The Illusion of Decision Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham T. Allison Review by: J. P.

Cornford British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 231-243 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/193517 . Accessed: 31/01/2012 18:43
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B.J.Pol.S. 4, 231-243 Printed in Great Britain

Review Article: The Illusion of Decision

J. P. CORNFORD* By Time, and Counsell, doe the best we can Th' Eventis neverin the powerof man. Robert Herrick

Fashions change and recent issues of this Journalbear witness to the concern of an increasing number of political scientists with the processes of government. If a fashion-leader were wanted then Professor Allison could not have provided a better. His book' is a rare treat, modest, literate, intelligent and about an event of great intrinsic interest and importance. It prompts reflections of two kinds: first, on the Cuban Missile Crisis itself and what Allison's analysis of it suggests about the closeness of nuclear war in October 1962 and by implication about the risk of nuclear war now and in the foreseeable future; and, secondly, on his analysis of governmental decision-making in general and the implications both for the ways in which we go about studying government and for the expectations we entertain of governmental performance.

The impact of Allison's account will depend on what you made of the crisis before you read it. I confess to have been an optimist at the time. I simply did not or could not believe that the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union would so take leave of their senses as to run a serious risk of nuclearwar, and I was confident that they would back away from confrontation. I believed essentially both in their sanity and in their control of their own governments and armed forces. The outcome of the crisis tended to reinforce this view and even to reconcile me to the putative benevolence of deterrence. I realised, of course, that miscalculations could take place. Khrushchev seemed to have played a dangerous game when he tried to sneak missiles into Cuba in the firstplace. It was a gamble to test Kennedy's determination but there could be no real danger, once that determination was made plain, that Khrushchev would risk a head-on collision. Allison's account of the crisis, however partial and tentative, especially on the Russian side, at the least makes clear that this interpretation,which I believe has been widely accepted, is optimistic, and naive. It depends on an account of the crisis which bears little resemblance to the detailed course of events and demonstrates little grasp of the motives, intentions and understandings of many of the actors.
* Universityof Edinburgh.
1 Graham T. Allison: Essence of Decision: Explaining the CubanMissile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. xii, 338.

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To put the matter with dramatic brevity, the lesson of Allison's account (or accounts since he gives three versions of the events based on different assumptions) is that nuclear war was avoided at the last moment by a precarious alliance between Khrushchev and Kennedy; that their sense of impending catastrophe allowed them to help each other to maintain control of their respectivegovernment and military machines; that Kennedy at least was under strong pressure to take action which would not have allowed this alliance to develop from a situation of mutual distrust, and that at least one of the things that persuaded Kennedy to delay direct action was a factual misstatement by the Air Force about the effects of an air strike on Cuba which both Kennedy and the JCS actually favoured at the time. Indeed Allison makes a convincing case for believing that quite a number of incidents beyond the control of the leaders could have committed them willy-nilly to successive acts which they themselves were not confident of controlling. The accidental timing of routine activities, for instance the U2 flights over Cuba by which the missile sites were identified, was crucial to the shaping and resolution of the crisis. But what grounds does this give for present alarm? Times have changed, there is much talk of detente,of strategicarms limitation, of MBFRs and so forth. The situation in Northern Europe has stabilized; the German question may be on the way to a satisfactorycompromise; the Soviet Union is no longer so anxious about Eastern Europe. These may be hopeful signs but they are not grounds for optimism. Arms limitation is still talk and even when achieved will not affect the nuclearcapacity of the great powers. The Middle East, the EasternMediterranean, South East Asia provide ample possibilities for confrontation, between powers whose ambitions have not substantially changed. Alarm or pessimism does not arise from the assumption that they will deliberatelyrisk nuclear war to get what they want, but from the sense that the positions in which leaders find themselves are only partially the result of a deliberatelyconceived line of action, that leaders are the victims of long chains of circumstancesbeyond their control and prisoners of the systems they are supposed to master. That is familiar enough: Tolstoy said it all before and better. But the particular significance of Allison's account is to point to the implications for a policy of nuclear deterrence. The general significance of his analysis lies in his attempt to account for this situation in a systematic way: and what he does in relation to an international crisis could and should be applied to routine domestic affairs as well.
II

Allison examines the missile crisis three times over from different perspectives. First, he gives a conventional analysis of international power politics in which each state is treated as an individual or person (the Rational Policy Model). Then he looks at the crisis from the point of view of the different government organizations involved - the State Department, Pentagon and so forth - with particularattention to their normal or routine ways of doing business (the Organizational Process Model). Finally, he looks at the crisis in terms of the

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personalities and political interests of the individual participants (the Bureaucratic Politics Model). In the Rational Policy Model, the analogy is between a government and a reasonable man. It assumes that governmental actions can be explained in terms of the means which a rational man would adopt to achieve his ends. Therefore if you want to understandwhat anothergovernmentis doing you observeits actionsplacing missiles in Cuba - and infer the intention behind the action from your own reflection on why a rational man would do such a thing. At a commonsense level this is how we interpret much of the behaviour of other people. At a theoretical level the assumptions are reflectedin the application of rational choice models to strategy. This mode of analysis has produced plausible accounts of the missile crisis which in turn have prompted a Panglossian literature on 'Crisis Management'. Allison has little difficulty in showing that such accounts involve serious omissions and distortions, which arise not from folly or ineptitude but from the shortcomings of the analogy itself. In its unsophisticated versions it involves unrealistic assumptions about how individuals make choices - perfect information, unlimited time, clear preferenceschedules and so forth. But the more serious objection is that governments are not individuals but clusters of organizations, and organizations are not like individuals either, certainly not rational men. They act on imperfect information, under pressureof time, not for the best conceivable outcome but for one that is reasonably satisfactory; but above all they act according to established routines (standard operating procedures). Hence Allison argues the need for Model ii, the Organizational Process Model, which looks at decisions as the products of the routine activities of the government departments involved. Organizations are defined by the ways they have of doing things. Not only will organizations come up with policies which fit within a limited perspective defined by previous experience - military men will give the sort of advice that militarymen have given before - but they will also act on orders in ways which they have been accustomed to act before, whetheror not these ways fit in with the intentions of those giving the orders. Allison by applying this notion of organizational behaviour to the crisis shows how things puzzling or inexplicable in terms of the rational actor model can be seen to flow from the characteristics of the organizations involved. Soviet tactics in deploying the missiles in Cuba, for instance, are incomprehensibleif one assumes an intention to surprise, to change the strategic balance or to test Kennedy's nerve. They make much more sense if one assumes that the Soviet organization concernedjust went ahead and did what it always did at home. While this organizational perspective(Model ii) reflectsthe ideas of Simon and others, Model iii, the internal politics of governmental decision-making, is pure Neustadt. Government is recognized as a congerie of organizations with their own traditions and routines which affect both policy and implementation. Decisions emerge not from reflection but from argument and conflict within and between organizations, partly over who shall do what (organizational survival),and partly because of differentperceptions of the problems and the means to deal with them. Any particulardecision will be taken not so much on the merits of the case but as

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the result of the conflicting views and interests of a variety of organizations on this and many other questions as well. Government is then a continuous process of decisions which are interdependentbecause of their effects on the relative positions and strengths of individual politicians and the organizations and constituencies they represent.Again this is a well established and widely accepted view, though one might be forgiven for expecting such considerations to be minimized in a context as dangerous as the missile crisis. But in fact this approach makes clear one crucial element in the crisis, namely Kennedy's reaction to the first news of the missiles: 'He can't do that to me!' The threat was not so much to the security of the United States: as MacNamara said early in the crisis, it did not matter much from a strategicpoint of view wherethe missiles were. But it mattered a great deal to Kennedy's domestic position and Kennedy thought that Khrushchev must know this. Allison believes, admittedly on scant evidence, that Khrushchev did not understandthe threat to Kennedy's personal position and would not have acted as he did had he anticipated Kennedy's reaction. But once Khrushchev had committed the missiles he would not accept the political reverseto himself of withdrawal until faced with a nuclear ultimatum. It is certainly plausible that the perceptions of the main protagonists should have been coloured by concern for their own positions; and not surprising,but sobering perhaps in the nuclear context when the elements of misunderstanding, miscalculation and misadventure are added.
III

None of Allison's 'models' is new. Models I and in are the stock in trade of students of international relations and political history. Model ii, the organizational perspective, is probably less familiar and certainly prompts the most interesting questions about the implementation of decisions and the capacity of the executive to maintain effectivecontrol of its subordinatemembers.This is a generalproblem which takes an especially acute form in Washington as others have recently testified.2 But while these models are not new, the ideas and assumptions have either been used intuitively or when self-consciously elaborated have been contributions to 'theory' rather than applied to concrete historical situations. The virtue of Allison's approach is that he makes the assumptions explicit, he applies them to a particularset of events, and he applies them consistently. He does not slide in the same account from one set of assumptions to another when the first set ceases to pay off. As Allison says, the models determine the kind of questions to be asked and the information gathered. It is not enough to revert to organizational factors when a Model I explanation falters: they must be kept in mind continuously or rather the whole process must be viewed from that perspectivein order to understand the effect the means of implementation have on the policy or decisions which emerge. Allison clearly hopes to end up with a composite picture, a definitive account which he promises at the end of this book. This hope seems to me illusory: there
2 Notably Harold Seidman, Politics, Position and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I970).

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are too many difficultiesin the way of historical reconstruction,even where excellent records survive and one cnjoys, as Allison has done, access to the personal recollections of many of the most importantparticipants.Recordsare ambiguous, memories partial and selectivc. Thcre will always bc room for reasonable doubt and differences of interpretation, simply because so much of any reconstruction depends on imagination. There is much to be said for the view that the conventional historical account of 'what really happened' is fiction, an imposition of order, coherence and purpose remote from the experience of participants.3It may be argued that with hindsight we can discern a pattern in events unperceived by the actors. But we may also falsify or distort the nature of the events by divorcing them from the understandingof the actors. The elucidation of patterns after the event may help the participants to understand what they have experienced in a different and more coherent way, and enable them to grasp more readily what is happening when a similar set of events begins. What it is unlikely to do is to prepare them for novelty or crisis, or alert them to those factors which make this new set of events differentfrom the last. Case history and experience alike depend for their practical value on repetition: experience that is in the sense of a special kind of knowledge learned by practice and communicable to others only by example, if at all. What we value in politicians is something ratherdifferentfrom the skills of the craftsman: we value the experience of success. Whatever the uses of adversity, failure in politics does not generally instil confidence in others nor that confidence in oneself which is felt with some justice to be half the battle. Experience in this sense is not relevant knowledge of a situation, but the confidence born of past success which enables one to face uncertainty without loss of nerve. The experience of the missile crisis must have increased immensely the confidence with which Kennedy and his close associates faced future problems of any kind. It is much more difficult to derive any general lessons from the crisis: hindsight does not readily yield foresight. People involved in policy-making are frequently unaware or unable to assess the significanceof what they are doing: this is not so much because of the difficulty of predicting the future consequences of actions, but because of the difficulty of understandingwhat is going on now.4 All this is by way of commending Allison's Rashomon technique for preserving a sense of the complexity of the governmental process, of the confusions, uncertainties, and discontinuities experienced by the participants. Since this sense largely derives from Models ntand in, there may be some temptation to ignore the considerations raised by Model i entirely. There is a fascination about the world of Neustadt, and a belief that politicians are indifferent to the content of policy.5 But even if this were the case, even if every
3 Those who like their philosophyhomespunand hairy-chested find a vivid exposition will of this view in Norman Mailer'sThe Armiesof the Night (New York: New AmericanLibrary, 1968). 4 Cf. Wildavsky's observation:'someofficialsdo not deal withcomplexityat all; they arejust overwhelmedand never quite recover'. A. Wildavsky, The Politics of the Bludgetary Process
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. I I. 5 E.g. 'Thelesson to be drawnfrom any study of high politics is that the centralconcernof

practitionersis with their position relativeto one another.'AndrewJones, 'LiberalHistory'

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politician and official cared only for the advancement of his personal, party or bureaucratic interest, even if all policy represents a compromise among those interests, politicians would still be obliged to argue in the language of Model I, of the national interest. There is moreover plenty of evidence that this is more than a language of convenience. Nations may not be persons but they are legal and moral entities. When Robert Kennedy argued against an air strike on Cuba, his concern was for the reputation of the United States. Everyone understood what he meant, even if they did not agree with him. The Rational Actor model may not yield a satisfactory account of the policy process, but it is nevertheless part of it, since it underliesthe public language in which politicians must argue and provides the legitimation of their bargains from whatever motives and interests these result. And some approximation of the model underlies much of their own understandingand judgement of politics. Few men are capable of thorough-going cynicism or sustained hypocrisy; most can persuade themselves to believe sincerely whatever they find convenient. This, of course, gives rise to complications. It would be helpful if at any particularmoment one could assume that the factors considered in Model I (ends) and Model ii (means) were settled parameterswithin which the bargainingand discussion of Model inltake place. There may be periods of fairly stable consensus on what constitutes the national interest, and conceptions of the national interest may change slowly. But it is in times of crisis that the common definition comes under strain and that the Delphic quality of general principles as guides to action becomes apparent. Equally organizational capacity is not a given quantity: it is crucial to have an understandingof the normal world of the bureaucrat,of the routines of politics, such as that provided by Wildavsky's study of the budgetary process. But routines can be disrupted and abandoned, organizations can do 'the impossible': Lloyd George's enforcement of the convoy system on the Navy in the First World War springs to mind. What people are prepared to advocate on public grounds, what they think capable of being done, and what they personally find desirable, are inextricably bound up. The interrelatedness of the models, or of the aspects of the situation with which they deal, is clear if they are put as a series of questions: Model I: Is there a generally accepted view of the national interest? What view of the world is it based on? Are there serious divergencies within government over these views? Model II: How far do differences in the conception of the national interest reflect differencesin the experience and interests of organizations and affect their willingness to implement certain lines of policy? What is the organizational capacity willing or not? Model III: What is the fit between the interests and perceptions of individuals
Parliamentary Affairs, xxv (1972), 351-4. Jones has given an excellent example of history from this perspective in The Politics of Reform, 1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). This is a market theory of influence which has been given its most cogent exposition in E. C. Banfield's Political Influence (Glencoe, ll1.:Free Press, 1961).

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and their relationship with each other, their organizational affiliations and their commitment to one view or another of the national interest and its implications in particular situations? All these questions need to be asked, and none of the issues raised by the models can be ignored. But this is not to say that the models themselves are adequate, used either alone or in conjunction. Allison demonstratesthe shortcomings of the rational choice model as a description of governmental activity. I have tried to indicate above why the considerations to which it gives rise are nevertheless part of that activity and why the amoral pluralism of Model iii is equally inadequate. In each case the simplification necessary to understand complex phenomena distorts our conception of the reassembledwhole. In the one case collective values, intentions and motives are exaggerated and in the other their reality is denied. Both overestimate the consistency, the regularities,of the world they describe. If one imagines the governmental process as lying somewhere between a battle and a game of chess, these models begin and end too near to the orderly (pace Fischer), rule bound, and reflective world of chess. And though bounded rationality and disjointed incrementalismare steps in the right direction, Model ii is also at the wrong end of the spectrum. Bounded rationality is still the rationality of individual calculation limited only by the force of more or less permanent and predictablecircumstances. Incrementalismoffers more promise as a description in two of its possible meanings:6 as a process of decision-makingwhich relies on precedent both in aim and execution; or as a process by which polic), emerges from a series of discrete decisions which involved no conscious intention to establish a policy. In a third meaning, incrementalismrefers to the output of decisions, and here both as description and prescriptionit rests on an assumption that severely limits its utility, and reveals its origins and drawbacks as a model of political activity. That assumption is the ready divisibility of output.7 Political economists have concerned themselves with political decision-making from an initial interest in budgetary policy and financial control, where it has seemed reasonable to import their theoretical stock-in-trade and their faith in the possibilities of quantification. Political scientists who are attracted by the rigour and precision of political economy, and perhaps also by the promise of certain and cumulative knowledge, are liable to the same disappointment which Keynes records of the pioneers of Welfare Economics in his memoir of F. Y. Edgeworth.8
6 These distinctions are made by Adrian Webb, 'Planning Enquiries and Amenity Policy', Policy and Politics, I (.972), 64-74, p. 7I, note 12. 7 This criticism has been made by Peter Self, Administrative Theories and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), pp. 40-1, and Richard Rose, 'Comparing Policy', European Journal of Political Research, I (I973), 67-93, p. 86, among others. 8 ' The atomic hypothesis which has worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics. We are faced at every turn with the problems of Organic Unity, of Discreteness, of Discontinuity - the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied. Thus the results of Mathematical Psychics turn out to be derivative, not fundamental, indexes not measurements, first approximations at best; and fallible indexes, dubious

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A disappointment which is both intellectual and practical: intellectual because the imported models (essentially equilibrium models) cannot cope with discontinuity, uncertainty, novelty or crisis; practical because the imported techniques, cost-benefit analysis, PPBS, and so forth, lead to exaggerated expectations, the evasion of political responsibility and even to outright deception.9 Though both are concerned with order, the models and the techniques should not be lumped together. Allison's Model Il derives from work which started from the recognition that the dictates of formal rationality are Utopian; that no one has the time, the energy, the knowledge or the mental capacity to follow them. It is based on an analysis of the ways in which politicians, officials (and business-men) reduce complexity, increase certainty and predictability, and make an impossible job tolerable by a network of mutual understandingsabout what is acceptable. It is concerned essentially with the stable, routine, repetitive world of bureaucracywith fiduciary regularities and standard operating procedures. While these are important and apply pretty well where divisibility of output makes for ease of negotiation by barteror compromise, the same methods do not explain behaviour or engender confidence in face of the unusual, the unexpected or the critical: they cannot deal with indivisible, irreversible or unique decisions. The missile crisis makes this readily apparent; but perhaps we can distinguish between routine and critical decisions. Perhaps, but I do not think so. Some decisions may obviously be critical, and others not. But there will be some which appear routine and turn out to be critical, say in the field of macro-economic management (what turns a recession into a slump ?). We need here the sort of topological model proposed by Christopher Zeeman in which a small incremental change produces catastrophic effects.10Even within the orderly world of budgeting, Wildavsky records the bewilderment of officials faced with a new item: their decisions appear to have been arbitrary and hence perhaps indefensible and unpredictable.t1 Again Wildavsky is at a loss to explain, from a Model II perspective, the changing moods to which all participants were responsive and with regard to which they modified their routines.12One cannot thereforereserveone's misgivings about the policy process to the big occasions and share the complacency of Lindblom, Wildavsky and company towards its routine operation. Disjointed incrementalism fails on two counts: there is much in government which is not incrementaland much that may
approximations at that, with much doubt added as to what if anything, they are indexes or approximations of.' J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Heinemann, I96I), pp. 232-3; cf. also Robert L. Heilbroner, 'Is Economic Theory Possible?' in Between Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 165-92. 9 Cf. Alan Williams, 'Cost-benefit Analysis: bastard science and/or insidious poison in the body politick', Journal of Public Economics, I (1972), 199-225; A. Wildavsky, 'The Political Economy of Efficiency: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Systems Analysis and Program Budgeting', Public Administration Review, xxvi (I966), 292-310; and Norman Dennis, Public Participation and Planner's Blight (London: Faber, 1972). 10 E. C. Zeeman, unpublished paper on catastrophe theory given at a seminar on 'The Use of Models in the Social Sciences', University of Edinburgh, 1972. l Wildavsky, Politics of the Budgetary Process, p. 44. 12 Wildavsky, Politics of the Budgetary Process, p. 72.

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be incremental in appearance though not in its consequences. And, secondly, disjointedness implies a dispersion of influence within government which offends against canons of accountability and of responsible government. In 'normal' times such dispersion may be acceptable but in critical moments it is difficult to justify; and the problem is compounded since crises are neither predictable nor immediately recognized. Even in the missile crisis, where a new command structure evolved quickly within the US government, the initial independent actions of separate government agencies placed critical constraints on subsequent coordinated planning.
IV

Disjointed incrementalismtherefore both exaggerates the degree of stability and regularity in government, and offends against our implicit assumption (or ideal) that government means the conscious control of events. In the nuclear context it is not difficult to shed amiable delusions about the benevolence of the Hidden Hand; the question is how to reconcile our recognition of the complexities of government with our desire not to be inadvertentlydestroyed; and less dramatically not to have public powers exercised in confused, contradictory, wasteful and unaccountable ways. We may have to accept that any modern government is an incoherent system. A system because, while there is muddle, the pattern of its activities is not random; most of the conditions and constraints within which it operates have some stability over time; and there is also a degree of stability in the behaviour of its component parts. Incoherent both because there is muddle and because the pattern of events is in fact and in principle unpredictableby participants. The complexity of events is too great for them to grasp what is going on and they do not know how they themselves are going to act. If moreover we mean anything by decisionmaking other than the illusion of choice, it must involve some element of chance. Manoeuvres in the corridors of power may often be without significance, but occasionally a decision will be taken when the factors which are beyond the control of politicians and in general control them, when these factors are evenly balanced. Hence the continuing possibility that political decisions will themselves make a difference,and the incentive both to observe the way politicians work and to attempt to improve their capacities. There are two ways in which we might consider the problem of improvement: one concerns the character of the politicians themselves; and the other the organizations and techniques at their disposal. Political scientists and politicians too are more inclined to concentrate on the machinery of government as capable of reform and to ignore the morality of princes; to concentrate on the newer and more puzzling functions of government at the expense of those older functions which are not concerned with the solution of 'problems' or the allocation of resources but with Order, Liberty and Justice, which demand propriety in the balance between eternally irreconcilablevalues. We may be obliged to rely on the long winnowing of the political career, on the exposure of the media, on the instincts of the electorate, on the judgement of their peers, to choose our Solomons.

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But as humble participants or helpless onlookers, we must acknowledge that it matters a great deal that our leaders should be humane, tolerant, sagacious and sane. And we ought to address ourselves also to the substantive rationality of the policies our leaders pursue and, for instance, inquire how it is that even decent men, fond of dogs and children, can support a doctrine as crazy as nuclear deterrence. Or, to put it mildly, conceptions of the national interest which entail the willingness to risk nuclear war are worthy of investigation.13 Even in regard to the modern functions, where the application of economic models and techniques has more relevance, there is a danger of ignoring the essential quality of government. It has proved difficult to adapt the administrative traditions of the nightwatchman state to the exercise of economic and social responsibilities. It is not surprisingthat reformersshould have been influenced by the example of the most vigorous and innovative institution of our time, the business corporation. No doubt there is much to be learnt from the practices of private bureaucracy,but that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the purposes of public and private bureaucracy are different. Business corporations enjoy a licence to ignore many of the consequences of their actions and generally command an audience when they denounce their critics as irrational or subversive. Governments are not blessed with these advantages: they are held responsible not only for what they do themselves, but for much else besides; they pursue no readily defined ends and must adjudicate among a myriad of conflicting and insatiable demands. Political institutions exist to balance the irreconcilable, to weigh the imponderable, and to come to decisions in the absence of agreed criteria or adequate information. Government is the art of the impossible: the wonder is not that it is done badly, but that it is done at all. One of the worst faults of politicians is to make promises they have no confidence of fulfilling; it is equally mischievous to pretend that organizational reform and so forth will more than marginally diminish the uncertainty in which they labour.14
v

Having aired a prejudiceor two I ought in conscience to returnto Allison and the general questions he himself raises: namely what sort of models are most helpful
13 This would involve both the double standard and the double audience problem. First, how do men accept in public life acts and arguments they would scorn in their private affairs ('the necessary murder'). And second, the nuclear deterrent can only be justified to oneself on the grounds that one will never use it, but it only makes sense at all if one's opponent believes that one might. If he comes to believe one's moral justification - that one will never use it - one must either abandon the deterrent or the justification. 14 Desmond Keeling, Management in Government (London: Allen & Unwin for the RIPA, 1972) is particularly good on the contrasts between public and private bureaucracies. For a good account of the second order effects of new budgetary techniques in British government see David Greenwood, Budgetingfor Defence (London: RUSI, 1972). First hand accounts of the operations of PESC suggest that it has much more significance as a means of maintaining Treasury control over levels of spending than as a means of resolving problems of priority within the public expenditure programme. The complexity of rational improvement is beautifully illustrated in J. K. Friend and W. N. Jessop's excellent Local Government and Strategic Choice (London: Tavistock Publications, I969).

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in understandingthe governmental process; and, secondly, how can the different interpretations of events derived from different models be reconciled with one another? I have suggested some shortcomings in the atomistic, static, linear, incremental and equilibrium assumptions underlying his own models. They do not make allowance for or help to explain the novel or the catastrophic.They have little to say about collective manifestations - morale, panic, terror, fashion which seem to me important phenomena in political life. They do not raise questions about the substantive rationality of the behaviour they examine and so forth. There are moreover internal difficultiesabout the models and the uses to which Allison would put them. A Rational Actor or choice model works well enough as a means of inferringintentions or predicting the behaviour of an opponent as long as one can be confident that one is playing the same game, that the rules of the game are fixed, and that they define the purpose of the play. Even in poker, of course, the game will not define all the utilities of the actors (sociability, distraction, and so forth) but it is possible to say whether someone is playing well or badly, seriously or not. But the analogy is difficultto apply to activities where one cannot be sure that one's opponent is playing the same game, or that his rule book is the same. One certainly cannot criticize the rationality of his actions, nor infer his intentions, nor predict his future behaviour, where there is any serious element of doubt. Hence in the later stages of the missile crisis the enormous importance attached by Khrushchev and Kennedy to spelling out clearly to each other the meaning of their moves. Thus the model only makes sense if one can be sure what it is one's opponent is tryingto achieve. In poker, or the market,it may be a reasonable assumption that the ends or utilities of the actors are dictated by the nature of the activity. There can be no such confidence in a political process where the rules are part of the game and the players may adjust their utilities in mid-passage. The real usefulness of a rational choice model in politics is not for predicting the behaviour or inferring the intentions of an opponent, but for examining one's own problems of collective decision for both moral and practical consistency, and for assessing their likely effect upon others. A second problem with Allison's models is whether there is any real distinction to be made between Models II and II. The difficultyis that the organizational process is not limited to formal routines but includes also the informal conventional understandings which can be, and are, modified more or less continually in the process of bureaucratic politics. Thus the two models tend to merge with each other, unless Model II is confined much more strictly to the formal aspects of organization than Allison himself confines it. The distinction between them is less a matterof logic than of origins; Model ii derivesfrom sociological approaches to organization and Model in from psychological studies of decision-makersand their milieux. Though the distinction is hard to sustain in a formal sense, the difference of approach is valuable. If Allison had combined Models II and II, or rather collapsed Model II into Model II, I doubt that the influence of organizational constraints would have played as interesting and important a part in his analysis.
17

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These criticisms suggest that Allison has misconceived the possibilities of Model I and that the distinction between Models ii and IIIcannot be sustained theoretically, but is useful because of the limitations of the analyst himself. And this in turn suggests a less elevated expectation of these models, and of models in general than Allison entertains.I am tempted to say, never mind: they have yielded a vivid and plausible account of the crisis; we understandthings we did not understand before; we shall be better equipped to look for the bodies next time. If these models leave obvious gaps, why not try a couple more which draw attention to the neglected factors? This is to advocate an eclectic strategy,to regardsuch models as heuristic conveniences. Allison wants us to take them more seriously: 'These conceptual models are much more than simple angles of vision or approaches. Each conceptual model consists of a cluster of assumptions and categories that influence what the analyst finds puzzling, how he formulates his question, where he looks for evidence, and what he produces for an answer' (p. 245). This suggests that the models are incompatible, and Allison goes so far as to apply the term paradigm to them. Without launching into the semantics of that elastic word, I must say that it seems too strong for Allison's case. I do not believe that these models amount to 'incommensurableways of seeing the world'. It is not as though the three accounts had been written by St Augustine, Bentham and Mao Tse Tung. They bear a strong family likeness and I certainly experience no discomfort in comparing them and deciding which offers the more plausible explanation for any particular incident. Thorough, self-conscious and sophisticated though they are, Allison's different accounts fall easily within a familiar commonsensical intuitive framework of social explanation, one indeed that requires pretty crude psychological assumptions and little reference to the great movements of history.15Indeed it is the similarity of the models, the fact that they are all within the rational choice paradigm, that makes their elaboration and comparison fruitful, whatever the shortcomings of the paradigm itself. It is much more difficult to see how models drawn from different paradigms could usefully be compared, since comparison would continually involve reference back to fundamental disagreements about the nature of historical and social knowledge; and these disagreements themselves preclude shared canons of proof or verification. Thus while Allison's work suggests that there is a great deal to be gained by elaborating and applying with precision numerous models within a common general framework, it has nothing to add to the debate over the nature of social explanation. Allison also believes that his models and methods should be judged by their results not defined as the production of satisfying historical reconstructionsbut of predictions. His ambition here seems fairly modest: one expects sophisticated and well-informed participants or observers to be able to make a good guess at what will happen next or what so and so will do; it is just that one's confidence
15 The similarities and limitations of Allison's models are readily apparent if one compares them to what may more reasonably be called an alternative paradigm, say Chinese theory and practice as described by Franz Schurmann in Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, I966).

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diminishes as the time scale gets longer and the issues more complex. It is rather like the difference between betting on a single horse race and filling in a football coupon: a moderateincreasein complexity enormously lengthens the odds. It may be that international relations are more like horse races than are domestic politics, but Allison with this study will himself have done much to discourage lighthearted punting. Allison's interest in internationalrelations and his choice of subjecthave naturally pushed to the forefront the question of the State as an actor, and the degreeto which those who must in fact make the decisions are in command of a unified, effective and obedient instrument. In a domestic context this problem would take on a rather different aspect. Few people now talk about the State as a monolith, and though problems of accountability and control are critical, the need for centralization is arguable. The problem is not to replace the Hidden Hand with a command structurebut to engineer a dispersion of responsibility as well as of influence.16This is only one of the many trains of thought this book provokes and which I cannot pursue further. I cannot refrain, however, from revealing to those in executive positions three practical maxims extracted from it: If you want to know what the Russians are up to, keep tabs on the Russians. Don't believe what the experts tell you or expect them to do what you tell them. Don't bother about the advice itself, look to see who is giving it.
16 Cf. for instance M. G. Clarke's review of 'The Dilemma of Accountability in Modern Government' in Political Studies, xix (I971), 469-72.