US military has terrible track record of losing wars

By just about any metric US military is by far the most powerful on the planet. The most powerful this planet has ever seen.

Yet, if you look at how it's been doing since WW2, it looks real bad.

I'm only including meaningful wars here, not just throwing a few bombs here and there.

Scorecard

I'll rate them on scale of: total failure, narrow failure, clear draw, narrow victory, total victory

Korean War - clear draw. After a lot of fighting everyone was pretty much where they all started.

Vietnam War - total failure. It doesn't get any clearer, nothing was left of what US spent so much time defending.

First Iraq War - narrow victory. Saddam was on verge of losing power, but US indecision let him crush the rebels and remain in power, remaining a problem for long time afterwards.

Afghanistan War - total failure, Taliban still controls most of Afghanistan, and Afghan government is basically negotiating terms of surrender.

Second Iraq War - narrow failure, Saddam was overthrown, but US got forced out by insurgents, and Iraq was 1/3 controlled by Islamic State, the rest by pro-Iranian puppet regime. After ISIS got defeated, pro-Iranian puppet regime controls Iraq.

So of big 5 wars, there's 2 total failures, 1 narrow failure, 1 clear draw, 1 narrow victory, and 0 total victories.

Is that what the world's biggest budget can buy?

It's not difficult to see the pattern. US military is terrible at counter-insurgency, and extremely unwilling to tolerate even modest casualties.

Many US cities are more dangerous than warzones US has been fighting, but even those modest losses are just too much.

So what is it good at?

So the question is - for all that money - what is it actually good at?

It's not actually clear it would be good at WW3 - most likely result is that everybody living in every major city anywhere dies from nuclear missiles.

At purely conventional version of WW3, general consensus is that Soviets would have conquered big parts of Western Europe before Americans would even show up. Not like Soviets had any intention of not using nukes. Every countries which couldn't retaliate was the target, including neutral countries.

It's really unclear that US would be able to win any of the likely regional conflicts with near-peer enemy.

It's not clear if US has any meaningful way to stop China from taking over Taiwan. China has effective ways to prevent any US ships from coming close.

Likewise if Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine or the Baltics, US wouldn't be able to do anything to prevent that.

This is mostly because geography favors its opponents in such cases.

US can win conventional fight against Third World countries, like Iraq in 1991 (on paper Saddam had one of 10 strongest armies in the world), but without willingness to accept costs of occupying those countries and ability to wage effective counter-insurgency this is of limited effectiveness.

US can bomb any Third World country it wants, but effects of that have been rather limited so far.

And US has no ability to defend its own borders - from illegal crossings - but that's intentional political failure.

It's by no means terrible, but relative to how much money is spent on it, it looks quite disappointing.

Prediction Markets were Batshit Insane this Election

The elections are over. The biggest loser are the prediction markets.

As I'm writing this, Arizona has already been called for Biden. And PredictIt has it as 30% chance of Trump.

Trump has no mathematically possible way of winning. PredictIt has it him at 20%.

I talked shit about 538, and I was absolutely right, but even they in the end had Trump at just 10%. Models I'd consider more reasonable like The Economist's had Trump at 3%. Prediction markets had him at completely batshit insane 40%.

And as votes started coming, when Trump did a tiny bit better than expected (but at no point was anywhere near having any chance of winning), Trump peaked at completely ridiculous 72%! It was known long in advantage that election day vote will be a lot more Republican than mail in vote, and states were clear how much of each kind outstanding there is. Prediction markets completely missed that, and had Trump as a favourite just because Republicans mostly went there in person while Democrats mostly sent their votes by mail, and it was too hard for them to understand.

Everything I said turned out to be right. If polls were right, elections would have been very easy Biden victory, and the "normal polling error" benefiting Biden would turn them into a Reagan style landslide.

But not only that - "normal polling error" towards Trump, would still mean easy Biden victory. Even unusually high polling error - what we had this year - didn't bring Trump particularly close to competitive territory. Everything that possible could go right for Republicans were perfectly for them - and Trump lost anyway, because his chances were nonexistent.

Polls weren't great, but they were fine. They predicted Biden to win by about +8%. By the time counting will end, he'll end up closer to +4 or +5%. We won't know for a while, as California takes forever to count their votes, so popular votes always ends up more Democratic than it seems on election day.

It turns out Trump was indeed closer in tipping point states, so Electoral College gave me a few points, but it never managed to overcome that kind of lead. There's no reason to predict which party will be at an advantage in 2024.

Real markets work because they're dominated by sophisticated institutional investors, whose job it is to figure things out, and whose predictions are tested every day. We hoped that small prediction markets dominated by small scale amateurs tested once every 4 years would be just as good, but it turns out they failed utterly.

I'm definitely disappointed as for a while it seemed that we might get great rationalist tool for very little money. It turns out it takes more than that.

EDIT: It's November 13th now, Trump lost nearly two weeks ago, every state has been called long ago, most betting sites paid out on Biden (including one where I bet), and Trump is still 12% on PredictIt. Some people must really hate their own money.