McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 1, October 1996

Since the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, there has been growing discussion of the possibility that technological advances in the means of combat would produce fundamental changes in how future wars will be fought. A number of observers have suggested that the nature of war itself would be transformed. Some proponents of this view have gone so far as to predict that these changes would include great reductions in, if not the outright elimination of, the various impediments to timely and effective action in war for which the Prussian theorist and soldier Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) introduced the term "friction." Friction in war, of course, has a long historical lineage. It predates Clausewitz by centuries and has remained a stubbornly recurring factor in combat outcomes right down to the 1991 Gulf War. In looking to the future, a seminal question is whether Clausewitzian friction would succumb to the changes in leading-edge warfare that may lie ahead, or whether such impediments reflect more enduring aspects of war that technology can but marginally affect. It is this question that the present essay will examine.

Clausewitz's earliest known use of the term "friction" to "describe the effect of reality on ideas and intentions in war" occurred in a 29 September letter written to his future wife, Marie von Brhhl, less than 3 weeks before France defeated Prussia at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt on 14 October 1806. (Note 1) By the time Clausewitz died in 1831, his original insight regarding friction's debilitating effects on the campaign of 1806 had grown into a central theme of the unfinished manuscript that his widow published as Vom Kriege [On War]. (Note 2)

American military officers today most often refer to Clausewitz's unified concept of a general friction (Gesamtbegriff einer allgemeinen Friktion) as the "fog and friction" of war. (Note 3) The diverse difficulties and impediments to the effective use of military force that those possessing military experience instinctively associate with this phrase are generally acknowledged to have played significant roles in most, if not all, of the wars since Clausewitz's time. Even in a conflict as inundated with technically advanced weaponry as the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), there was no shortage of friction at any level, tactical, operational, strategic, or even political. Indeed, close examination of Desert Storm suggests that frictional impediments experienced by the winning side were not appreciably different in scope or magnitude than they were for the Germans during their lightning conquest of France and the Low Countries in May 1940.

The historical persistence of friction, despite vast changes in the means of war since Clausewitz's time, suggests that his concept may reflect far more than a transitory or contingent feature of land warfare during the Napoleonic era. Yet, as we try to think about how war may change over the next couple decades in response to technological advances, nothing precludes us from wondering whether the scope or overall magnitude of Clausewitzian friction may change. Some U.S. military officers who have grappled with how future wars may be fought have suggested that foreseeable advances in surveillance and information technologies will sufficiently lift "the fog of war" to enable future American commanders to "see and understand everything on a battlefield." (Note 4) Nor are visionary military officers alone in this speculation. In a 6-month assessment conducted by a Washington, DC, defense-policy institute on the prospects for a "Military Technical Revolution" (MTR), the participants concluded that "what the MTR promises, more than precision attacks or laser beams, is . . . to imbue the information loop with near-perfect clarity and accuracy, to reduce its operation to a matter of minutes or seconds, and, perhaps most important of all, to deny it in its entirety to the enemy." (Note 5)

These forecasts concerning conflict in the information age raise at least three first-order questions about Clausewitz's unified concept of a general friction. First, contrary to what Clausewitz probably thought, is it likely that general friction is a transitory, nonstructural feature of the violent interaction between contending political entities we call war and amenable to technical solutions? Second, even if friction is, instead, an enduring, structural feature of combat processes, can technological advances appreciably reduce the aggregate quantities of friction experienced by one side or the other in future conflicts? Third, do wars since Clausewitz's time, or foreseeable advances in the means of waging future wars, demand major modifications of Clausewitz's original concept? Alternatively, how might Clausewitz's original concept change if interpreted in light of contemporary knowledge, particularly from the standpoint of disciplines such as evolutionary biology and nonlinear dynamics?

The first task in trying to answer these questions is to clarify Clausewitz's mature notion of general friction. To establish a common baseline for discussion, we will review the evolution of friction in Clausewitz's thought (chapter 2) and its origins in the intellectual clarity of his mentor and second father, Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (chapter 3). Using this baseline, the taxonomy of Clausewitz's mature concept will then be clarified and extended (chapter 4).

The second task is to subject our baseline understanding of general friction to the test of empirical evidence. What does the Persian Gulf War suggest about the persistence of Clausewitzian friction as recently as 1991 (chapter 5)? And does friction's role in that conflict provide any grounds for concluding that its potential role or "magnitude" has appreciably diminished since World War II?

The third task is to examine friction's prospective role in future conflicts. This task presents special problems insofar as direct evidence about wars yet to be fought is not possible. Instead, arguments for friction's undiminished persistence in future war will have to be constructed on the basis of related structural limitations in other areas. The discussion will aim, therefore, at establishing three conclusions by various indirect arguments. First, the prospects for eliminating friction entirely appear quite dim because friction gives every evidence of being a built-in or structural feature of combat processes. (Note 6) Second, whether friction's overall magnitude for one side or the other can be appreciably reduced by technological advances is less important than whether such advances facilitate being able to shift the relative balance of friction between opponents more in one's favor. Third, recasting Clausewitz's concept in contemporary terms is a useful step toward better understanding its likely role in future war regardless of what one may conclude about the possibility of either side largely eliminating its frictional impediments.

What sorts of arguments and evidence might build a case for these conclusions? Before military conflict even begins, there is the apparent intractability of the prospect of strategic surprise, which offers a "pre-combat" parallel to general friction (chapter 6). The inaccessibility to central economic planners of all the information needed to run a national economy more efficiently than market forces driven by a myriad of individual choices reveals an economic "friction" comparable to that built into military organizations (chapter 7). The propensities and constraints built into humankind by biological evolution provide a wellspring for general friction that seems likely to persist at some level as long as Homo sapiens does (chapter 8). Finally, air combat data and related experimental evidence can be used to quantify, within a single area of tactical interaction, the degree to which the presence of man himself "in the loop" dominates engagement outcomes (chapter 9).

With these indirect arguments for general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war in hand, the final task is to exploit the modern notion of nonlinearity as a basis for reconstructing Clausewitz's original concept in more contemporary terms (chapter 10). Among other things, the contemporary understanding of nonlinear dynamics reveals how nonlinearities built into combat processes can render the course and outcome of combat unpredictable in the long run by repeatedly magnifying the effects of differences between our constructs of unfolding military operations and their actuality.