RESPONSE TO COMMENTS (1)

A number of comments have come in, all friendly and some (a second category) going beyond congratulations and encouragement (gratefully received) to make perceptive points in the spirit of the posts that I originally made and usefully enlarging upon them. I have published all in the second category on the blog. I would like to add something here on the difficulty, brought up in one comment, of telling who has appropriate expert judgment and who does not. There is no general solution to this important practical problem. In many cases it is easy: There is a well-defined issue (how to conduct an amphibious assault) and people with a good track record in dealing with just such issues (someone who has conducted amphibious assaults on similar targets). At the other extreme, there are issues that even people with the most relevant experience cannot be counted on to deal with successfully. The generals who in 1916 were making strategic decisions on both sides of the First World War had the most relevant experience but went on making gross mistakes. No one would have listened to a child who told them, "You’re getting nowhere, just slaughtering young men to no purpose; stop the offensives and demand that the politicians bring the war to an end." The generals did not think this way. A pity: the child would have been right. We cannot in such cases rely on the experience that some people claim; we have to judge for ourselves the plausibility of their approaches to strategic judgments. We have to seek a minimum of experience, certainly; but also openmindedness, a readiness to experiment, a willingness to admit mistakes and correct them. Claims to judgment based on experience have to be examined skeptically, more skeptically than McCain’s rivals have been examining his claims, more skeptically than McCain himself has examined them.