William Spaniel is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh and a prominent content creator specializing in game theory and international relations.
“The top line here is that this is not a limited activity like the special Maduro operation. Rather, Operation Epic Fury as it is being called is using all of the U.S. assets in the region. This is not the type of action that will last a few hours. And short of Iranian capitulation or regime overthrow, it is designed to last days at minimum.”
“There is no traditional Congressional authorization to use force in Iran. The executive branch, of course, has broad latitude to conduct limited strikes over limited time frames.”
“The Pentagon Pizza Theory—yes, real worlds that I just said—tells us that all we need to do is track the number of orders of pizza made at parlors near the Pentagon or elsewhere in Washington. The core idea is that, when major military motions are afoot, staffers in the Pentagon put in a bunch of overtime, and often at bizarre hours of the night.”
“Issue one is a statistical fallacy known as “selecting on the dependent variable.” This is when you take the outcome of interest—in this case, the start of a war—and then look at the factors common to them. In contrast, a good statistician would look at instances of pizzas getting ordered and then see how often that correlates with wars starting.”
“It turns out that you cannot just look at the cancer deaths and make a claim that water kills people. Instead, you would need to look at everyone’s water consumption. And if you did, I bet that you would soon find out that the people consuming water tend to do better than the people who do not. Pizza-wise, you would need to construct a measure of pizza orders across many years, and then check whether the days of large orders happen more often on the eve of war than on ordinary days.”
“Well, allow me to give you the strategic corollary to that: “in an adversarial environment, when one party uses a manipulable measure to make decisions, the other party will deliberately manipulate that measure.””
“So, to condense this argument into a sentence, Iran building those weapons creates a bargaining problem in the future that the United States does not want to deal with. And that was one of the key motivations for Trump to pull the trigger.”
“In contrast, U.S. doctrine here is that the best defense is a good offense. Rather than shoot down individual drones and missiles, the United States wants to destroy their warehouses, production facilities, and launch platforms. The advantage here is obvious: rather than need to cast a huge defensive net, you simply nip the problem in the bud.”
“The problem is that you have to be really good at projecting power to accomplish that goal. Well, the United States is really good at projecting power, and so that is why it is taking the risk.”
“However, the standard discussions surrounding that second question overlook a fundamental principle of war termination: that for a war to end, the process of fighting must resolve whatever problem caused the war to start in the first place.”
“But those details aside, literally any geopolitical analyst worth their salt knew that this was what would happen in the event of a major war with Iran. You only have to go back about a year and a half to see my own warnings about that risk.”
“Somewhere in the Pentagon, some team has calculated the minimum stockpile quantities that the United States absolutely, positively cannot drop below in Iran. If all the regime does is survive until that point, then Iran effectively wins by default.”
“Somewhere in the Pentagon, some team has calculated the minimum stockpile quantities that the United States absolutely, positively cannot drop below in Iran. If all the regime does is survive until that point, then Iran effectively wins by default.”
“The Pentagon intends for the bombing of security forces and the decapitation strike to reduce civilian fears of getting onto the streets and marching on the capital.”
“The average civil war lasts a long time. A decade or a lot more would not be unusual. Compare that to Trump’s comments that operations may only last a few days, a few weeks, or a couple of months, and you see a clear discrepancy.”
“It was the very first strike of the war that terminated the Ayatollah’s time on Earth. The CIA learned that a high-level meeting was scheduled to take place in Tehran on the morning of February 28.”
“By one Iranian official’s own estimate, Iran’s nuclear program cost the country $2 trillion. Let that sink in for a moment. $2 trillion.”
“Indeed, every world leader already understands that nuclear weapons confer a certain type of insurance policy against regime change. Nothing is learned by seeing regime change in action.”
“By one Iranian official’s own estimate, Iran’s nuclear program cost the country $2 trillion. Let that sink in for a moment. $2 trillion.”
“The Ayatollah’s assassination serves two purposes here. One, it is a rallying cry to get protestors back on the streets. That seems to be working.”
“On the surface, this may sound like a basic triage problem, something that your average field hospital or civilian hospital confronts on a regular basis. However, on the modern battlefield, this is a network problem. Previously, you might only be able to send someone to a specific field hospital.”
“Because complexity grows exponentially, the problem is too big for one person to handle on their own. You cannot break up the problem across many people either, because of the connected network nature of the problem. You cannot have many people work as a team, as they would waste too much time trying to coordinate. The response has to be automated.”
“The winner of the medical competition was a Dutch team called “Bytes on the Ground.” Every team’s solution had similar elements.”
“And I suspect that given how the world has become one step less secure over the weekend, more allies will be inclined to make an investment.”
“One, political insiders do not believe that the full files will be as damaging as the prevailing online sentiment believes that they will be. As I said at the top, I know that the modal internet sentiment is that the full Epstein files would be game over for Trump, but I cannot stress this enough, that is not how political insiders both in Washington and foreign capitals feel about the situation.”
“What dictates Iran’s optimal choice under these circumstances is its belief about which type of Trump is more likely, weighed by how costly war is to Iran. If Iran is fairly convinced that Trump has a lot to gain from a distraction, then it will prefer to make a greater concession.”
“To recap, the mechanism for war here is: one, a leader has private information about his personal benefit for war; two, the opponent’s belief is that the private benefit is likely small; and three, that assessment is wrong.”
“You see, Trump has arguably had the most adventurous first fourteen months of any U.S. president. There was the roughly two-month long series of air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. Then there was the one-shot strikes on Iran’s nuclear program in the middle of the Israel-Iran Twelve Day War.”
“If the PRC were to ever invade Taiwan, the entire world would encounter an economic catastrophe, even if Beijing’s forces failed to capture the island. Taiwan produces something around 90% of the world’s top of the line microchips, and accounts for 60% of chip revenue worldwide.”