Timothy Martyn Hill is a statistician who works in the private and academic sectors.
Episode Description
It’s been almost two years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine with the UN estimating that more than 27,000 civilians of Ukraine have been killed or injured in the conflict. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops have been killed or injured while Russian forces have suffered over half a million casualties. The current situation has many wondering, “who is winning?” That’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Martyn Hill.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
It's been almost two years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. With the United Nations estimating that more than 27,000 civilians in Ukraine have been killed or injured in the conflict. Tens of 1000s of Ukrainian troops have been killed or injured, while Russian forces have suffered almost half a million casualties. The two sides currently seem locked in a stalemate that has many wondering who is winning the conflict. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind his stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist, John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Timothy Martyn Hill, a statistician who works in the private and academic sectors. He's also the author of an article in Significance examining data related to the Russian Ukraine war. Martyn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Martyn Hill
Thank you for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
Why did you decide to write about this?
Martyn Hill
Well, it was partially coincidental. My normal field of work is in election prediction, I don't make election predictions. I measure them. I'm a statistician by profession. But because my previous employment was in computing, I had to make sure that I could keep up the amount of statistical work per year, from my continuing professional development blog, so I developed a career compiling and assessing election predictions. Now, from about 2014, to about 2020, there was an enormously large crop of applicable elections in the Anglophone world. So there was interest in other publications. For me to pursue this, both for 2022 and 2023, there was less interest than there would normally have been because there were no major elections in Britain in the United States, apart from the 2022 midterms. So I anticipated this and looked around for something else? Now, in a conversation with some people that I know, the question came around to the Ukraine war, this was in early 2022, immediately prior to the invasion? And the question turned out, how do you know who's winning? Now, that was the spark and that conversation occurred, roundabout February or March 2022. And then the Russians went in, and it became rather important that this be measured. That's how it started, after about 18 months worth of work. The article, which I then wrote on the subject, was published in Significance a month or two ago. So it started off with a single question. And 18 months later, I have what I believe to be an answer that was sufficiently well thought out enough to be published by somebody else.
John Bailer
I love the way that you frame this, this piece was thinking about gaps, and then ultimately having to measure some characteristics of the conflict in order to address these gaps. Did you have some larger mental model that sort of the participants in a conflict such as Russia and Ukraine, that led you to thinking more deeply about how these gaps were described?
Martyn Hill
Well, first of all, I need to point out that a lot of the theoretical work underpinning the article did not come from Me. It came from some academics that were originally I think, in the US Navy, who published a very large book on how to assess war. And that was part of the background reading that I did for the article, of which it was somewhat extensive. If you ever end up reading von Clausewitz, is on war, you can miss out the middle bit. That's all about how to pitch your tents if you've got your back to the river, but it's the first third and the latter. Third are the interesting bits. The way to conceptualize it is to consider the participants in a war. War has been a human universal, but it has evolved over time the wars we fought as cavemen were different to the wars that we fought in the Middle Ages. I think from memory the concept of cavalry He has been independently reinvented at least twice, for example. But since about the third millennium BC, when we started having city states, and war started to take a recognized structure, there have been four components to every single war. There's the Kings, there's the generals, there's the soldiers, and there's the people. The kings are the people who give the decrees the person who acts for the state. The generals are the people who interpret the commands of the King into something that a soldier can follow. The soldiers are the people who actually do the killing. And the people are the ones who suffer and die, and for whom the war is nominally fought with those four components, they each interact with each other, and those interactions can be measured. And it is these metrics that are referred to as gaps. Those gaps can be measured and that is broadly how you measure a wall.
Rosemary Pennington
So in the article, you start with this discussion of the claws with the Clausewitzian gap. Do you say that right? Yes.
Martyn Hill
Oh, yeah. The Clausewitzian gap. It wasn't very mine.
John Bailer
Some academics always get technical.
Martyn Hill
Yeah. Anyway, Clausewitz Prussian military person, early 19th century, was very big into the analysis of war. He's a very ambitious man, he married up. He wanted to fight in pressure and cause pressure and shoot Prussian soldiers who are very big on fighting. And he wrote a book on war. It was one of those things that led into the concept of the Clausewitzian gap, which was named by somebody else, a Clausewitzian gap occurring when the king issues an order. But the generals issue orders that do not mesh with it. That can happen when either the generals misunderstand or they, in a fluster, pick orders that they can enact rather than what the king wants them to do. Or it can be an active form of sabotage. I can give you a real example and unfortunately to Americans. So these kinds of things happen all the time, just that one of the more famous ones was the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the king in this case was President Lyndon Johnson. And the generals in this case were Secretary of State McNamara. And General William Westmoreland. Who was I think, I'm sure you know this better than I do. The Officer Commanding forces in Vietnam, at the time of the Vietnam War, when it was a sight to think he was linked to being replaced. Lyndon Johnson's broad approach was to keep South Vietnam within the Western sphere, and defeat communism, a very well thought out strategic goal. The actions that the generals decided to undertake, to achieve this goal, was to be measured via body count. Body count is a highly debated and contested metric, it is difficult to assess, even if you're counting your own side, because weapons tend to kill people in horrible ways. And counting the bodies afterwards is difficult, because there are bits everywhere. And because of this, and the tendency of people to inflate figures, if that serves if that serves their purpose. Body Count was a badly chosen metric. Because the more that you increase body count, the less the citizens of South Vietnam, were eager to stay within the Western world because they were being killed. So this is one example of a Clausewitzian gap. The goals of the king in this case, President Johnson, were not served by the orders given by the generals, um, that's a Clausewitzian gap. And you can measure it, it depends on the metric of merit that you pick.
John Bailer
So, as you mentioned, the Vietnam War is an example like I remember many, many years ago seeing a story, and I think it was, it was from a political scientists, I wish I could remember the reference now, where it was the study of the public support for the Vietnam War, the US public support, and that it decreased as a function of body count that essentially, with every tenfold increase in the number of of US military personnel who are dying in this conflict, the amount of support decreased by the same, it decreased by the same amount and the public attitudes. So where does that fit into this mental model or this not mental model, but the model that you described are the four participants, in this case?
Martyn Hill
It's the conversation gap, and the credibility gap. The credibility gap is a term that you may be familiar with, because again, that particular terminology dates from the Vietnam War, the conversation gap is the public understanding of the war. Do the public understand what the war is about? What is the goal of the war? Do we have the resources to achieve it? Do we have the public support to maintain those resources for the war, that is known as the conversation gap. And this is why things like propaganda or public information are so important. A king, that loop that cannot close are the kings and generals that cannot close the conversation gap will not win the war because they will not have the support necessary to do it. One, absolutely marvelous. Cat taking away from the United States for the moment and towards Napoleon, Napoleon was one of the first people to present the first generals, emperors, in fact, to totally mobilize his population in modern times. Prior to Napoleon, in Europe, wars were fought by small armies, or armies of mercenaries that the French Revolution, the late 18th century, upended the whole continent. And then Napoleon came along and said, I am France and France is with me. And all of a sudden, everybody in France was on the French side during the war. This is a beautiful example of when the conversation gap is fully closed, through French further cannons, they managed to get very close to an enormous amount of support from the French population. And that enabled an enormous military mobilization by the French, which is why a country which is large by British Standards, but not by world standards, meant to the was able to go through Spain, and all the way to the gates of Moscow, and very nearly conquer the entire continent, because in this particular instance, the compensation gap was fully closed, he had the support of all the people behind him. But if you have a war, where the conversation gap stays open, the public no longer supports your war or believes that it has found out what the war is really about, and then abandoned support, then that becomes a credibility gap. And at that point, the lot the war is lost, you will lose it eventually, regardless of how you fight the class, the recent examples of the United States and the United Kingdom in the wars in Iraq, the United Kingdom, went into the war in Iraq, on the presumption that this was to remove weapons of mass destruction. The public were fully behind it, it was an easily comprehensible war aim. But then they discovered the weapons of mass destruction. This destruction was fictional, and at that point, support evaporated and the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, remained in office for about three years but was forced to resign in the middle of a term the conversation gap must remain closed. You If it is not closed, it becomes a credibility gap where the people no longer trust the kings and the generals. And at that point, war is lost.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking with Timothy Martyn Hill, about an article he's written for Significance about the Russian Ukraine war.
John Bailer
You know, I was interested in some of the figures that you had. And in your article, I mean, one of the figures that was looking at things like the Russian support for the war, according to opinion polls, I was struck by how remarkably stable they seemed. Although now this is a relatively short timescale that this was looking at night, I don't know when such decay will occur and support will start to emerge. Were you at all surprised at seeing that pattern?
Martyn Hill
Interpreting Russian polls is difficult. There is a contention amongst people on the western side, particularly in Britain, that you cannot trust the Russian polls, that the Russians are lying to the pollsters and the rest of it. And that these numbers may be fictional. There is a good argument to be said for that. But there is a counter argument that says that the triumph of Putin since he came to power in I think the year 2000, is to distance the people from the government from the function of politics, just as in China, politics has become entirely divorced from the people. China is not a democracy, as we would understand it, the function of government is done by the Chinese Communist Party, and the arguments are within the party itself. Similarly, in Russia, the people have become distanced from the function of politics. And as a result, they have become somewhat apathetic is the wrong word, but more willing to trust the functions of government, to the government, Putin has enormous popularity, in elections, he wins them all. And it's not all a case of cheating or badly counting the numbers, it's simply the feeling amongst the Russian people, that they trust the government to do the governing, and that their support is more a expression of faith or to be very cynical about it, social satisficing in the government, rather than what it would be in, say, the United Kingdom or the United States, which is a vote to support for the actions of the government. In Russia, the polls tend to be more geared towards the person of the government or the concept of government doing the government. Whereas on the western side, it's more of the actions of the government. So the support of the Russian people for the war did not surprise me.
Rosemary Pennington
In the article, you're looking at these opinion polls, but you also at one point, start talking about the sort of the merits of certain metrics that people are using to decide whether they're winning or losing. Right, so you have the poll, the opinion polls, where you can look at are you winning or losing public opinion? But then also like the generals, and you know, the Kings, right, are looking at how many people have died? How many? How many tanks? Have they lost? Can you talk a bit about why you felt like you had to walk through some of these metrics and sort of evaluate them in regards to sort of how we figure out if a country is winning or losing a war.
Martyn Hill
I'll split that into two parts. Firstly, there are the metrics that people are using, the ones that you see on social media or on the news, things like the list of ship losses, the list of aircraft losses, the total combat losses, the pro Russian forces, the number of casualties, these are measures of performance. These are metrics that soldiers use amongst themselves, to assess how well they are doing. And measure performance can be thought of, are we doing things right? These are the things that soldiers used to assess their own performance, and generals used to assess the performance of soldiers, but they are not useful in deciding who is winning. If you take who is winning as a strategic goal, then you need to know what the nature of the war is. There's an American writer called Thomas Rick's who was absolutely wonderful. I really recommend him wholeheartedly. And he says that the major, the major and possibly only function of a general is to decide what kind of war we are waging. In Ukraine, the war being waged is a war of occupation. President Putin wishes to transfer administration of Ukraine from Kyiv, to Moscow, at a very bureaucratic level. And in order to do that he needs to invest in the country with sufficient forces and sufficient bureaucracy to administer it in a way that he sees fit. And there are various reasons why he wishes to do this. Consequently, the war is a war of occupation. If the President, if the Russians, occupy 100% of Ukraine, they have won. If the Ukrainians occupy 100% of Ukraine, they have one. So now that we understand what kind of war it is, we can work out how to measure it. For a war of occupation. The metric of merit is very simple. It's the amount of area occupied, you can track it on a map. It is that simple. So in this specific instance, I chose the number of second level administrative divisions that currently had rational or pro Russian forces present in them. And that got it down to something that was really simple. That metric has certain characteristics which are desirable in a statistic. So for example, it can go down as well as up at 100%. One side is one as 0%. The other side is one, it can be evicted, depicted graphically can be gotten over time. You can measure it fairly straightforwardly, you can compile it and warfare conditions, you don't have to assess it from both sides. And those characteristics and some others, meant that the area occupied would suffice as the metric of merit for the war. Other proposed metrics such as body count, remaining reserves was a good one. But it's very difficult to measure battles, one is very, very relative. And it's difficult to measure. The amount of material lost, which we've referred to previously, is a measure of performance, not a measure of effectiveness. It doesn't matter how many tanks Russians lost, it doesn't matter how many planes Ukrainians lost, what matters is removing the Russians from the area that they occupied, or from the Russian point of view, moving your forces forward and occupying more land. That's the metric of merit. So that's why I chose occupied as the metric of merit for this current war in Ukraine.
John Bailer
Yeah, so that clearly suggests that if there were other goals, other than occupation that other metrics would apply. But I'm really intrigued at then, or not intrigued, I'm saddened when I look at, like the one of the figures where you're tracking the percentage of second level divisions with adjacent forces present, because they're not approaching zero or one 100. I mean, it looks like it's relatively stable between 25% to 35%. At least that was as of mid summer of 2020.
Martyn Hill
And it hasn't, it hasn't changed very much.
John Bailer
That doesn't give me a lot of hope for resolution anytime. And, you know, if these absorbing states of zero and 100 were achieved.
Martyn Hill
It's difficult to see a way forward for both sides. Because of the level of tech and if because the level of technology that each side is limited to. The war favors the defense, it's become a very world war one war. Anybody who goes in with a tank, or an armored fighting vehicle or an armored personnel character, carrier, or an infantry fighting vehicle, has a high proportion of dying because of things like mines, because of things It's like drones, because of the fact that neither side has air superiority, it is very difficult to move forward. The cranium counter offensive during the spring and summer, found this out very quickly. There were some horrendous numbers coming out in terms of casualties. And it changed strategy from moving forward to trying to attract Russian forces in such a way that they would withdraw before the Russian presidential election in I think it's March 2024. The presumption is that during winter, during the run up to the election, President Putin will find it politically difficult to bring reinforcements forward. So the theory goes on more. It's been proposed that the Russian that the Ukrainian theory is, is that if they attract Russian forces as much as they can, then just as they did, sometime, back in April, May, last year, they will move their forces back. But that's where they are at the moment, they cannot move forward through prepared defenses, which they tried to do in Zaporizhia. And paid a terrible cost for similarly, Russian forces in the east of the country, around the back moot, are trying to advance. But advancement is measured in villages. It's very, very small. Either way. Give. I'll give you an example. I work in Oxford, a town that is about five kilometers wide. Okay, it's a large town, small city, depending on what you think about it. In England, it's about five kilometers wide. You can get a taxi from one side and be at the other side in less than an hour. When the Russians invaded and finally took back moot, it took them two months. And what they call flame artillery, which is something which is very similar to thermobaric bombs, but smaller, and you can find more of them. And by the end of it back, it was a wreck. Every building is damaged. It's just a plume of crowd and Gulf cloud and smoke and rubble, and all the buildings are trashed. It took me two months to do that. And that's what the pace of the war currently is against a determined defense, this level of technology, without things like air superiority. People who attack do not make good progress. People who defend can defend the land. This, I assume is why Ukraine has currently done a bit of a vault fast, and is now attacking areas near the coast. I forget which one it is, I think it's Kherson. But near to Crimea, because the area around there is marshy and is not and is difficult to defend and is relatively easy for them to get to. You don't have a minefield in the middle of a marsh, they think. So it's a little bit easier for them to attack and they are now focusing on those areas instead. But it illustrates the point in a war of occupation, the war is won or lost by the area that is occupied. But in the present state of technology that the Russians have an Ukrainians are limited to cannot easily displace the other side, which is why that line, and I think we're looking at the same graph at the moment, has remained effectively flat for about a year now.
Rosemary Pennington
So who is winning? This war reached a stalemate.
Martyn Hill
It's a stalemate, and it will remain so until somebody comes up with something better. And we keep proposing game changes. Some of them work. Some of them don't. But they're just making the technology a bit better. What I imagine would be a game changer would be if one side or another could achieve it. Air superiority is already supremacy, I forget the term where you totally dominate the skies and the other side cannot move then you could do things like paratroops or going round in a ship. And that might make a difference. But the current approach which can be rather awfully characterized as trying to drive through a minefield, does not work. And until one side or another achieves, again, game changer, this will remain. Because there is a limit to what flesh and blood can achieve. It may well be the Ukrainian approach of picking easier targets or treating Russian forces, because there is a limit to what even the Russians are willing to lose. There is a possibility that Ukrainians will win, but it's not going to be quick.
Rosemary Pennington Well that’s all the time we have for this episode. Thank you, Martyn, for joining us.
Martyn Hill
Thanks for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media, journalism and film as well as the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcasts or other places you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the programs and your email to statsandstories@miami.oh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the Stories and the Stories behind the statistics.