McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 5, October 1996

5.

FRICTION BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER DESERT STORM

Has general friction been a continuing feature of war since Clausewitz's time? If so, is there any evidence that the "magnitude" of its influence has changed appreciably in recent decades? A minimalist response would be simply to note that detailed campaign history since Napoleon has consistently and strongly confirmed general friction's persistence. In this regard, a colleague with many years of teaching experience at the National War College has observed that friction's persistence is the one Clausewitzian concept that most military officers, especially those from combat arms, instinctively embrace. (Note 1) Indeed, friction is the one part of On War that uniformed students at American war colleges usually think they understand.

This minimal response, however, is unlikely to satisfy those lacking either firsthand experience with military operations or in-depth familiarity with the history of at least a few campaigns since Napoleon (particularly twentieth-century military campaigns). Nor does it offer much insight into the possibility that the "magnitude" of general friction's influence on combat processes and outcomes may have changed over the years.

To furnish a more complete response to the questions about friction's role in recent times, therefore, this section will review evidence from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Operation Desert Storm has been chosen for various reasons. First, it is the most recent, large-scale conflict available. Second, Coalition forces employed many of the most technologically advanced military systems in existence, including satellite communications and reconnaissance, direct-attack and standoff precision-guided weapons (for instance, Paveway III laser-guided bombs and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile or TLAM), and low-observable aircraft (the F-117). Third, having participated in the Gulf War Air Power Survey, the author is reasonably confident of having as solid a grasp as most people on what actually occurred during this 43-day campaign, particularly in the air. (Note 2)

At the tactical level of the Coalition air campaign, even the most cursory look at day-to-day operations suggests that there was no shortage of general friction. Aircrews had to cope with equipment malfunctions, inadequate mission-planning materials, lapses in intelligence on both targets and enemy defenses, coordination problems between strike and support aircraft (including a number of F-111F sorties aborted on the third day of the war due to being unable to find tankers for prestrike air refueling(Note 3)), target and time-on-target (TOT) changes after takeoff, unanticipated changes in prewar tactics, adverse weather, the traditional lack of timely bomb damage assessment (BDA), and, in many wings, minimal understanding of what higher headquarters was trying to accomplish from one day to the next. None of these problems were new under the sun in 1991. Indeed, the author personally experienced virtually all of them while flying F-4s over North Vietnam during 1967-1968.

Elaboration of two examples from the preceding list should suffice to substantiate friction's seemingly undiminished pervasiveness at the tactical level during Desert Storm. After the initial three days of actual operations (17-19 January 1991), Coalition air commanders began to shift low-altitude bombing operations to medium altitude in order to minimize further losses to Iraqi low-altitude air defenses, which consisted of large numbers of antiaircraft artillery (AAA) and infrared surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). (Note 4) While this decision did not appreciably affect the accuracy of laser-guided bombs (LGBs) delivered from F-111Fs or F-117s, it did degrade the visual-bombing accuracy of platforms like the F-16 and F/A-18 when pilots began releasing unguided bombs from altitudes well above 10,000 feet. (Note 5) Since the F-16s and F/A-18s predominately employed unguided munitions during Desert Storm, the persistence of this restriction until the Coalition's ground offensive began on 24 February severely limited their ability of these aircraft to hit pinpoint targets such as bridges, fiber-optic cable junctions linking Baghdad to its forces in southern Iraq and Kuwait, or dug-in Iraqi armor. (Note 6) Thus, in 1991, the combination of Coalition sensitivity to losses, coupled with the impracticability of eliminating more than a fraction of the Iraqis' AAA and infrared SAMs, imposed an unexpected degradation in the visual bombing accuracy of Coalition aircraft that persisted to the end of the campaign. During the Vietnam war, most air-to-ground bombing was done manually or with very early computerized bombing systems. As in 1991, staying high enough to avoid losses to low-altitude AAA systematically degraded bombing accuracies.

Adverse weather, which Clausewitz explicitly associated with friction in On War, (Note 7) offers another unambiguous example of the frictional impediments to the execution of plans and intentions in Desert Storm. Adverse weather conditions substantially disrupted operations, especially during the early days of the air campaign and the Coalition's ground offensive at the conflict's end. On the second and third nights of the war, more than half of the planned F-117 strikes were aborted or unsuccessful due to low clouds over Baghdad; on the second day of the ground campaign (25 February 1991), all F-117 sorties were canceled due to weather. (Note 8) So disruptive did the cumulative effects of adverse weather become on the air campaign that the Coalition's head air planner, (then) Brigadier General Buster C. Glosson, came to view it as his "number-one problem" and, by implication, as a greater impediment than the Iraqi Air Force. (Note 9) Similar assessments of weather's disruptive effects on air operations can be found as far back as World War II. In reflecting on the Combined Bomber Offensive against Nazi Germany that he helped both to plan and to execute, Major General Haywood Hansell observed in 1972 that "weather was actually a greater hazard and obstacle than the German Air Force" during 1942-1945. (Note 10) In the case of adverse weather, therefore, it would probably be fair to say that it has consistently been a major frictional impediment to effective war in the air since the emergence of aircraft as a military weapon during World War I. (Note 11)

Given the lop-sided military outcome of Desert Storm, tactical-level friction was unquestionably far, far worse on the Iraqi side of the hill. If Coalition air forces typically found themselves "knee deep" in various "tactical frictions," the Iraqis drowned in it. In air-to-air combat, the Iraqi Air Force suffered thirty-three losses in exchange for a single Coalition fighter believed to have been shot down by an Iraqi MiG-25 on the first night of the war. (Note 12) So quickly did the Iraqis lose effective control of their own airspace that, over 43 days of fighting, they are known to have mounted only two air-to-surface attack sorties against Coalition targets, and both of the Mirage F-1s involved were shot down prior to weapons release by an F-15 of the Royal Saudi Air Force. (Note 13) The dominance of Coalition air forces is, if anything, even more apparent in sortie comparisons between the opposing sides: by the end of Desert Storm, Coalition fighter and bomber crews had flown over 68,000 "shooter" sorties, meaning sorties on which the aircraft involved carried air-to-air or air-to-ground munitions, to appreciably less than 1,000 by the Iraqis. (Note 14)

In fairness, it should be said that the Iraqi Air Force was neither designed to deal with an adversary as large and capable as the Coalition air forces it faced in 1991, nor did it seriously attempt to contest control of the air. Instead, the Iraqi Air Force seems to have hoped merely to impose some losses on its opponents' strike operations while riding out Coalition air strikes, if not the war, inside its hardened aircraft shelters. (Note 15) Imagine, then, the shock, and friction, imposed on Iraqi squadrons when, on the night of 22/23 January 1991 Coalition aircraft began taking out individual shelters with laser-guided bombs (LGBs). (Note 16)

Coalition air power imposed a similar shock on Iraqi ground forces. Saddam Hussein's strategy was not to rely on his air force for decisive results but, instead, to bank on his army being able to inflict enough casualties on Coalition ground units that the allies would not be able to stand the pain; his model of future combat was the kind of bloody ground battles of attrition that had dominated the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. (Note 17) When, in late January 1991, Saddam Hussein ordered the probing attacks that precipitated the Battle of Khafji, he assumed that Iraqi ground forces could move at night despite the presence of Coalition air power. This assumption, however, proved disastrously wrong on the night of 30/31 January. When an E-8 Joint STARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) detected at least two Iraqi brigades on roads in eastern Kuwait trying to move south, Coalition air power proceeded to inflict such devastating destruction that both units were stopped before they could even reach the Saudi border. (Note 18) Further, while the inability of Iraqi ground forces to move even at night in the face of Coalition air power was a tactical issue, it had profound implications for Iraqi strategy. In retrospect, Saddam Hussein's only viable military option after Desert Storm began was to force an early start to a ground war of attrition, before his own ground forces were exhausted, in the hope that sending enough Coalition soldiers home in body bags might shatter the Coalition or turn American public opinion against the war. That this gambit failed in late January and was never attempted again not only shows how much Coalition air power dominated the military outcome of this conflict, but illustrates that unexpected frictional impediments can have operational and strategic consequences as well.

This last point suggests that Iraqi friction was not only far higher than the Coalition's at the tactical level, but at the operational and strategic levels of the campaign as well. In this sense, general friction's manifestations go far to explain both the failure of Iraqi strategy in the Gulf War as well as the lop-sided military outcome. Understandably, these observations may tempt the reader to conclude that Coalition forces encountered little, if any, friction at the operational and strategic levels. Although Coalition friction was certainly less at these levels as well, it was by no means absent.

Consider Coalition efforts during the Persian Gulf War to destroy the Iraqi nuclear program. The Coalition's publicly stated goal of promoting the "security and the stability of the Persian Gulf" provided the political basis for trying to eliminate this program with military means. (Note 19) By the eve of Desert Storm, destruction of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capabilities, including research, production, and storage facilities, had become an explicit objective of the air campaign. (Note 20) Indeed, these capabilities were identified in U.S. Central Command's operations order for the campaign as one of Iraq's "three primary centers of gravity." (Note 21)

In the case of Iraq's nuclear program, destruction was predominately a postwar rather than a wartime objective since Coalition commanders, air planners, and intelligence correctly believed that the Iraqis had not yet fielded even a crude nuclear device. Targeting of the program during Desert Storm, therefore, aimed at inflicting enough destruction on nuclear-related facilities that it would take many years for the Iraqis to reconstitute a viable development effort able to produce operational nuclear weapons. (Note 22)

This seemingly straightforward targeting problem foundered not only on inadequate intelligence about individual targets but, more importantly, on Coalition misunderstanding of the target system as a whole. The difficulties went much deeper than failing to identify even half of the geographic locations containing nuclear or nuclear-related facilities by the final days of the war. (Note 23) The nature and operation of the Iraqi nuclear program were not understood.

In 1976 the Iraqis had struck a deal with the French to supply two nuclear reactors, the larger being a 70 megawatt (thermal) reactor that the French dubbed Osirak and Saddam Hussein named Tammuz to honor the month in the Arabic calendar during which his Ba'th party came to power in 1968. (Note 24) When oil-rich Iraq began subsequently acquiring large amounts of uranium ore concentrate (yellowcake) neither subject to international safeguards nor directly usable as fuel, the possibility arose that once Osirak came on line it would be used to irradiate yellowcake which, if reprocessed, would begin yielding weapons-grade plutonium. (Note 25) This alarming prospect provoked the Israelis to plan a preemptive strike against the Osirak reactor at Al Tuwaitha, about 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, before it became operational. (Note 26) The attack was carried out by Israeli fighters on Sunday, 7 June 1981, and Osirak was not subsequently rebuilt.

While it was generally believed in the West that Iraqi efforts to acquire nuclear weapons went mostly dormant for at least the next five or six years, the truth of the matter was quite different. The picture eventually pieced together by international inspectors in the months after Desert Storm ended was that the Iraqi response to the Israeli raid had been to redesign the program to minimize its vulnerability to accurate bombing. Realizing that the reactors necessary to produce plutonium in the quantities needed for nuclear weapons presented large, fixed targets that were as vulnerable to destruction as Osirak had been, the Iraqis altered the nature of their nuclear program; instead of pursuing plutonium weapons they shifted to enriched uranium. (Note 27) In short order the Iraqis embarked on a clandestine, lavishly funded, and highly redundant program that included three parallel tracks for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic-isotope separation using calutrons; chemical enrichment; and, gaseous-centrifuge enrichment. (Note 28) At the same time, they instituted a range of measures to hide what they were doing from the outside world. These measures included orchestrated deception of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, extensive concealment and dispersal, compartmentalization, the use of middlemen and front companies to import needed elements from foreign sources, and, even the construction of decoy facilities became part and parcel of this national-level program. (Note 29) In retrospect, this redesign of Iraq's drive to acquire nuclear weapons succeeded. Through the final days of Desert Storm, the nature, scope, and detailed operation of Baghdad's nuclear program were never understood by Coalition commanders and military planners.

As a result, Coalition air forces were unable to target the Iraqi nuclear program effectively during Desert Storm, much less destroy it. Even with laser-guided bombs, aircrews still have to know where to aim and at what they are aiming. To compound further the frictional impediments Coalition airmen encountered with this target system, the Iraqis displayed a surprising capacity to evacuate, further disperse, and hide program elements, including nuclear material, once the campaign began. (Note 30) The upshot was that while Iraqi work on nuclear weapons was halted by Desert Storm and many program elements damaged or dispersed, the Coalition failed to achieve its operational objective of eliminating Iraq's nuclear program. The crux of this failure, moreover, lay in textbook manifestations of Clausewitzian friction: Coalition failure to grasp the nature of the target system reinforced by prodigious Iraqi efforts to conceal its nuclear ambitions from the outside world. (Note 31) Admittedly, the magnitude of the Coalition's military success by 28 February 1991 created a postwar situation in which the political goal of limiting Iraq's threat to its regional neighbors was later achieved by perhaps the most intrusive compliance regimes imposed on a sovereign nation since the postwar occupations of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan following World War II. But what one cannot deny is that general friction prevented Coalition forces from achieving their stated operational and political goals regarding Iraq's nuclear-weapon program during Desert Storm. (Note 32)

One can draw much the same conclusion regarding the Coalition's operational goal of "destroying" Iraq's Republican Guard (RG) forces, which were also identified by the theater commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, as a primary center of gravity. Despite U.S. Army doctrinal emphasis on synchronization, the planned timing between the Marine-led holding attack in the east, whose objective was to reach Kuwait City, and the multi-corps "left hook" from the west, which aimed at destroying the Republican Guard, was substantially out of "synch." Third Army's VII and XVIII Airborne Corps were to take "seven to ten days" to execute the left hook and destroy the RG, whereas the Marines, informed by what they learned of actual Iraqi capabilities from the fighting around Al Khafji in late January 1991, replanned their attack to reach Kuwait City within three days and, in the event, made that timeline. (Note 33) To make matters worse, when the Coalition's ground offensive kicked off around 0400 hours on 24 February 1991, Third Army initially stuck with its original plan of delaying the advance of the heavy units in XVIII Airborne and VII Corps for 24 hours. (Note 34)

As early as 0840, however, Schwarzkopf received reports of Iraqi demolitions in Kuwait City indicative of withdrawal preparations and called Lieutenant General John Yesock, the Third Army commander, to obtain his views on scrapping the original timetable and attacking early with the heavy forces. (Note 35) The attacks of the heavy units in XVIII Airborne and VII Corps were then moved up to 1500 hours on the 24th. Nonetheless, the time lost soon became impossible to make up, especially in the case of VII Corps. As darkness approached on February 24th, the VII Corps commander, Lieutenant General Frederick Franks, after consulting with his three division commanders about the wisdom of pressing ahead through the night, elected to stop his advance until daybreak the following morning. (Note 36) Regardless of the reasons for this decision, it did not reflect the theater commander's intent. As the Third Army historian later wrote: "A gap had begun to open between the tactical operations Franks was fighting in the field and the operation Schwarzkopf envisioned in the basement of the Ministry of Defense [in Riyadh]." (Note 37)

This "frictional gap" continued to widen as the ground offensive unfolded. Indeed, by the fourth day of the campaign, "Schwarzkopf did not know where his leading forces actually were." (Note 38) It would be going too far to argue that this single gap between intentions and actuality in the Gulf War explains why Iraq's armored and Republican Guard forces were not completely destroyed despite the immense tactical success of the Coalition's 100-hour ground offensive. (Note 39) Another important source of friction bearing on this outcome was the gap between the belief of key Coalition ground commanders that the Iraqis would stand and fight and what the Iraqis actually did: begin a wholesale withdrawal from the Kuwait theater of operations on the night of 25/26 February. (Note 40)

These two frictions, in turn, were compounded by a number of others. The Coalition's 100-hour ground offensive occurred in some of the worst weather of the campaign. Because none of the Iraqi armored and mechanized units in the theater ended up fighting from the positions they had occupied prior to 24 February, (Note 41) considerable uncertainty developed within XVIII Airborne and VII Corps as to their locations by 26 February. Further, there was no time in an operation that lasted only 100 hours to calibrate the accuracy of reporting up the chain of command from those doing the fighting. More crucially, coordination problems between soldiers and airmen, especially on 27 February, undermined the effective use of fixed-wing aviation to prevent the escape of Iraqi armored forces that, in October 1994, would again require deployment of American forces to the Persian Gulf. On top of these impediments, U.S. Army commanders basically stuck with their original plan of trying to destroy the Republican Guard forces by smashing headlong into them with a multi-division phalanx of armored and mechanized units rather than first encircling the Iraqi forces and then reducing them at the Coalition's leisure. (Note 42) This operational concept, which emphasized synchronization between units aimed at presenting no flanks, was a doctrinally driven preference very different from the practices of leading armored commanders in World War II such as Heinz Guderian, Hermann Balck, and John Wood. (Note 43) In Clausewitzian terms, this preference for synchronization focused above all else on minimizing the internal friction of one's own military "machine." As such, it exemplifies friction in the narrow sense and harks back to Clausewitz's first-known use of the term Friktion in 1806.

The picture that emerges regarding friction in the Coalition's 100-hour ground offensive, then, is one of multiple frictions overlaid on top of one another, with several growing worse as the offensive unfolded. From this perspective, the cumulative weight of friction appears more than adequate to explain how and why Coalition commanders failed to achieve their operational objective of destroying the Republican Guard. General Schwarzkopf implied in his postwar book that his intention had been to inflict sufficient destruction on the Republican Guard that they would no longer be "a threat to any other nation." (Note 44) The return of additional U.S. forces to the Gulf when T-72-equipped Republican Guard forces that had escaped destruction in 1991 again menaced Kuwait in October 1994 demonstrates that this goal was not achieved during Desert Storm. (Note 45) Thus, despite the Coalition's enormous military success, it is evident that general friction had operational, if not strategic, effects even on the Coalition's side of the hill.

In sum, scrutiny of Operation Desert Storm reveals that Clausewitzian friction persisted at every level of the campaign. Even for the Coalition, general friction had operational and strategic consequences, not merely tactical effects. Moreover, none of the specific frictional impediments documented, from adverse weather and faulty intelligence to the American army's doctrinal infatuation with synchronization, would be unfamiliar to Clausewitz or Scharnhorst. Every impediment discussed in this section can be understood in terms of the list of general friction's sources at the end of chapter 4.

What about the overall magnitude of general friction in 1991 compared to earlier conflicts in this century? The most relevant "quantity" for comparison would be the differential between Coalition friction and Iraqi friction. How might this frictional imbalance between opponents compare with imbalances during campaigns from the Vietnam period, the Korean War, or earlier?

The immediate problem, of course, is finding some way of gauging or measuring the required differential on a scale that is comparable over periods of decades, if not longer. Unfortunately, especially at the operational and strategic levels, no such metric readily springs to mind. Indeed, setting aside recurring claims from at least some operations researchers and military modelers to have captured everything important about combat in their equations, the author is not aware that such an overarching metric has ever been seriously proposed, and for obvious reasons. The considerable difficulties of constructing such a metric are apparent in chapter 4's final taxonomy of general friction's various sources or components. What single metric could quantify the frictional imbalance between two sides stemming from things as diverse as danger, uncertainties in the information on which action in war is based, chance, physical and political limits to the use of military force, and disconnects between ends and means in war? Further, given the enormous advances in the means of combat during the 20th century, would the frictional imbalance between Coalition and Iraqi forces during the initial two days of Desert Storm be comparable with that evident during the battles of Jena and Auerst(dt on 14 October 1806? One suspects that merely describing such a metric, even if just in qualitative terms, would be hard given the likelihood that frictional imbalances could fluctuate considerably over the course of any actual campaign. Precisely measuring such imbalances in specific historical cases on a scale applicable to earlier or later conflicts would, almost certainly, be even harder. (Note 46)

Do these difficulties mean that nothing can be said about the relative magnitude of general friction over the course of recent decades? Intuitively at least, detailed examination of the relevant campaign history suggests that the frictional differential between victor and vanquished in 1991 was not appreciably different from what it was during the German Blitzkrieg across the Low Countries and France in May 1940. These two campaigns, separated in time by just over a half century, are perhaps as comparable in scale and duration as most that could be selected from the twentieth century. Both produced lop-sided blow-outs in which the winning side's friction was palpably less than the loser's. (Note 47) Yet, in each case, friction at the operational and strategic levels also caused the winning side to fall short of all it might have achieved in ways that had long-term consequences: in 1940 some 338,000 Allied troops, mostly British, escaped from Dunkirk harbor and the surrounding beaches to fight another day, much as happened with elements of Iraq's Republican Guard in 1991. (Note 48) Thus one may speculate from these 1940 and 1991 examples that friction not only persisted, but persisted relatively undiminished in "magnitude."

Can we put some substance behind this speculation? Logically, it presumes that these well-matched historical cases contain features or dimensions that do in fact provide rough measures of the relative balance of friction between the opposing sides. (Note 49) Can any such measures be suggested, even if they elude precise quantification? The details of these campaigns offer two candidates: "decision-cycle times" and what will be termed "option sets in possibility space." To be stressed is that these candidate metrics do not purport to be universally applicable or to capture more than aspects of general friction. Instead, they are intended to indicate the direction in which such metrics may be sought.

In the case of the Blitzkrieg in May 1940, a feature that gives some insight into the frictional imbalance between opponents is the degree to which Germans quickly achieved a temporal advantage of days between their pace of offensive execution and the Allies' responses. By focusing the main attack, including the bulk of German armored forces, through the "impassable" Ardennes where the Allies least expected it, the Germans got an immediate temporal advantage at the outset. France's intelligence system was unable to identify the main German attack, and as late as the morning of 13 May, the third day of the campaign and only hours before Heinz Guderian's XIXth Panzer Corps crossed the Meuse River around Sedan, French commanders and analysts continued to believe that the main attack was coming to the north through central Belgium. (Note 50) Once across the Meuse, Guderian in particular elected to "press forward with less than two-thirds of his forces and without regard for enemy actions against his flanks." (Note 51) Hence, the German armored breakthroughs were exploited at a pace that only widened the temporal gap between German actions and Allied responses. Consequently, the "cycle times" of successive German decisions began to fall further and further inside those of the French and British. By the time the leading German spearheads began pivoting to the west and the Channel coast on 15 May, this temporal gap in decision-cycle times between the two sides had grown to the point of being comparable to a chess game in which one side is allowed two moves for every one taken by the opponent.

Many of the same patterns are evident in Desert Storm. As was true of the Allies in 1940, the Iraqis were surprised about the direction of the main Coalition ground offensive. During the preceding 39 days of unrelenting air attack, the Iraqis evidently developed no inkling that the Coalition was moving two entire corps hundreds of miles to the west to form the main attack. And, once the Coalition's ground offensive started, Iraqi ground forces were, at best, able to move only in slow motion compared to the pace of Coalition units, much as happened to French and British ground units in May 1940 compared to the speed with which panzer units advanced. In the chess analogy, the Iraqis' situation during 24-28 February 1991 is perhaps best compared to a game in which Coalition ground forces were allotted two, or possibly even more, moves for every Iraqi one and the Iraqis were only able to "see" the location of Coalition "pieces" when they actually attack Iraqi units. Thus, in terms of decision-cycle times, the frictional imbalance between opponents in 1991 appears, if anything, to have been slightly larger than in May 1940.

Decision-cycle times, though, only address a slice of general friction. A somewhat broader, but by no means comprehensive, indicator of the relative balances of general friction in 1940 and 1991 is the notion of option sets in possibility space, meaning the aggregate of viable moves available to each side over the course of these two campaigns. In both instances, the set of viable options available to the eventual victor was probably larger than that available to the eventual loser at the outset of offensive operations. Further, over the course of the two campaigns, viable options for the Allies and Iraqis contracted rapidly and substantially compared, respectively, to those of the Germans and the U.S.-led Coalition. (Note 52) In a matter of days from the beginning of large-scale combat, the losing side's best remaining option had been reduced to salvaging as many soldiers and as much military equipment from the theater as possible, strategic defeat having become unavoidable. Indeed, since the Iraqis had more initial latitude to negotiate their way (and their forces) out of the theater of operations without surrendering national sovereignty than did the French, Dutch, and Belgians in May 1940, the differential in viable option sets may have been less during the first three weeks of Desert Storm than it was at any stage of the 1940 campaign.

Decision-cycle times and possibility space, then, do seem to furnish parameters that enable one to compare, if but roughly or incompletely, the magnitude of frictional imbalances between opponents in May 1940 and January-February 1991. In the case of decision-cycle times, one could even envision quantifying the imbalance at specific stages of these conflicts in hours or days. What about option sets in possibility space? Might they be similarly quantifiable? On the one hand, viable options in possibility space appear to be the more general of the two "measures." On the other, the notion of viable options in a multi-dimensional "possibility space" is probably not amenable to being captured by a single number. Instead, estimates of attractive options over time would almost surely require a more complex mathematical object. As Alan Beyerchen has speculated, the frictional imbalance between adversaries at any point may be better envisioned as a dynamic "shape" in a multi-dimensional "phase space"(Note 53) rather than as any single number or value. (Note 54) That said, it is not at all obvious that the differential in options sets was greater in 1940 than in 1991.

Again, the two metrics just discussed do not purport to be universally applicable or to encompass all imaginable manifestations of general friction. They were drawn from two very similar campaigns They were not intended to solve the problem of measuring the relative frictional imbalance between opposing sides, but to indicate the direction in which progress might be possible, thereby giving some substance to the intuition that the "magnitude" of such imbalances has not changed greatly over the half century.

To recapitulate the argument so far, two of four tasks have been completed: clarifying Clausewitz's concept of general friction, and confirming its persistence as a factor in combat outcomes as recently as 1991. The exposition will now turn to the third and most daunting task: to build a case for general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war.