. If Trump returns to the White House, he will probably end sanctions against Russia, and the black market will collapse. -- Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

For helpful comments, I thank but do not implicate Annabel Benson, Paul Higgins, and Mark Kennet.

References

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. James Baker’s 7 Rules for Running Washington - POLITICO September 28, 2020.

Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Katie Rogers. Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Lenny Bronner and Diane Napolitano. How The Washington Post’s presidential polling averages work - The Washington Post June 26, 2024.

Lenny Bronner, Diane Napolitano, Kati Perry, and Luis Melgar. Who is ahead in 2024 presidential polls right now? - Washington Post June 26, 2024.

Dartunorro Clark. Trump suggests 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lungs (nbcnews.com) April 23, 2020.

Jim Dunnelly. Watch David Muir's Exclusive Interview with President Biden on the D-Day Anniversary | ABC Updates June 5, 2024.

Ariel Edwards-Levy and Jennifer Agiesta. CNN Flash Poll: Majority of debate watchers say Trump outperformed Biden | CNN Politics June 28, 2024.

Michael Gold. Trump Confuses Haley and Pelosi, Accusing Rival of Jan. 6 Lapse - The New York Times (nytimes.com) January 24, 2024.

Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker. 'A Very Stable Genius' book excerpt: Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals - The Washington Post January 17, 2020.

Becky Little. Reagan Aides Once Raised the Possibility of Invoking the 25th Amendment | HISTORY November 6, 2023.

Iain Marlow. Biden Threatens to Withhold Weapons to Israel Over Rafah Invasion | TIME May 9, 2024.

National Constitution Center. 25th Amendment - Presidential Disability and Succession | Constitution Center

Zoë Richards. In his second mix-up this week, Biden talks about meeting with dead European leaders (nbcnews.com) February 7, 2024.

Michael D. Shear. Biden Holds Fewest News Conferences Since Reagan - The New York Times (nytimes.com) April 21, 2023.

Andrea Vacchiano. Doubt in Biden's cognitive abilities jumped after debate against Trump: poll | Fox News June 30, 2024.

Woodrow Wilson - Wikipedia

Caitlin Yilek. When the next presidential debate of 2024 takes place and who will moderate it - CBS News June 28, 2024.

Why do people die in the military?

 

                                          Oops. Photo credit: US General Accounting Office

For Memorial Day, I looked at the annual causes of death among active-duty personnel in the US Army from 1980 through 2022. More recent data were not available.

According to my calculations, the death rate has fallen by more than half since the 2007 withdrawal of troops from the war with Iraq that stemmed from President George W. Bush’s invasion in March 2003. The Iraq War continued through 2011, and about 2,500 US troops are still stationed there. Since 2008, the military death rate has fallen from 14.3 deaths per 10,000 on active duty to 6.5 (Figure 1).

                                          Figure 1: Total US military deaths per 10,000 on active duty

For decades, the leading cause of military deaths was accidents. But since 1980, the death rate due to accidents has fallen by nearly three-fourths, from 7.6 to 2.0 per 10,000 active-duty troops. Meanwhile, the death rate due to suicides has more than doubled, from 1.1 to 2.6. As of 2022, suicides were the leading cause of Army deaths (Figure 2). 

Illness is not a major cause of military death. The spike in deaths due to illness around 2020-2021 is probably due to Covid-19. Even in those years, the number of deaths due to illness was smaller than the number due to either suicides or accidents.  This smallness was probably due to the Army’s mandatory vaccination in 2021.  RFK Jr., take note. But the Army no longer requires vaccination.  

                                  Figure 2: Military deaths by cause per 10,000 on active duty

Terrorism was a significant cause of military deaths only in October 1983, when two trucks loaded with explosives blew up American and French barracks in Beirut, killing 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers. Three months later, President Ronald Reagan withdrew troops from Beirut. One might have expected this withdrawal to encourage more terrorist attacks killing soldiers, but in fact it had no significant effect. The number of active-duty deaths due to terrorism is random over time (Figure 3). After 1983, the largest terrorist attack claimed 46 active-duty deaths on September 11, 2001. Since then, there has been only one military death attributed to terrorism, in 2008 (Figure 3).

                                         Figure 3: Number of active-duty deaths due to terrorism

Neither were terrorist deaths obviously due to hostile action. The correlation between deaths due to action and deaths due to terrorism is -.12, which is essentially random. Interpreted literally, the number of deaths due to terrorism fell when the number due to action rose, for those on active duty. But the correlation is so small that it might well have occurred by chance. 

Like deaths due to terrorism, the number of deaths in action has also fallen to virtually zero, from 847 in 2007. Until then, the deaths in action due to the invasion of Iraq were the leading cause of active-duty deaths (Figure 4). 

                               Figure 4: Active-duty deaths due to hostile action

I thought that fatal accidents might have been more likely in action. But no. The correlation between deaths due to action and those due to accidents, again for those on active duty, was -.17, again essentially random. The Army says its leading cause of deaths is vehicle accidents during training, especially in the summer, when new platoon leaders arrive and may not know how to avoid mishaps. Also, urban recruits are used to taking the bus or subway rather than driving.  And many Army and Marine recruits drive poorly because they lack sleep, according to the General Accounting Office, the watchdog of Congress. 

The Army says the vehicle death rate has fallen because of emphasis on safety, which means exactly nothing.  Airplane accidents seem to occur in August, when daylight hours are longer for flight training. Anticipating this timing may have improved training.  But in general, the statistical work on military accidents is too poor to permit many firm conclusions, in my opinion. The dataset is not rich, and the statistical techniques are primitive (so of like the ones in this post!).   

I conclude: The military has reduced its death rate steadily, outside of times of war, especially by avoiding fatal accidents. But mental illness has become much more important as a cause of death, when compared to other causes, perhaps partly because most soldiers are too young to die of old age. Nevertheless, the military may be in a position to provide more mental health care than do the public high schools, although mental illness is a growing diagnosis for their students.  In its 2021 survey of high school students, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than two in five “felt persistently sad or hopeless.” Nearly three in ten reported “poor mental health.” More than one in five “seriously considered” suicide, and one in 10 attempted it.  Distress, often manifest in thoughts of, or attempts at, suicide, was more common among students who were LGBQ+, female, and black.  – Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana tayloralmaty@gmail.com

 

Notes

For valuable comments, I thank but do not implicate Sergeant Annabel Benson of the US Army. All data are from the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System.

References

Benyon, Steve. The Top Killer of Soldiers, Army Vehicle Deaths Are Tied to Poor Training, Though Numbers Down | Military.com November 12, 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011-2021 (cdc.gov) . 2021. 

United States Department of Defense. Defense Manpower Data Center.  Defense Casualty Analysis System (osd.mil) 

United States General Accounting Office. Military Vehicles: Army and Marine Corps Should Take Additional Actions to Mitigate and Prevent Training Accidents | U.S. GAO July 7, 2021.

 

Leading the future of social sciences (and tripping)

 

                                         Meet KIMEP's new dean.  Credit: Getty Images

A few months ago, in one of his periodic blowups, as predictable as thunderstorms in summer, the President of KIMEP University, Chang Young Bang, fired the longtime dean of the College of Social Studies, Gerald Pech. Since then, the university has scrambled for Pech’s successor. It seems to have found him, and I must say that Dr. Bang richly deserves him.

KIMEP flew in Jason Gainous, last seen at Duke Kunshan University (search me), to present a Powerpoint seminar entitled, “Interconnectedness and impact: Leading the future of social sciences.” It went downhill from there.  Dr. Gainous is passionately concerned with “the web of interconnectedness,” in which “social sciences are increasingly interconnected,” “human behaviors and societal structures are interwoven, influencing global phenomena (hey, they’re interconnected, too!), and “digital technologies are reshaping disciplinary interconnectedness.” And that was just the first slide. But listen, we’ve got to get our priorities straight, because “interconnectedness fuels impactful changes beyond social sciences.” Dr. Gainous’s inspiring vision embraces “Unified Impact: Merging Liberal Arts with Social Sciences.” This breathtaking dream focuses on “philosophical interconnectedness” with “holistic insights” that “deepens [sic] understanding of human and societal dynamics.” I don’t know about you, but my pulse is already racing, especially since Dr. Gainous is dedicated to “Building Interconnectedness Through a New Political Science Department.”

But enough of the noble nightmare, er, dream. Let’s get down to brass tacks! Dr. Gainous proposes the KIMEP Center for Social Science Research Methods. This would develop a “comprehensive Ph.D. program focused on advanced research methods (I guess we wouldn’t want a doctorate focused on backward methods), including applied statistics, modeling, artificial intelligence, big data, and machine coding, and qualitative methods.” Research Methods Training Seminars would “foster[] a community of learning and sharing, interconnectedness (of course!) and impact.”

Most of Dr. Gainous’s gas production can be safely dispersed.  But his new Ph.D. program is another matter, because it must be approved by the Ministry of Education and Sciences. So let’s talk about it.

Dr. Gainous is a connoisseur of ritzy-sounding terms that he doesn’t understand. “Applied statistics” is “modeling.” On the other hand, AI, big data and coding, and qualitative methods are very separate concepts.

Qualitative methods are as old as statistics themselves. We can measure data in two ways. One is in small chunks. For example, we can measure income in dollars and cents. But not all data are suitable for continuous numbers. An example is gender. It’s male or female, and it cannot be measured with a number. Another example is racial origin. Such data are “qualitative.” Data that can be measured are “quantitative.”

Nothing about qualitative data requires a new doctorate degree. It differs from quantitative data only in its units of measurement. We can gauge the impact of a one-dollar increase in income on spending. Those data are quantitative. But if we’d like to know how gender affects spending, we will have to compare spending by a male to spending by a female. The usual way to do this in a statistical model is with a variable that has the value of 1 for females and 0 for males. For example, suppose that we estimate this model: Spending = 40 + 2* Female. The typical female spends 40 + 2*1 = 42. The typical male spends 40 + 2*0 = 40. That’s all there is to it.

Well, almost all. There is a temptation to introduce two gender variables, Male and Female. Male would equal 1 for males and 0 for females. Female would equal 1 for females and 0 for males. But a moment’s thought will show that this is saying the same thing twice. If we have a Female variable, we already have a distinctive value for males; it’s Female = 0. We do not need a Male variable.

In fact, if we include both Male and Female variables, the statistical software may go berserk. This is because it assumes that all data in a dataset are useful.  The Male variable is useless, because it duplicates what we already know from the Female variable. But as long as we avoid such duplicate variables, we will have no problem with qualitative data. That part of Dr. Gainous’s “advanced” doctorate can be explained in five minutes.

“Big data” is another term for which Dr. Gainous needs to go get a clue. It just refers to a lot of data.  If you gather data on gross domestic product (the value of what an economy produces) for each year of independent Kazakhstan, you will have only about 32 observations. That’s not big data, although it is very valuable. If instead you gather survey responses by every person in Kazakhstan, you will have more than 19 million observations. That’s big data.

It requires a shift in the way that we model statistics. Our usual problem is to reach conclusions about the real world when we know only a little bit about it. For example, we may want to know whether the typical Kazakhstani approves of President Kassym Jomart Tokayev. But we have enough money only to survey 100 people. Can we extrapolate our results to the nation? Maybe, if we pick a sample so impartially that it is like a microcosm of the nation. “Inferential testing” determines when this is the case, and it usually eats up half of a course on econometrics (the economist’s term for applied statistics). But if we can survey every Kazakhstani, our usual problem disappears. Even if we can survey “only” a million Kazakhstanis, inferential testing will go the way of the dodo. If randomly sampled, a million observations can give us an accurate picture of the nation.  

But big data are not a panacea.  They cannot substitute for clear thought. For example, even if we survey every Kazakhstani, we will get nonsense from regressing the respondent's opinion of Tokayev upon the respondent's blood type. 

A more subtle problem is the failure to control for factors that relate to the explanatory variable that interests us. For example, in the Mincer equation, we may regress the (natural log of) the wage on education across workers: Wage(i) + a + b*Number_of_years_of_schooling(i)+..., where i indexes the worker. Our estimate of the coefficient b gives the rate of return to another year of education. But the model is not as perfect as it may seem. Talent also affects the wage: Talented people are highly productive. And talent correlates with education: Talented people earn advanced degrees. But there is no obvious way to measure talent: IQ is but a crude gauge. So we cannot control for talent in the Mincer equation. Since it does rise with education, part of the rate of return that we ascribe to schooling is really due to talent. That is, we will overestimate the rate of return to education. This problem will persist even if we have a zillion observations.           

Finally, big data are a headache to manage. We need a way to find particular facts quickly in a dataset of millions of observations, and to identify fake or misleading data. This may require new theories of computer science and statistics. Whether these can be developed in a doctoral program aimed at political science students still struggling with the multiplication tables is, well, food for thought.

I don’t mean to suggest that Dr. Gainous would be wholly useless.  Academic deans are often appendages anyway, and one like Dr. Gainous may have entertainment value. The problem is to determine his fair salary. May I recommend consulting the pay schedule at Barnum & Bailey? – Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

For useful comments, I thank but do not implicate Mark Kennet.

Keystone clowns

                                                 Indy Eleven stadium: Boon or boondoggle?

The Keystone Group developers are miffed that Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett proposes to offer a 20-acre site near the White River, 80% of which is financed by a special taxing district, to the highest bidder. Keystone wants to use the site for a 20,000-seat stadium for the Indy Eleven, a soccer team, as well as for 600 apartments, nearly 200,000 square feet for shops and restaurants, and so forth. The total cost of developing the site would exceed $1 billion.

It is unusual for the taxpayer to foot 80% of the cost of building a sports stadium. In Nevada, the legislature last year approved $380 million for a proposed $2.2 billion stadium for the Athletics in Las Vegas, and even that relatively modest amount has the teachers up in arms. They’d rather spend the money on schools. The $2 billion Allegiant stadium, where the Las Vegas Raiders football team plays, consumed $750 million of public funding. Not pocket change, but again only a little more than a third of the total cost of building the stadium, which opened in 2020. Eighty percent is out of line. Why should the state subsidize sports fans?

Keystone accused Hogsett of “shopping state legislation championed by Indy Eleven, working behind closed doors to offer publicly-owned real estate and public financing to the highest bidder, with assurances that neither the redevelopment of his riverfront parcel [on the White River] on the continuation of the Indy Eleven would be requirements for city support.”  Keystone was founded by the owner of Indy Eleven, Ersal Ozdemir.  

Why shouldn’t Indianapolis demand the best return on its land?  That’s not likely to be a sport stadium.  For the most part, the city would want the use of the land that would provide the greatest tax revenues net of what the city spends on the site. That use is unlikely to be a stadium for a minor sport, because it won’t attract many out-of-towners, whose spending would increase the city’s income. The fans are most likely to be Indianapolis residents. In that case, there may be little net gain in spending and therefore little net gain in sales tax revenues.  The Indy family may spend $100 more on soccer games, and pay for it by spending $100 less on meals at local restaurants.

In general, there is little evidence that building stadiums benefits a city economically.  A stadium has "an extremely small" effect on the local economy, wrote Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll of the Brookings Institution in 1997. 

The reason is simple: Economic growth depends mainly on knowledge (“human capital,” if you want  the lingo). When workers know how to produce cars faster, their productivity rises. When programmers figure out how to speed up a robot, their productivity rises, too. Nothing about a sports stadium need increase labor productivity.  Perhaps by providing needed recreation, yes.  But the empirical evidence for that is weak, perhaps because today there are so many forms of recreation already to choose from.

The true cost of the stadium to Indianapolis is not the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it but the amount of education that the money could have provided. Assume conservatively that Indiana assumes $500 million of the cost of developing the site. In Nevada, a pricey state, the total cost of providing a schoolteacher is $81,000 to $86,000 per year. At that cost, spending $500 million on education rather than the stadium could hire nearly 6,000 teachers for a year. Indeed, the number is likely to be greater than 6,000 for Indiana, because it is much cheaper than Nevada. Teachers here don’t demand such high salaries.

Keystone boasts that building the stadium would create 1,000 construction jobs. Well, building schools creates construction jobs, too.  Hogsett has his priorities straight. --Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana  tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

For useful comments, I thank but do not implicate Forest Weld. 

 References

Alexandria Burris.  Keystone accuses Hogsett administration of trying to walk away from Eleven Park deal.  Indianapolis Star.  April 25, 2024. 

Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll.  Sports, Jobs, & Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost?  June 1, 1997.  Sports, Jobs, & Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost? | Brookings

Crunch time

 

                                  The Iron Dome launches a missile to intercept an invading one.

                                   Photo source: Wikipedia

                      Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convenes the war cabinet. 

                                               Photo source: Government of Israel. 

News reports indicate that Iran and its clients have launched more than 300 drones as well as cruise  and ballistic missiles in Tehran's first direct attack on Israel.  It retaliates for the April 1 Israeli bombing of Iran's embassy in Damascus, which killed the head of operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Syria and Iraq. 

The Israel Defense Forces said Israel and allies had shot down 99% of the hostile projectiles. Of more than 30 cruise missiles, none entered Israel's air space. Israeli planes intercepted 25. No drones penetrated the air space. A few ballistics got through, despite Israel's Arrow defense system. The IDF reported minor damage to the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel. But the attack continues. The terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon said it had launched Katyusha rockets against a military base in the Golan Heights. In general, the Golan Heights was one of the most vulnerable areas in Israel. 

I guessed that at least a fourth of this barricade was aimed at Israel's biggest cities. These are protected by the Iron Dome defense system, which claims a success rate of 90% in destroying an incoming projectile. But a bevy of 50 missiles is serious business. Even with a 90% interception rate by the Dome, the chances that at least five will penetrate the Dome are 58%...unless projectiles are shot down before reaching the Dome by defending missiles or by jet fighters.  (Calculations are below.) Evidently, that's what happened.

Until recently, the United States had two carrier battle groups in the region that could shoot down missiles. The Eisenhower group is still in the region of the Persian Gulf, but the Ford group returned to Norfolk several days ago after an eight-month deployment. Central Command, which runs the US military in the Middle East, repositioned two destroyers in the region. One has the Aegis system for defending against guided missiles, according to The Wall Street Journal.  The Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is near Japan, said defense analyst Stratfor.

Iran has warned the US not to get involved, and the US has denied advance knowledge of Israel's embassy attack.  But it has also pledged to defend Israel in case of an Iranian attack. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US had shot down dozens of drones and missiles from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Jordan said it shot down dozens of drones flying to Israel.  

It seems inevitable that the US will be dragged to some degree into a Middle Eastern war. Undoubtedly this worries Washington less than seven months before a Presidential election. But by launching so many missiles, Iran has made clear that it intends a regional war. The US is not responsible for it, and it has no choice but to defend the region's strongest democracy. -- Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

For helpful comments, I thank but do not implicate Mark Kennet.

I assume that the probability that the Dome will destroy an incoming missile is 90% and is independent of its interception of any other of 50 missiles. (By “independence,” I mean that the Dome’s response to one missile does not affect its response to any other.)  This scenario fits the Bernoulli probability distribution. The probability that the Dome would fail to intercept at least 5 of 50 missiles is

Sum [i = 5 to 50] ( 50! / (i! (50 – i)!))* (.1)^i *(.9)^(50 – i) .

     

References

Josef Federman and Jon Gambrell. Israel says Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted.  Associated Press.  Israel says Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted (yahoo.com) April 14, 2024.

The Jerusalem Post. US redeploy two destroyers to the Middle East over Iran threat - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)  April 13, 2024.

Jacob Magid and Amy Spiro. IDF: Iran fired 200 missiles and drones; most intercepted; minor damage at IDF base | The Times of Israel.  April 13, 2024.

Suleiman al-Khalidi. Jordan airforce shoots down Iranian drones flying over to Israel (yahoo.com)  Reuters. April 14, 2024.

Anat Peled.  Israel and allies intercepted 99% of Iran's drones and missiles, Israel says. The Wall Street Journal. April 14, 2024. 

Stratfor. U.S. Naval Update Map: April 11, 2024 (stratfor.com)

The Wall Street Journal. Iran Launches Over 200 Drones and Missiles in Attack on Israel: Live Updates (wsj.com) April 14, 2024

Getting even, Tehran edition

                                           Iron Dome intercepts a drone. Photo source: Defense News

Iran promises to reply to Israel’s bombing of its embassy in Damascus last week. The news media speculated that Tehran would hit the Israelis before Ramadan ended.  This is partly because Muslims are most likely to support Iran, which is Shi’a, during this religious period of sacrifice and reflection.  After all, they may be prone to consider Israel’s alleged sins in attacking in what was technically Iranian soil dedicated to diplomacy. (The embassy had sheltered the Iranian general directing operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Syria and Iraq, but never mind.)

Ramadan has ended. So for Iran, retaliation may be now or never.

The consensus has been that Iran would bomb an Israeli embassy in a moral symmetry that might please the Iranian public.  Iranian officials have said that no Israeli embassy was safe from their fury. But another possibility is a direct attack on Israel, relying heavily on the 155,000 missiles of an Iranian client, the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This option may seem improbable, because the highly accurate Iron Dome defense system shields Israeli cities from drones and ballistic missiles. Well, let us accept the claim of its co-producer that the  Dome can intercept (that is, destroy) an incoming projectile with 90% accuracy. (The producer is Rafael Defense Systems of Israel, which produced the Dome with Raytheon of the United States.) Suppose that Hezbollah and other Iranian clients launch a flock of 30 missiles at Israel. Given the size of the Hezbollah arsenal, an expenditure of 30 missiles looks like a modest investment in violence. Then a simple calculation suggests a 16% probability, or about one chance in seven, that at least five missiles will survive the Dome. That would be enough for Iran to make its point.  The calculations are below. -- Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana, tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

For useful comments, I thank but do not implicate Dmitriy Belyanin, Annabel Benson, and Mark Kennet.

I assume that the probability that the Dome will destroy an incoming missile is 90% and is independent of its interception of any other of 30 missiles. (By “independence,” I mean that the Dome’s response to one missile does not affect its response to any other.)  This scenario fits the Bernoulli probability distribution. The probability that the Dome would fail to intercept at least 5 of 30 missiles is

Sum [i = 5 to 30] ( 30! / (i! (30 – i)!))* (.1)^i *(.9)^(30 – i) .

I calculate that this is just under 16%.

 

References

 

Times of Israel. Iron Dome is facing its greatest test in war with Hamas.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/iron-dome-is-facing-its-greatest-test-in-war-with-hamas/#:~:text=How%20accurate%20is%20the%20Iron,%25%20effective%2C%20according%20to%20Rafael.&text=But%20it%20can%20get%20overwhelmed,allowing%20some%20to%20slip%20through.  October 14, 2022.

Cassandra Vinograd.  Iran Says Israel ‘Will Be Punished’ for Strike in Syria - The New York Times (nytimes.com)  April 10, 2024.

  

 

Avenging the embassy

 

                                       Tel Aviv leaves its calling card in Damascus.  Photo: AP
                                 

Iran vows to “answer” Israel’s destruction of its consulate in Damascus Monday in a big way.  And it has told the US that it holds it responsible for the bombing that killed three Iranian generals, including the former head of Iranian operations in Syria and Lebanon. The US denies knowing anything in advance about the attack. How might Iran retaliate?

Iran knows that it would lose a war with either Israel or the US, much less both. But neither can it ignore the attack. An attack on an embassy amounts to an attack on home soil; certainly, the Iranian public will view it that way. It also infuriates Iranians because it occurred on the holiday marking the death of the founder of Shi’a Islam, Iran’s dominant religion.

Iran’s problem is to retaliate in a way that discourages assaults on Iranian soil, without provoking a war that would shatter its economy.  It is already troubled by annual inflation running close to 40%, or 10 times higher than in the US. The demands of fighting a war would drive prices much higher, squeezing households.

Iran might attack either many sites to a moderate degree, or one site to a massive degree. Which response would best serve its purposes?

Many paths to revenge

Attacking many sites, but no one site with many missiles, has the advantage of getting the world’s attention without necessarily killing a soldier at any one site. Should a US soldier die, Congress would pressure the Pentagon to retaliate to a degree that might bring on war. Attacking one site with many missiles ensures gratifying damage but risks deaths.

What might Iran do?  Consider two cases in which it has faced this problem.

After the bombing of the al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City about October 17, falsely blamed on Israel, Iranian-linked militias attacked US posts in Syria and Iraq more than 170 times. They didn’t kill anybody until about January 28, when a drone killed three American soldiers at a small supply post in Jordan near Iraq and Syria. On February 2, the US responded by attacking more than 85 sites in Syria and Iraq associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Tehran’s regional troublemaker.  The militia attacks stopped. This suggests that Tehran prefers to harass the US by coordinating many small attacks until one goes wrong.    

The second case was Iran’s response to the American assassination on January 3, 2020, of the charismatic commander, Qasem Suleimani, of the Quds Force, the military intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards.  On January 8, Iran responded by launching more than 12 ballistic missiles at the US post at Baghdad, al-Asad, which had no air defense at the time. But Iran warned of the attack in advance. As a result, no Americans died, although scores were treated for concussions. Again, Iran had stopped short of war.

My guess is that Iranian militias might launch drones simultaneously at several US posts, such as al-Tanf in eastern Syria, near the highway running between Baghdad and Damascus; posts near Deir ez-Zour in northeast Syria, a province that is close to militia supply sites; al-Asad; and two US posts near Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan province in northern Iraq, near Turkey.  

A second possibility is a massive attack on the Kurdistan post more distant from Erbil, al-Harir; for its defenses are relatively weak, as was demonstrated by an October 18 attack on the site that nearly destroyed the barracks. For Iran, the advantage of this site over the one nearer Erbil is that fewer civilian casualties are likely. 

Mark Kennet notes a third possibility: An eye for an eye -- an attack on an Israeli ambassy.  It has happened before. On March 17, 1992, a bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 and injured 252. The Argentina Supreme Court assigned responsibility to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, with planning and financing by Iran. A similar attack on July 18, 1994, on the building of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, killed 85. For these details, I draw upon House Resolution 201 of 2017, introduced by then-Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), who chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee.

An embassy attack might gratify the Iranian public's sense of justice.  And it is nothing new in the Middle East.  In early December, seven mortars hit near the US embassy in Baghdad. No injuries were reported, but terrorism of US embassies is not confined to the region. On August 7, 1998, nearly simultaneous bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 and injured 4,500. The FBI attributed these attacks to al-Qaeda, not to Iran. But they suggest a need for precaution now at American embassies. As far as I can tell, the US State Department has not urged caution upon the embassy and consulate in Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan, at least.

When could an attack occur? After the Suleimani killing, Iran retaliated in five days. This might suggest a need for vigilance in the next day or two.

Of course, this post is just speculation. But when Iran warns of a response, it is not prudent to call its bluff. --Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com Seymour, Indiana

 Notes

For helpful comments, I thank but do not implicate Annabel Benson and Mark Kennet. 

References

Steven Erlanger.  Strike in Damascus Escalates Israel’s Undeclared War With Iran - The New York Times (nytimes.com) .  April 2, 2024.

Farnaz Fassihi and Matthew Mpoke Bigg.  Iran Says the Deadly Israeli Strike in Damascus Will Not Go Unanswered - The New York Times (nytimes.com)  April 1, 2024.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. East African Embassy Bombings — FBI

Missy Ryan, Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, and Mustafa Salim.  U.S. launches strikes in Iraq, Syria after deadly drone attack in Jordan - The Washington Post.  February 2, 2024.

Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali, Timour Azhari.  US embassy in Baghdad struck with seven mortars as attacks escalate | Reuters December 8, 2023.

US House of Representatives Resolution 201 of 2017.  https://www.govinfo.gov/.../html/BILLS-115hres201ih.htm