“Figures often beguile me,” Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’”
Most of those who work in the realm of international security would tend to agree with Twain. We have all seen academics spit out statistics and models in a way that was of no actual use to those who cared about the real world. Similarly, we have watched politicians run fast and loose with all sorts of numeric data. The result is that we often more agree with the witty Scottish statesman who said, “You might prove anything by figures.”
And yet, as much as those of us who despised calculus back when we were in school hate to admit it, numbers do matter. The unadulterated cleanness of a number does have a certain way of driving home the truth of a matter, most importantly in cutting through the rhetoric and the often intentional confusion that surrounds complex matters. Figures can show a cold, hard reality that we often want to ignore. As Aristotle wrote, “Numbers are intellectual witnesses.”[1]
Today, we are entering a period in national security that various strategic documents ranging from the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to the new British Security Strategy have entitled “an age of uncertainty.” We have been left grasping for some type of certainty in everything from threats to resources. So, if looking through the mathematical lens offers “the poetry of logical ideas,” as Albert Einstein claimed, what are the key numbers that we should be paying attention to in trying to understand where we might be headed next in the realm of national security?
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