The Mechanics of War :: War Statistics Papers

The Mechanics of War Recently a new trend has taken up Wall Street. Savvy broker firms have realized that the market is probably controlled by some rules, and those rules have to be found to make more money with the least risk. They hired many mathematicians to look for any formulas that would seem to express the market. Those analyzed previous market trends and used laws of statistics to try to predict the â€Å"future† of the market. The funny thing is that at times this approach actually worked. It yielded a slightly more than fifty percent accuracy, and that was enough. (When dealing with tremendous amounts, even a small percentage is not meager.) Statistics work for everything when there is a lot of it. They work for money, molecules, atoms, star systems, and even people. People tend to adhere to statistics when there is a fair amount of people to stifle the occasional fluctuations in human behavior. Many things we do depend on statistics. Take war for example. War is a very good example, since the outcome depends more on the general strategy of the whole war, than on individual soldiers. It follows definite rules that can be expressed in formulas. The individual people in war tend to become statistics, in the eyes of the high command, the public, as well as in their own perception. Tim O’Brien wonderfully illustrates this in his essay â€Å"How to Tell a True War Story.† He relates that there is no point to any events or actions according to the perception of the soldier during a war. â€Å"You smile and think, ... what’s the point?† (469) he says. A person then becomes nothing more than a statis tic -- a part of a whole behaving in a random way. If there is no point to existence, then his actions are truly random. Something truly random can be easily studied, stimulated, expressed in some numbers, percentages, probabilities. This randomness of the soldier is what the whole military apparatus depends on. Consider: if the life of a soldier during war had a point, if he realized that there is some underlying meaning, wouldn’t he strive toward the goal assigned by that meaning? He would, for that is in human nature. Now, if there was no meaning in his perception, he could easily be persuaded that a particular thing must be done. He will obediently follow.