What’s new and what’s old? Debate over defense theory and practice has focused much in recent years about the novelty of respective defense theories and terminology. This debate, like the COIN debate, is probably going to continue to go around in circles. Is war more complex than it has been in the past? Probably not. So why do we feel like it is?
First, complexity is often a product of lived experience. A soldier serving in Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in World War I would take a different view of the complexity of his tasks than a soldier in the Western front, although both operational problems were equally complex (the considerations behind the infantry offensive and its coordination with artillery in the Western front were equally complex as the war of movement waged by Allenby in battles such as Megiddo in 1918). Second, complexity is often a product of structural factors. If you have a poor strategy and you are trying to design a campaign plan, things will by definition look scary and complex because the intent you seek to realize is hazy and ambiguous. Poor training or a very mechanistic education in strategy can also make problems look complex when methods only appropriate for one kind of situation fall through.
One thing that can probably help us is to look back at complex and intractable problems in strategy of the past often forgotten in our field of study’s presentism. The Cold War, for example, was really complex–as any look at the mathematics of deterrence theory and game theory indicates. The cognitive challenge of adapting to French superiority of a new method of war in the early 1800s was also a difficult task for Prussia. The Civil War and the American Revolution are also great case studies because of the way they exposed one of the fundamental weaknesses of American strategy–divided government and the conflict between the decentralized democracy the founders preferred and the centralized command necessary to integrate political and military effects in war.
Red teaming and alternative analysis for national security and business advantage.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Phil Ridderhof 03.02.10 at 4:18 pm
This is a great post, as is your associated paper on SWJ on Design. This recent Foreign Affairs book review backs up your points on the complexity of the Cold War: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66033/lawrence-d-freedman/frostbitten?page=show.
As you allude to, there’s a connection between how familiar we are with a subject and its percieved complexity or difficulty. I don’t beleive that’s it generally a case of more or les complex, but more or less familiar. What is familiar to us now is less complex.
Additionally the insight enabled by hindsight–of knowing what actually did happen based on what actions were taken, provides a false perception of simplicity (relative). This belies the actual complexity of the problem when it was considered with the information available beforehand. There is also the case that in history, we tend to generalize the cause and effect relationships, which also leads to inaccurate simplification of the problem.