McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 11, October 1996

Our original point of departure was the notion that foreseeable advances in sensor technologies and information systems may (or will) enable the side exploiting them more effectively to eliminate its "fog of war" while turning the opponent's into a "wall of ignorance."(Note 1) Implicit in this view is the presumption that "knowing everything that is going on" in a volume of battlespace is a problem that technological advances will eventually "solve" once and for all. (Note 2)

Better weaponry, like superior training or operational concepts, can certainly provide leverage for shifting the relative balance of friction decidedly in one's favor, especially against an adversary lacking comparable means altogether. The potential that the Joint Surveillance and Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War to enable Coalition commanders to track coherent vehicular movement on the ground that they had seldom, if ever, been able to follow before was truly breathtaking, and no one in their right mind would consciously prefer to go to war with inferior equipment. However, driving one's own friction to zero while, simultaneously, rendering the enemy's effectively infinite is not, at its core, a technical problem.

In the first place, even in an "information-rich" environment, there is only so much that any human can absorb, digest, and act upon in a given period of time. The greater the stress, the more data will be ignored, noise mistaken for information, and information misconstrued, and the greater will be the prospects for confusion, disorientation, and surprise. Second, the spatial and, especially, temporal distribution of information relevant to decisions in war means that some key pieces will be inaccessible at any given time and place. Those who have held senior positions in corporations or military services need only reflect on how much they did not know about what was taking place in their own organizations to appreciate the reality of information being spatially or temporally inaccessible. Third, the empirical fact of nonlinear dynamics, when coupled with the unavoidable mismatches between reality and our representations of it, reveal fundamental limits to prediction, no matter how much information and processing power technological advances may one day place in human hands. However fervently one may wish that Laplace had been right in viewing the world as a predictable clockwork, at the end of the twentieth century this outlook no longer appears defensible either in practice or in theory.

To push the implications of these three points a bit further, the ways in which friction will manifest itself in future conflicts, too, undoubtedly involves human foibles, inaccessible information, and nonlinear dynamics. No matter how much technological advances may constrain general friction in some areas, the evidence and arguments mounted in the second half of this essay suggest that it will simply balloon in others, often in ways that we cannot predict. Technological innovation in the means of combat introduces novelty into warfare, and the indirect effects and second-order consequences of novelty are never predictable with any high degree of certainty. (Note 3) Who among IBM's executives genuinely foresaw in the early 1980s that, first, mini-computer servers and, then, personal computers would so rapidly erode the company's traditional mainframe business that "Big Blue" would post a record $5 billion loss in 1992, lay off tens of thousands of workers, and lose forever its earlier dominance of the computer industry? (Note 4) Who could have predicted that the main benefit the Israelis would find in their early battlefield experience with remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) would turn out to lie in fixing their own forces rather than enemy targets? (Note 5) And who would have guessed that the invention of the post box would contribute to women=s liberation by enabling new generations of young ladies to post letters to their sweethearts without their parents' knowledge? (Note 6) The social consequences of technological innovation are especially hard to predict and war is, after all, a social enterprise.

Looking ahead to how friction may one day manifest itself in future conflict, one should also consider the susceptibility of "digitized battlespace" to subtle forms of misinformation and deception. The more the U.S. military embraces digital networks and synthetic environments, the greater will be the potential for subtle manipulation of our "situation awareness" by a sophisticated adversary, to say nothing of simply confusing ourselves with an overabundance of "information." Indeed, it is entirely possible that the application of information technologies to future war will expand, perhaps enormously, the potential for deception. Similarly, the more "transparent" battlespace becomes, the more human participants may feel pressured to make life-or-death decisions in shorter and shorter spaces of time. (Note 7) Hence, there appear to be good reasons to expect that the wholesale introduction of state-of-the-art information technologies into future war, far from eliminating Clausewitzian friction, will simply give rise to new and unexpected manifestations.

Yet, despite all that has been said, might one not still hold out for some reduction in the overall "magnitude" of Clausewitzian friction as advanced sensors and information systems make ever greater inroads into the conduct of war? As initially broached at the end of chapter 5, this question raises a host of difficulties concerning the actual measurement or quantification of frictional differences between opponents. Decision-cycle times and viable option sets in possibility space were introduced to try to put some substance behind the intuition that general friction's magnitude in and influence on Desert Storm in 1991 did not seem to be noticeably less than its magnitude and aggregate influence had been during the Germans' May 1940 assault on France and the Low Countries a half-century earlier. If anything, the differential in attractive options may have been somewhat less in 1991 than in 1940 because the Iraqis had more "maneuver room" than the Allies, despite the Coalition's one-sided access to advanced sensors and information systems, including satellite imagery and Joint STARS data.

Whether notions such as decision-cycle times and viable option sets in possibility space can be extended in the future to lend more precision and completeness to these judgments remains to be seen. On the one hand, they appear useful in supporting judgments about general friction's rough magnitude at different times in this century, and those judgments seem comparable to the kinds of conclusions that biologists such as Richard Dawkins have drawn about "large" versus "small" leaps in genetic space. (Note 8) On the other hand, Alan Beyerchen's caution that attractive option sets for either adversary over the course of a conflict are best envisioned as a dynamic "shape" in a multidimensional phase space, rather than as a single number, indicates the immense difficulties of precise quantification in concrete situations. Of course, to repeat a point made in chapter 5, cycle times and options in possibility space do not capture all aspects of general friction. The matter of a good fit between ends and means in war, for instance, falls outside both of these candidate metrics. Hence decision-cycle times and option set in possibility space do not exhaustively quantify the waxing and waning of general friction during military operations; instead, they merely suggest a direction in which progress toward some degree of quantification appears possible. A further thought, however, is that we may be longing for simple, quantitative metrics where none is possible. One can measure temperature or mass readily enough with a single number, but social utility or the second-order consequences of wartime decisions years afterwards may be another matter entirely given the spatial-temporal distribution of the relevant information and the limits of human cognition.

A related point that emerged most vividly in chapter 9 is that high situation awareness by one side need not be equivalent to a favorable balance of friction. Crystal-clear awareness that defeat or death is imminent is of little value if one's option set of viable responses has reached the vanishing point. Even perfect information is useless if there no longer remain real alternatives to the defeat or destruction of one's forces. A comparatively high level of battlespace awareness vis-a-vis the opponent may be, barring the "unbarrable" exception of Clausewitz's Glhck und Unglhck (good luck and bad), a necessary condition for success in war, but it is certainly not a sufficient one.

What might be some of the more salient implications of general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war for military theory? To begin with a minor but unavoidable point, there has been some resurgence of anti-Clausewitzian sentiment since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Martin van Creveld, to cite one example, has argued that because future wars will be low-intensity conflicts waged by non-state actors against whom the "modern regular forces" of states like Israel, Britain, Russia, and the United States are "all but useless," the age of large-scale, conventional warfare on the Clausewitzian, "trinitarian" model appears to be "at its last gasp." (Note 9) This view, whatever its merits insofar as the character of war in the post-Cold War era is concerned, does not really touch the subject of this essay, general friction. Indeed, van Creveld himself recognizes that "inflexibility, friction, and uncertainty" will continue to apply in future warfare, even if its new form does turn out to resemble most closely the more primitive kinds of conflict that preceded the Peace of Westphilia in 1648. (Note 10)

The second point concerns what a scientific theory of warfare might be like. The four propositions advanced toward the end of chapter 8 are not such a theory, although they represent a plausible start should one choose to begin with the problem of friction in war. The recasting of Clausewitz's original concept in chapter 10 suggests that starting there would be a good idea since the three "frictional" components highlight some of the most enduring features of real war as opposed to war on paper. Emphasis on these kinds of "structural" features had its inspiration in the great clarity Scharnhorst and Clausewitz had concerning what actually occurred and recurred on the battlefields of their day. In this sense, their theoretical emphasis on friction, particularly as reconstructed in chapter 10, was as legitimately scientific as Darwin's notion of the evolution of biological species by means of natural selection.

Third, it is easy at this stage to clarify friction's place in Clausewitz's thought. On the one hand, the Prussian soldier and theorist has not been spared in this essay. Where his thinking about friction and related matters warranted correction, extension, or wholesale revision in light of later knowledge and military experience, changes have been made without hesitation. On the other hand, Richard Simpkin expressed the opinion in his 1985 book Race to the Swift that friction was, to his mind, "Clausewitz's most important contribution to military thought." (Note 11) It turns out that retired U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd had reached the same conclusion by the spring of 1982 based on his willingness to connect Clausewitzian friction with the second law of thermodynamics. (Note 12) At a minimum, this essay has shown how central the unified concept of a general friction (Gesamtbegriff einer allgemeinen Friktion) was to Clausewitz's understanding of war.

This essay, however, had a more ambitious goal: to build a case for the conclusion that general friction will continue to be central to future warfare regardless of technological changes in the means of combat. Perhaps the single most important theme woven into the tapestry of the essay's argumentation is summarized in Proposition III in chapter 8: the realization that it is the differential between two sides' levels of general friction that matters in combat outcomes. If what counts in real war is not the absolute level of friction that either side experiences but the relative frictional advantage of one adversary over the other, then the question of using technology to reduce friendly friction to near zero can be seen for what it is: a false issue that diverts attention from the real business of war. Even comparatively small frictional advantages can, through nonlinear feedback, have huge consequences for combat outcomes, as the air-to-air experience detailed in chapter 9 confirms. Moreover, such relative advantages hinge fundamentally on: (1) constraints imposed by human physical and cognitive limits; (2) informational uncertainties and unforeseeable differences stemming from the spatial-temporal dispersion of information in the external environment, military organizations, and the brains of individual participants; and, (3) the structural nonlinearity of combat processes.

One may or may not choose to gather these diverse structural features of combat and war under a single unified concept of general friction, as Clausewitz did. Nonetheless, they seem destined to remain the root sources of one side's relative frictional advantage over the other even in the age of so-called information-based warfare. Consider, after all, how much would have to be overturned or rejected to conclude otherwise. Among other things, one would need to overthrow nonlinear dynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, the fundamental tenets of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology, and all the limiting metatheorems of mathematical logic, including Kurt G(del's famous incompleteness theorems and Gregory Chaitin's extension of G(del's work to demonstrate the existence of randomness in arithmetic. No small task indeed!