When Models Matter: "The Great War of Archimedes"

World War II was the defining epic of the modern world, the Iliad of our present society. Ironically, it was so influential in each national context that it managed to create national myths that are almost isolated from each other. Jewish victimhood, German guilt, American triumphalism, Japanese hubris, and Russian sacrifice barely interact with each other in their own historical context as they tell their respective stories to themselves.

So it is interesting when someone decides to tell a story that transcends the national experience, and instead of a spin on their parochial narrative (eg, “what if Americans were more bloodthirsty than heroic?”), tries to generalize to a statement about global society. “The Great War of Archimedes” is such a movie.

You’re not going to find a film more laser focused on the autiste demographic than one that takes place primarily in an office via blackboards and debates over defense budget allocations. Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind” realized the lack of broad appeal of actual math or theory, skipped it almost entirely, and fictionalized what remained. “The Pentagon Wars” turned it into a farce. “Archimedes” grasps the nettle and goes for it - you will watch a drama about curve-fitting to acquisition cost overruns and there will not be a “love interest” (although as a crowd-pleaser, they blow a decent portion of their budget in a CGI air attack almost immediately).

In the film, Admiral Yamamoto can see which way the wind is blowing - Japan is preparing for a general war, which will necessarily involve fighting the British and the Americans at sea. He wants carriers, the weapon of the future - the old guard of the Navy and Army want a grand battleship, the proposed Yamato, that will symbolize Japan’s newfound prestige and power, and are the traditional mechanism of worldwide force projection.

So Yamamoto and his allies in the defense establishment bring in Tadashi Kai, an autiste mathematician obsessed with proportion and models, to show the Yamato’s design is likely to blow way past its specified budget. Hell yeah, let’s do some bill-of-materials, let’s get some labor supply metrics, let’s amortize our machine tooling, let’s calculate the cost of foundry capacity expansion. Throw in the logistics budget to account for delivery costs while we’re at it. I’m down to clown!

On the one hand this is mildly interesting on its own terms. A stylized bureaucratic knife fight over appropriate cost modeling assumptions is, to me, like a 1300s French knight listening to the Song of Roland. I can appreciate the nuances, you know? If I was watching this in a theater, I’d be tempted to go for the Full Baltimore participatory experience. “Watch out Kai, it’s a fifth order polynomial! Get his ass!”

On the other, this is obviously about more than just this particular historical incident. It’s impossible to miss that the currently dominant naval power keeps dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into increasingly elaborate platforms that are likely to be obsolescent in an era of emergent drone swarm and missile saturation. As strike platforms they are of course excellent, as long as you don’t mind shoveling pallets of cash into the boilers so you can do things like threaten guys who mostly launch rockets made of stuff you can buy at Tractor Supply. There is no world in which they are cost effective, especially when the alternative is actually using the gigantic alliance network we supposedly have at our disposal (and if not, why do we spent billions on our “defense commitment” to them?), and especially when considering how much it costs to actually protect them from asymmetric threats. The number of carriers the US can expect to lose over the next century is well above zero, and the reaction to losing 3000 sailors and effectively a tenth of the surface fleet at a stroke is anyone’s guess.

The parallel continues as, in the film, Japan neglects its strategic autiste reserve, to the extent Kai is on the point of moving out of the country because his lack of social graces makes him unable to pursue the kind of patronage networks necessary to advance in pre-war Japan. He is only convinced to stay and participate in the project when he has visions of his friends and country immolated due to losing a disastrous war. This mirrors the incredible destruction of human and social capital the United States is presently engaged in, as it educates foreigners and low IQ patronage demographics in preference to the population that actually built and maintains its defense capability.

In reality, of course, the Yamato does get built, ironically with Kai’s assistance in resolving some design flaws. Despite Kai showing the estimates justifying construction are wrong, leadership decides this is a benefit - their peer competitors will be confused at how Japan can build a battleship for half the price it should be (and in fact is), and will not attempt a super-battleship race, leaving them with durable naval superiority. Ultimately this genius plan developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage. Fundamentally, like most else of the Japanese experience of the time, the movie ends up being a tragedy.

We should hope the United States does not repeat that experience.