The_Capt

Now everyone is beating up on Clausewitz.

So my advice is get to know the sources. This is deep in the Gray camp (The Strategy Bridge is the name of his book), which is not a bad thing but a lot from this camp take Clausewitz to an unhealthy extreme. It is like when people translate Nostradamus, seeing things that are not there. Further, translating these leaps of logic into practical application that works in pretty much random in success rates. That said, there is some very good stuff here but we need to spend less time trying to cram it into Clausewitzian doctrine and saying “see!?”, and more time applying to actual modern warfare. The Clausewitzian priesthoods waste energy trying to defend their system, that would be better spent moving forward. I have counter-notes but no time to post them now. That all said, it is worth reading Antoine Bosquette’s book “Scientific Way of Warfare”.

I think there is a bit of a failure to communicate real life context here. If a nation could 85% quantify war deterministically they would likely be able to rule the planet. With our current methods, even with technology, I doubt we could do better than 25% on predictive accuracy, and Inam being generous. This is a competitive space to say the least, where a few percentage points would be enormous. So while people are debating 100%, the reality is that 50% could make someone a superpower basically overnight. I am not even talking about deterministic or predictive. I am talking “indicative” - ie we know what we are seeing when we see it. We employ metrics and units in warfare all the time, translating then into real information advantage as operations are occurring it also a competition space, we are seeing it right now in Ukraine. Anyway, it was a wonderful journey and I think I have landed on an answer, but we don’t need to unpack it, I will save it for work.

I find this sort of analysis (Cooper’s) confusing. Ukraine has opened up another phase of this war - deep strike manoeuvre essentially, which is disrupting and dislocation Russian offensive operations to the point I am not sure they will be able to resume (how long has this pause been going on now?). They have been shaping the battlefield around Kherson very effectively, only the dimmest analyst cannot see they are setting the Russians up for “bad”. All of this is supposed to be when the UA was on its back foot after the glorious Russian victories at Severodonetsk. I have not followed this Cooper guy but have read others who have built assessments but refuse to get off them once they are proven wrong. So there were only three bridges across the Dneiper and the UA have nailed two of them so precisely that it would put an engineer to shame, let alone an air strike. “Oh but look the Russian’s repaired a bridge at Kharkiv”…so f#cking what!? Last we heard the Russians were scrambling towards Kherson and stalling in the Donbas, while desertions/refuseniks/ and general signs of morale failure continue. Unless this guy can show that the action at Kharkiv is opening up a new operational offensive, it is like that kid we all grew up with that would go “well sure a trip to Disneyland is nice but…”. We have been talking a lot about metrics and one I keep coming back to is “options”. The introduction of more deep strike capability in the UA has clearly expanded their options while compressing the RA’s and by any standard that is not a good thing for Russia. We should double down on this and send more deep strike…cause it is working.

Dollars Converts (or Believers) Votes Just about every human endeavour has fundamental metrics applied to it, be they accurate or not. We are probably at the “agree to disagree” point on this. But I am grateful for the discussion, it has been helpful and triggered some ideas.

I think we are closer to agreement than not. The crux of disagreement is likely here. We have metrics for other human activity - lots of them. Demographics, migration, economics, views, likes, consumption, political activity, opinions, a person themselves (race, language, births, deaths, gender, orientation etc) and religion, just to name a few. We assign all sorts of metrics to human activity and interaction. We create models, some more successful than others. Given all those units of humanity, what makes the human interaction/activity of war lack a fundamental unit? What makes it so special that it becomes immeasurable? I disagree, mainly because it mystifies and obfuscates, when the gravity of the pursuit of war should demand the opposite. As we have discussed, in fact what started this was a general accepted fundamental unit of a “kill”, employed even in this war. It is constant in every war, but as I have described it is incomplete. A kill may be just a representation of a more abstract relationship, like dollar to value. “Loss”, is definitely a fundamental metric of war, no one who has ever engaged in one has ever come out with some loss. In fact one could say the primary pursuit in war is to “lose less”, or maybe “lose better”. Perhaps the fundamental unit is sacrifice itself as it is directly linked to Will. No matter, I guess it is on me to figure out, or not, I did bring it up after all.

Not attainable? The problem we have is that there are too many and they are often in conflict. We are living in one right now, we call it Joint - which code for “integrated, empowered and expensive”. The general theory is simple - if I have that better than an opponent, I will win. Before that we had Mass (the quality of quantity), and before that we had Offensive Spirit (the bold press of the bayonet). We have tomes of general theories, we call them doctrine. It is picking the right one that appears to be the problem. Now if we are talking a universal general theory that will stand forever as a universal constant…that one is harder unless you go with very broad definitions - e.g. War is a violent contest of human Will. Ok, most definitely applies to every war we have ever had…it also applies to a football game. Nor does it leave much for strategy:. “We must have more Will, and better violence”…um, ok. Now the problem is that general theories evolve, they are dynamic. Further the side that figures that out first has an enormous advantage. If war is a human-based affair then if we get consensus, it is “true”. It is when that truth runs into physical reality that things get strange, and physical reality is “true” in the scientific sense. So we have a subjective human activity that sits on a foundation of objective physical reality, that is the tricky part but does not disqualify the pursuit for deeper or better general theory. I guess my point is for everyone to take a short break from the OS feeds on this war and reflect on the last 1000 or so pages. Just looking at what happened to the Russians we can 1) confirm the theories we already knew (e.g. understand the war you are in, and be prepared to adapt to a new one), and 2) have seen some bent and possibly broken (e.g. Conventional Mass and Surprise). We could bolt together all the things we have seen and discussed for the last 6 months into a new general theory of modern warfare, or at least How Not to Fight a Modern War that may only apply to this one, or it may uncover deeper general principles.

Pretty damn near exactly. I suspect that there are some fundamental factors that we can employ across wars; however, the weighting (like weighted violence) is different for each war. We already have this in operational planning in the form of indicators and information requirements. JIIPOE alone has laundry lists of analytical factors, as does Mission Analysis, COG constructs…we got a lot of factors is my point. My thinking is there may be more fundamental ones worth exploring and we likely glanced off them right here on the thread. As to big computing. I gotta be honest, I do not know. I have seen some impressive stuff but I suspect it will be like unmanned systems and will require a human in the loop for context. I suspect war can be distilled down to a fundamental strategy framework, we actually had some already End-Ways-Means; however, they keep coming up short.

So a dynamic Drake equation that continually needs to 1) stay aligned with context as it shifts and 2) can learn. My best guess is that it will have to be a man-machine pairing, as the machine will be needed to aggregate the data and the man to understand slithery human context, add a good dose of instinct. Of course we are back to currencies of war and what to look for, you list a few right there.

Again, a lot to unpack here but I disagree mainly because we just did it. As to computers, we are talking about non-linear algorithms here which do not create deterministic models, they instead can give probability based assessments. Will we ever have a super computer able to predict war accurately?…dunno, depends who you talk to. Dr John Arquilla seems to think so, but plenty experts agree with you. I do know it is an investment area in military affairs and I have seen some stuff that says “definitely maybe” at least in some contexts. As to metrics and indicators, a forum full of guys saw and predicted the Russian failures based on a finite number of key metrics - What we could see: Russian logistics fail; operational pre-conditions fail; air power fail; abandoned vehicles/discipline fail; combined arms fail; UA friction/attrition. We already did a meta-analysis and we still are doing it. And that analysis was far more accurate than “the professionals”. We did not need a giant computer to tell us Russia would fail to take Kyiv, nor did we need one to know they would stall in the Donbas. Nor do we need one to tell us that they are likely going to be looking at collapse this Fall. If we had better data or a way to crunch large data better we would likely see more trends - I have no doubt we missed some. We just did crowd-sourced meta-analysis that led to a better assessment of the current war than a lot of professionals are doing - and here you will just have to trust me. If we took this method and fed it high-side information we would even do better. If we could distill this down to a currency of war, we would be on to something even stronger. I am not a war game developer (well maybe an amateur one), I am professional military and have been for 33 years, and what I have seen on this thread alone tells me we have not come anywhere near the potential limit of what is knowable about a war in motion. In fact I hope we kept a list of the trends we developed and followed as they may be closer to the “silver bullet” so assessment that a lot of what we are using in the trade right now.

Clearly I am not getting through here. I am not proposing a complete numbers based theory of warfare…that died with Jomini and the thinkers of his era. Nor can war entirely be based on scientific method, here we often fall down in the West. That all said, war is not a voodoo art or entirely a set of dice rolls either. We can, and should do more to try and develop more nuanced theories of a central human enterprise, or we all know the risks involved. I completely disagree with the “ce sera” or “it is too hard” position as it traps us into planning for the last war and strategies built on hope, which never work out. Gains can be made, and better ideas are out there - we can war better.

This...and This. War is a human enterprise built on a foundation of Will. I call it Certainty, because I believe it goes beyond "wanting" and must encompass believing. Clausewitz definitely got that part right. But unpacking Will is where Steve's point comes in...how do you do it? Can you do it? It is an incredibly complex and problematic concept. It is influenced by memory, fear, greed, righteousness, culture, social value, to name but a few. Finally, Will is often not rational, nor does rationality become insured through a collective...hell we are watching Russia do that now. War is a violent collision of human Will, while all parties negotiate with a future. Is as close as I can come right now. From this we get: - Vision - what is that Will envisioned as a future Certainty? - Communication - How do a people communicate that Vision? I think this component is fundamental to characterizing a war. - Negotiation - Internally and externally. How is a people negotiating with the future? - Sacrifice - How do a people rationalize the loss against the vision? All of this is only useful if it can be translated into practical strategy.

And here we definitely disagree...well maybe not entirely. I too have heard the stories of the "big giant computer program" and they have not ever been effective - RIP EBO. War, like economics is highly complex, to the point it may be chaotic (Bosquette called it chaoplexic a term I really like) but it is bounded by predictable and definable frameworks - gravity for instance. Human interaction is also governed by patterns of behaviour, sown with chaotic elements. I think there are at least two answers to the "unsolvable riddle" theory: 1. We have not developed the computational horsepower, or sophistication to be able to actually crunch numbers. Here things like AI/ML and Quantum computing offer some glimmers of potential. These teamed up with omniscient ISR means that the answers are likely there but they are deeply hidden in the noise. 2. We are looking at the problem incorrectly, missing something or a perspective. The idea that war should be viewed through a meta-analytical lens/framework may gives us an ability to derive indicative trends - in fact we did that exact thing here on this thread. By stepping back and pulling in multiple macro and micro data points, process by many minds from different backgrounds and perspectives, we developed an meta-analytical algorithm that has been pretty damned accurate, if low resolution. This is not that different from what military staffs do already. Or perhaps you are correct and I am an alchemist looking for the Riddle of War, which may be unsolvable. But the effort is not wasted. You kinda are making my point. If we can apply a universal metric to a social enterprise like economy, why can we not do it for warfare? One can argue in some wars the fundamental unit was "land"...took so much terrain. I am getting the sense the answer may lie in value-for-cost but both of those are squishy concepts.

Is it now? So when the Mongols employed strategies of extermination against the Khwarazmian Empire, how exactly were they "compelling to do will"? ISIL is another great example, they followed an eschatological doctrine - the hard core believers were not fighting to compel anyone to do their will, they were an extension of the will of their god, same for the Crusaders for that matter. Problem is that there is no universally accepted definition of war - https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Contemporary_Military_Theory/9WQKBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 We have more forms and types of war than Inuit have names for snow...and none fall under any universal definition that is not so broad as to be useless to the practitioner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_war. Best advice in that reference - "It is by understanding the war you are about to embark upon that you can identify correctly you comparative strategic and operational advantages, which, in turn, is necessary in order to construct an optimized strategy" (Ch 2, pg 2 - quoting Harry G. Summers). This speaks to the reality is that war is a multi-dimensional creature that often takes on many different characteristics between conflict. Knowing which one you are in, is likely the most important step. With respect to overly broad terms like "politics" the problem becomes obvious...so what? How does one build a strategy from a definition that encompasses every facet of human interaction. Clausewitz was not talking about the broader term, we know this from his trilogy. He was talking the politics of the state. Reading his small wars papers and "older Clausewitz" demonstrate that he struggled with "war of the people" significantly and never really cracked them, and may have never done so because they did not fit his reality. Clausewitz was not wrong, he was in fact a foundational theorist - western at least - however, it is important to know where the Clausewitz horizon is located. We have gotten ourselves in far too much trouble ignoring that. From what I have seen he has several horizon limitations - micro-social, pre-civilization, culture/ideological and modern information age warfare to name a few. Past these horizons we either apply the wrong metrics or principles. Ok, and here is another problem with Clausewitz, because his writing is incomplete it remains vague...like "Bible vague" in places, and believers are always trying to "fill in the blanks". When Clausewitz reduces war to the key principle of "decision of arms", I cannot assign Sun Tzu-esque nuance that is not there. He meant "kill them until they stop or cannot fight anymore"...nothing more or less should be expected from a Prussian aristocrat from his time. I have seen to many in the Clausewitzian priesthood go "well you must understand in the original German"...don’t buy it, never will. The man was an old soldier and knew his business. Problem is that we know this does not work universally - e.g. NVA and VC, never won a battle but won the war, same applies to the Taliban.

Problem with this is that is broadens the definition of “political” to mean everything which then really means nothing. So ISIL going to war with the west as basically a doomsday cult…is political. Barbary Coast pirates waging war as a vocation…political. At this end of the spectrum, may as well say “war is an extension of human” because everything human is “political”. This is about as useful as saying “war is war”.

Now that is something - the weight of violence is not a constant. Seems obvious but that is profound. I am not sure this is an attritional equation where killing a lot of Russians will deliver - but hey worth a try. I do think that killing a lot of the right Russians at a high rate may get us closer to where we need to be. Will need to think on this but I just got that “tip of tongue” feeling.

I think you miss my point, I am likely not describing it clearly. We live in, or at least view it as, an information-based universe. Standard unit that describe quantities (or qualities e.g. density) are built off of universal constants that are in effect packages information. We see physical phenomenon and we measure it via different slices of those universal constants. e.g. a meter is how far light travels in a vacuum in a set period of time. This is all information, packaged, transferable and universal. Economics is about value. How it is made/determined and how it is distributed and how it transitions. We use a completely arbitrary unit to describe value and measure it - currency - fundamentally in economics everything boils down to a value-information unit. No matter how one looks at it, we have fundamental units - you can call them something else, measure them in a different way but they are all wrapped around a fundamental piece of information. In warfare, we do not have that. This enormous human enterprise, in some ways as large as economics - in fact we measure war in dollars as well as blood. We do not have a fundamental unit. This would be like trying to understand physics without a standard unit of time or length. Or a universal constant like the speed on light. Not really asking for an answer, if anyone had one I would be shocked - and I have looked for a very long time. My point was that applying “killing” as a sole primary metric, or fundamental unit of information within war is problematic and proven as inaccurate in many cases.

It is part of the answer but I am with Keegan on this one, war is often a lot more than political or about will. Some wars are commercial - a way to make a living. And others are cultural - “my god told me to go to war”. In fact the Clausewitzian doctrine is what gets us into trouble on body counts (i.e. results of duels).

So I have been thinking about the fundamental measure in warfare. In physics we have the meter, the second and the gram - all framed by the speed of light in a vacuum. Within information theory the famous “bit”. Chemistry has the “degree”. In economics we have the mighty $. Almost every field of study can be boiled down to a few fundamental units. So what is the fundamental unit of warfare? And I have not found it yet. First response is “body count”, or a death…easy. Problem is that as a unit it does not track. The body count does not directly correlate to the course or outcome in too many cases. We have had wars of extermination in which body count did become the basic unit, such as the Mongol invasions. However, we have had wars with millions of dead, like WW1, but it was not those deaths that determined who won or lost. WW1 ended due to economic exhaustion, to which loss of human capital was a factor but not the deciding factor. We have also had endless wars where the body count did not seem to matter, like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Further we have had wars that were decisively determined with very low body counts, such as the Falklands. So “killing” appears as a means or way, not an end. It can give an indication but is not determinative. If war is a collision of certainty, then it follows that the fundamental unit is a measure of that collision. Will has to be central to that but Will is an incredibly complex and squishy concept with a lot of layers. I have played with the idea of a “wit” as placeholder but have not got a bead on what it actually looks like or how to measure it. Regardless, the biggest problem with “a kill” as the fundamental unit is what does one do when it does not work? Easy answer is “more killing” up and including “all of them” but we all know that extermination not only has blowback in the community of humanity, it deeply affects internally. Killing does affect collective will but it is not a direct relationship, unless you completely remove that collective - and even here it might not work as the “idea” of the will of an exterminated collective can outlive the people who came up with it…like Christianity.

If you meet one turn around and run. War when is viewed as history it seems so clear - when you are living one it is a chaotic mess with nothing but shades of grey in every direction.

I get the "terror strikes" component to put pressure on the Ukrainian government - problem is, when has "terror" or "shock and awe" ever really worked as strategy? Human beings are a funny bunch, we exist in imaginary social constructs - nations, provinces, duchies, towns, neighborhoods etc. We invented these structures to sustain order when our populations expanded well beyond what we were originally designed for - but here is something I have suspected for a long time: we are still wired for our real social structures. Those few dozen people we are directly linked to by blood or dependency. These are little social bubbles - hell in the pandemic we could map them - that comprise the real ocean of humanity. We actually care about them. These are the people we go to war for, we also go to work well after we want to for them. We get dragged to church on Sunday by them and we dress like them, talk them and eat like them. We buy the same stuff, dress the same way and consume the same information, thru the similar lenses. We are still really tribal after all this time. Now the energy in those bubbles is incredibly powerful - like running into a burning building, powerful. However, it is also incredibly local. We hunker down in our particular tree and tend to keep our heads down, even when the tree next to us gets chopped down. It takes a lot to get us all going in the same direction. We invent all sorts of mechanisms to create and generate power from these little bubbles - the Chinese did a massive and brutal social engineering exercise in the 60's to try and re-build those bubbles in such a way as to give the state all the power...it did not work because people. So what? Shock and awe, terror strikes and what not, have an effect but it is 1) very hard to line up in the direction you may want it to go, in fact it might create massive counter pressure (see The Blitz 1940) and 2) getting that effect to translate broadly across and entire macro-social system can be very hard, even impossible under some circumstances. Humans are highly unpredictable - I think we talked about 3rd order chaotic systems - and as such lobbing really expensive and limited missiles at them to get them to do anything in concert as a primary strategy...well it is not optimal. Sociologist have no idea how "Springs, revolutions or movements" really happen. We can see them easily in hindsight but predicting them ahead of time is nearly impossible right now. So what magically triggers things like The Crusades or Hippies is really difficult - a sum of pressures and human turbulence that is highly unpredictable, and people have spent empires trying to crack that Riddle of Flesh. If Russian power brokers sat down and figured "we will simply hit them with missiles and they will all give up" then they are 1) complete amateurs, and 2) dangerous amateurs who do not really understand the dynamics of application of military power against human-based social structures - s'ok, they are not alone in this. My point is that they should have been looking at military impact if they wanted to win a war, and it is likely too late to "get smart" now if they could. Directly impacting micro-social Will is a game for subversive warfare, not missiles and Russia clearly mis-read what war it was in, and now has to come to terms with how to lose it.

In this we are in complete agreement but these are targets it is the failure to achieve effects and translate them into decision points that is the hallmark of the Russian way of war so far. - Erode and disrupt UA C4ISR - ensure your enemy cannot see, think, react and learn faster/better than you. - "Make it go dark" - isolate all sectors of a target society by cutting off communications and information nodes leading to a "loss of coherence" or disunity within the enemies Will/conative frameworks. - Destroy, disrupt and dislocate logistics - the net effect here is that it essentially erodes enemy ability to establish operational tempo, particularly offensive. This would include cutting western support. [aside: Russian is supposed to be the masters of hybrid and "sneaky" warfare, which leaves me wondering why we have seen no warehouse fires in Poland] Problem is, Russia was supposed to do all this before they crossed the start line on 24 Feb. Trying to do it 5 months in, when your opponent has hardened and built resilience based on national mobilization and international support is nearly impossible. It has been interesting that the RA has not seemed to be able to come out of their "operational pause" even though they were announcing as such. A war is like a rock concert in some respects - while the music is pounding and everyone is jumping, it is hard not to get caught up. But when there is a 30 min break between bands, everyone checks their phones, notices how tired they are as the drugs start to wear off and start looking at the exit - the real danger of an operational pause. I think Steve predicted Jun as the breaking point for the RA awhile back but Aug-Sep is starting to sound more likely based on a lot of this. I am not sure what that "breaking point" might look like, it could be as simple as "no longer able to conduct operational offensives", or it could be bigger. The thing is, Putin could order total mobilization right now but it likely would not change the conditions the RA is operating under for at least 90-180 days, unless they just start pushing untrained people to the front Stalin-style, at which point my bet is the whole thing will explode in Putin's face.

I get the sentiment but I think the danger is in another direction to be honest. Putin cannot convince his people to do full mobilization, hence this “soft-opening” approach. I am not sure they are willing to follow him into a certain inferno. The Russians also have to be worried about US ABM technology development, it spooked the crap out of them back in the late 80s and that was over 30 years ago. They have to be wondering just how strong that hand is, or is not. So the old Capt has been going on about decisions and this is a Strange one - creating/making a decision from imagined conditions/stimuli. Built on perception this space sees the Boogie man and drives off the road. It is the land of Darwin awards and it has many champions in the pursuit of war. So I am not saying that Russia cannot find itself down this dark road but it is more likely that someone bullets Putin before they do, if he ever did order it. Far more dangerous is a fallen Russian without a safety net. Fractured and possibly in a state of civil war, with about 6000 nuclear weapons rolling around the dance floor. So I agree, we definitely are lovers in a dangerous time here, gas prices might be a quaint memory if this goes totally pear shaped. Russia has ran into a house and set it on fire while nailing shut all the doors…and it is all our fault! Which would be hilarious if they did not have nukes in the basement. And even if Russia learns how to lose this thing, we still have the rise of China as it aims to re-wire global order, we will see if it can. Oh and we can throw in a US which is frankly scaring the hell outta everyone and has been since about Jan 6th…I honestly hope it was just an anomaly and/or growing pain. Toss in climate change pressure etc…only thing missing are zombies, which at this point might be a stabilizing force. Remember when we only had the pandemic to worry about?

Proprietary as far as I know, but it is gaining traction in some circles particularly in discussions about subversive/political warfare. Up front, it is a point of contention with some particularly in certain conventional groups but you can see examples of all three being projected around in this war just fine. In military circles I always go with “if it helps, use it, if not, well don’t”…I get the same pay either way. The thing to understand is that each decision has power and influence on options spaces, the trick is understanding how to use them.

And lord knows the modern western military decision-making and intelligence enterprise has never been wrong. Fair point, I was more referring to here in our little virtual world. An assumption should not become a fact until fully confirmed and even then if it is human-based keep a close eye on it. If we end up adopting assumptions as facts before that validation very bad things happen - like invading a smaller neighbour and treating the assumption that they will roll over in a weekend as fact, and then building an entire military operation off that “fact”….whoopsie. And then there are meta-stable (there is that word again) facts, who can turn and bite one in the ass in a bippy, like the reliability of a partner nation force. Or tautological loops where assumptions and facts feed upon each other into a self-fulfilling circle jerk. It is what I tell students - war is complex enough it does not need your help. Make sure your Observations, Deductions and Conclusions stay lined up, and that your assumptions and facts stay on speaking terms.