At the Applied Mathematics Group−Columbia, dozens of young women bent over Marchant desktop calculators were calculating formulas for the optimal curve a fighter should trace out through the air in order to keep an enemy plane in its gunsights
.. This was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room.
.. So here’s the question. You don’t want your planes to get shot down by enemy fighters, so you armor them. But armor makes the plane heavier, and heavier planes are less maneuverable and use more fuel. Armoring the planes too much is a problem; armoring the planes too little is a problem. Somewhere in between there’s an optimum. The reason you have a team of mathematicians socked away in an apartment in New York City is to figure out where that optimum is.
.. But the damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.
.. The armor, said Wald, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are. It goes where the bullet holes aren’t: on the engines.
.. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back. Whereas the large number of planes returning to base with a thoroughly Swiss-cheesed fuselage is pretty strong evidence that hits to the fuselage can (and therefore should) be tolerated.
If you go to the recovery room at the hospital, you’ll see a lot more people with bullet holes in their legs than people with bullet holes in their chests. But that’s not because people don’t get shot in the chest; it’s because the people who get shot in the chest don’t recover.
.. countries don’t win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That’s not the stuff war movies are made of, but it’s the stuff wars are made of. And there’s math every step of the way.
.. To a mathematician, the structure underlying the bullet hole problem is a phenomenon called survivorship bias.
.. a comprehensive 2011 study in the Review of Finance covering nearly 5,000 funds found that the excess return rate of the 2,641 survivors is about 20% higher than the same figure recomputed to include the funds that didn’t make it.
His independence has also been called into question by some, including for his relationship with defense giant Northrop Grumman, where he chairs an international advisory board.
.. But throughout his career, Stavridis built a reputation as a leading strategic thinker — not unlike his Army counterpart, General David Petraeus.
.. In many ways, Stavridis, who remains one of the most prolific writers to come out of the military and is frequently published in foreign policy magazines and blogs, is the anti-Trump.
.. In an interview last October, he directly refuted Trump’s assertion that 9/11 — when Stavridis himselfnarrowly avoided the attack on the Pentagon — was a failure of immigration policy since the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
“9/11 was not a failure of immigration policy, 9/11 was a failure of intelligence & imagination,” Stavridis told Fox News Radio. “We couldn’t imagine our way to what happened. We didn’t have the appropriate means of collecting intelligence. I don’t think immigration would have solved that.”
As the fighting continued year after year, Mr. Pence kept up his support, speaking forcefully in favor of the Iraq war even as many Americans turned against it. But his firm stance on that invasion now represents one of the most jarring differences in his abrupt political marriage to Donald J. Trump ..
.. From the use of force to free trade to diplomacy, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence hold very different views of the United States’ role in the world
.. “I believe it is imperative that conservatives again embrace America’s role as leader of the free world and the arsenal of democracy,” he said last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he called for “dramatically” increasing military spending.
.. Mr. Pence has expressed his approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and voted for trade agreements while a member of the House. During his first successful congressional campaign, in 2000, his opponents criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, but Mr. Pence expressed support for the trade pact and the idea of free trade.
.. Mr. Trump insists that the United States is losing when it comes to trade. In 2001, Mr. Pence said that when American companies compete globally, “We win, and we win consistently.”
The case for a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.
.. We didn’t see Trump’s apotheosis coming. But in our 2008 book, “Grand New Party,” we pointed out that despite its “party of the rich” reputation, the Republican Party increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters’ problems and concerns.
.. So what should the Republican Party offer them instead? The best answer is a conservative politics that stresses the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home.
.. With the exception of Rand Paul and the partial exception of Ted Cruz, the consensus critique of President Obama from not-Trump Republicans often seemed to be that he should have kept more troops in Iraq and kept more troops in Afghanistan and sent more troops to Libya and intervened in Syria andsent more arms to Ukraine and expanded NATO’s presence in the Baltics and been more willing to bomb Iran and …
.. And the ease with which Trump crushed Jeb Bush, in particular, suggests that it will continue to resonate until Republican leaders become more selective in their hawkishness, more comfortable with five simple words: Invading Iraq was a mistake.
.. But when you dig into survey data, immigration skepticism seems to be rooted as much in concerns about how quickly immigrants assimilate, whether they rely on welfare programs and whether they compete for American jobs as it is in racial or cultural anxiety.
.. should explicitly try to attract immigrants who will be in a strong position to provide for their families in a difficult economic environment. It should encourage a market in which employers have to compete more for less-skilled labor, to slow the alarming retreat from paying work among native-born working-class men.
.. Nothing unites elite conservatives more than their support for bringing entitlement spending under control. But by frequently insisting that he’d never cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, and basically endorsing universal health care, Trump has put himself on the side of millions of grass-roots Republicans.
.. The party will still back tax cuts for the middle class and revenue-neutral tax reforms. But there should be no new income tax cuts for households earning $250,000 or more.
.. A politics that stresses national solidarity isn’t just the best way to keep Trump voters from tearing down the party’s tent. It’s also the most plausible path up from white identity politics to a one-nation, pan-ethnic conservatism.
.. Some liberals believe that this kind of shift is basically impossible — that racism and right-wing politics are so deeply intertwined that any Republican populism will just end up defending welfare for white people, that any “immigration in the national interest” proposals will descend into “Mexican rapists” one-liners on the campaign trail.
Sadly, Donald Trump has offered powerful evidence for the liberals’ perspective. But if the Republican Party hopes to recover from his destructive rise, it has no alternative except to try to prove them wrong.
