Guest Post: Daniel Reda on Offense vs. Defense

For a different perspective, my husband and thinking buddy Daniel takes the stage today. He recently had a discussion with a friend about which is stronger, offense or defense? He synthesized it beautifully, and was happy to share it here.

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Offense vs. defense - I've explored this concept as well. I think it has to do with an asymmetry in how we define success for each side. Take any situation with an offensive side and a defensive side and we will consider offense to have succeeded if any ONE of its attacks penetrates through the defense. Alternatively, we only consider defense successful while it's able to block ALL offensive actions.

The odds of any one of many offensive actions succeeding will generally be much higher than the odds of ALL defensive attempts to block such actions.

So if we think about offense and defense this way, offense is inherently stronger. This surprises us because of a cognitive bias that causes people to consistently underestimate the odds of any one thing happening and overestimate the odds of all things in a set happening.

I haven't thought about how it applies to sports as much, but I imagine the asymmetry is reduced by the rules of the game, which constrain the possible offensive actions, limiting the space of defensive tactics necessary to block most attacks.

When it comes to terrorism, terrorists only need to invest resources in one strategy at a time, but a defense system needs to invest resources toward block ALL possible attacks because it doesn't know which one will be used. And, as we have seen with 9/11, if it lets one out of a million pass through, it's readily judged to have failed overall.

Replace terrorist with virus and defense system with immune system above and the same applies I think.

It's easier to destroy than to build because there are more ways of being in a destroyed state than in a state we called ordered. We both have children and know this from experience - there are far more ways to scatter blocks around the floor than there are ways to build something we consider ordered or "interesting".

- Daniel