What is ironic about Isaac Asimov's story "The Machine That Won The War"?

Issac Asimov’s story “The Machine that Won the War” is
ironic on a number of different levels and in a number of different ways. The story
reports a conversation among three men who had been instrumental in helping the Earth
win a long interplanetary war against the Denebians, who had now been “shattered and
destroyed.” Most of the public credit for the victory had been given to Multivac, a
gigantic underground computer that coordinated information in such a way that the
leaders of Earth were eventually able to triumph.

Lamar
Smith had served as Executive of the Solar Federation and was thus the leader of the war
effort. John Henderson, as chief programmer of the enormous computer, had provided the
data that Multivac had so importantly analyzed.  Finally, Max Jablonski had served as
chief interpreter of Multivac’s output – an obviously significant job.  All three men,
then, had played crucial roles in the successful war effort.  Without the input provided
by Henderson, Jablonski would have had no output to interpret, and without the output
interpreted by Jablonski, Smith would not have possessed the data he needed to make the
crucial final decisions that led to ultimate victory.

As
the three men talked, however, Henderson discussed the nature of the data he had
received from other computers and other persons.  These were the data he was expected to
feed into Multivac. He quickly became aware, however, that much of the data were
unreliable, especially because people lower in the chain of command had provided reports
designed to make themselves look good. Henderson now revealed that he had therefore
supplied Multivac with data that he had “corrected” – data based largely on his own
intuitions. “Toward the end,” Henderson commented,

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"I scarcely cared. I just wrote out the necessary
data as it was needed. I even had the Multivac Annex prepare data for me according to a
private programming pattern I had devised for the
purpose."

Success in the war,
in other words, had apparently depended largely on Henderson’s intuitions. This is the
first of the story’s main ironies.

It was at this point,
however, that Jablonski revealed yet another irony: Multivax itself had not been
operating reliably and could not be reliably repaired. Thus the data that Jablonski
received from Henderson were not as important as Henderson had assumed. Jablonski, in
fact, in interpreting the output of Multivax, had been forced to do what Henderson had
done when supplying the input: he had relied largely on his own personal intuitions. As
Jablonksi explained,

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"I did what you did, John. I introduced the
bugger factor. I adjusted matters in accordance with intuition--and that's how the
machine won the
war."

Ironically, then,
neither the input nor the output associated with Multivax had been nearly as important
as everyone had assumed. Human intuition had played a far more crucial role in the
success of the war effort that anyone could have
imagined.

However, the final irony of the story appears
when Lamar Smith, the man who had to make the final decisions, surprisingly revealed
that he had always distrusted the reports from Multivax and had not taken them very much
into account when choosing how to prosecute the war effort.  Instead, he had relied on a
far simpler decision-making tool when faced with a crucial choice: ironically, he had
simply flipped a coin.