McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 7, October 1996

Chapter 6 provided an indirect argument for general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war, as opposed to merely documenting its recurrence in past conflicts, and shed new light on several traditional sources of Clausewitzian friction (danger, informational uncertainties, etc.). A second indirect argument for general friction's robust persistence in the future arises from the distribution of information within very complex systems such as market economies or the earth's biosphere. In both market economics and evolutionary biology, even quite fundamental information involved in the underlying adaptive processes (or adaptations) is, for all practical purposes, inaccessible at particular places and times. (Note 1) The claim of this section is that comparably fundamental information involved in the orchestration of combat within any reasonably large volume of "battlespace" exhibits precisely the same inaccessibility due to its distribution in space and, especially, time. Even granting the enormous advances in information systems and related technologies now widely expected to occur in the decades ahead, the temporal distribution of critical information bearing on the conduct and effectiveness of military operations alone seems sufficient to insure not only the future persistence of general friction, but to raise doubts about the possibility of greatly reducing its overall magnitude.

One place to begin building a case for this conclusion is the work of the economist Friedrich von Hayek (1900-1992). Hayek was perhaps the twentieth century's greatest champion of the extended, spontaneous order of human cooperation that constitutes market or capitalist economies. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, especially during twenty fruitful years spent at the London School of Economics after 1931, he also became the foremost critic of socialist economics, arguing ultimately that the aims and programs associated with centrally directed economies were "factually impossible to achieve or execute . . . [and] logically impossible." (Note 2)

At the core of Hayek's mature economic philosophy lies the notion of the market as an evolutionary process of discovery (or adaptation) whose primary function is the gathering and processing of dispersed, unsurveyable information:

Modern economies are vastly complicated. Somehow they must process immense quantities of information, concerning the tastes and incomes of consumers, the outputs and costs of producers, future products and methods of production, and the myriad of interdependences of all of the above. The task of gathering this information, let alone making sense of it, is beyond any designing intelligence. But it is not beyond the market, which yields "spontaneous order" out of chaos. (Note 3)

In Hayek's own words: "Modern economics explains how such an extended order can come into being, and how it itself constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control." (Note 4)

How could the exquisite order of the market have arisen spontaneously without being designed and consciously directed by human reason? In Hayek's view, the first step in this evolutionary process was the development of "several property, which is H. S. Maine's more precise term for what is usually described as private property." (Note 5) The emergence of "several property" in primitive human groups, the details of which are now lost in pre-history, was "indispensable for the development of trading, and thereby for the formation of larger coherent and cooperating structures, and for the appearance of those signals we call prices." (Note 6) In turn, the development of trade, which Hayek identified as a precondition for the emergence of Egyptian, Greek, and other ancient civilizations, depended on the freedom or liberty of traders to be able to profit from the use of privileged "information for purposes known only to themselves." (Note 7)

Given this "reconstruction" of how today's extended market order most likely emerged, how could such a structure gather and process information that is inaccessible to any single individual or group?

Much of the particular information which any individual possesses can be used only to the extent to which he himself can use it in his own decisions. Nobody can communicate to another all he knows, because much of the information he can make use of he himself will elicit only in the process of making plans for action. Such information will be evoked as he works upon the particular task he has undertaken in the conditions in which he finds himself . . . Only thus can the individual find out what to look for, and what helps him to do this in the market is the responses others make to what they find in their own environments. . . . The market is the only known method of providing information enabling individuals to judge comparative advantages of different uses of resources of which they have immediate knowledge and through whose use, whether they so intend or not, they serve the needs of distant unknown individuals. This dispersed knowledge is essentially dispersed, and cannot possibly be gathered together and conveyed to an authority charged with the task of deliberately creating order. (Note 8)

This "essentially dispersed" economic information emphasized is distributed in time as well as in space. Economic actions will be adapted through the extended order "not only to others distant in space but also to events beyond the life expectancies of acting individuals." (Note 9) Some of the information that the extended order gathers and processes only comes into existence when individuals are confronted with particular economic choices in particular circumstances. Other elements, especially those having to do with long-term consequences, can only be known later in time because of the subsequent contingent choices open to other individuals. Just as a planned surprise attack can be aborted at the last moment, individuals can react in more than one way to perceived economic signals and effects at times of their own choosing. In the marketplace, therefore, "unintended consequences are paramount: a distribution of resources is effected by an impersonal process in which individuals, acting for their own ends (themselves also often rather vague), literally do not and cannot know what will be the net result of their interactions." (Note 10)

Hayek's outlook reflects a keen appreciation of the fact that there are "limits to our knowledge or reason in certain areas." (Note 11) He points to the marginal-utility theory developed by W. S. Jevons, Carl Menger, and others, with its stress on the "subjective" nature of economic values, as having produced a "new paradigm" for explaining how structures can, and do, arise "without design from human interaction." (Note 12) This new paradigm, in turn, rested on "the discovery" that economic events could not be entirely explained "by preceding events acting as determining causes" due to the role of later interactions.13 The upshot is not to suspend causality. However, the temporal inaccessibility of key economic information means that detailed predictability is lost. (Note 13)

This same pattern of "essentially dispersed" information also plays a crucial role in evolutionary biology. Consider speciation events, meaning the earliest point in lineage of a group of living organisms united by descent at which the emergence of a new species can be discerned. An example would be searching for the female who is the most recent direct ancestor, in the female line, of every human being alive today. Scientists have christened her the "Mitochondrial Eve" in light of the fact that, since the mitochondria in our cells are passed exclusively through the maternal line, all the mitochondria in all the people alive today are direct descendants of the mitochondria in her cells. (Note 14) However, because her offspring could, whether by accident or a lack of evolutionary fitness, have all died off, Mitochondrial Eve "can only be retrospectively crowned." (Note 15) Her status as the closest direct female ancestor of every human alive today depends not only on contingencies in her own time, but on those in later times as well. For this reason her status, like all events associated with demarkation or emergence of species, was "invisible at the time" it occurred(Note 16)

In both economics and evolutionary biology, then, the distribution or dispersal of critical information in both space and time suggests definite limits to what can be known by any individual, or group of individuals, at any given point in time. From an evidentiary standpoint, the consistent failure throughout the present century of centrally directed economies to achieve economic performance comparable to that of the extended market order argues that these limits ought to be taken seriously. (Note 17) Sufficiently complete and unimpeachable information to eliminate major uncertainties about the future course of events does not appear to be possible in economics and, almost certainly, the same is true of biological adaptation through natural selection. (Note 18) Granted, these parallels to the frictional uncertainties that confront combatants in wartime cannot, in and of themselves, establish the existence of similar limits to combat processes; arguments by analogy alone are never decisive, however insightful they may be. Nonetheless, awareness of the existence of such limits in other highly contingent processes certainly opens the door to the possibility that the same could be true of war, even of future war.

Is there any empirical evidence that might support this conclusion? Consider, once again, the profound uncertainties that Coalition planners faced during Desert Storm in trying to eliminate the Iraqi nuclear program. Only the intrusive inspections conducted under United Nations auspices after the war revealed how much of Iraq's nuclear program had escaped destruction during Desert Storm. In this same vein, revelations in August 1995 concerning Iraqi preparations in December 1990 to employ biological agents reveals that there were fundamental facts about that campaign that were neither known nor knowable outside Saddam Hussein's inner circle and selected military units for some years after Desert Storm ended. (Note 19) To see the essential contingency of such matters, consider the following possibility. If all physical evidence (including documents) regarding Iraqi biological warfare capabilities had been destroyed, and if everyone involved had gone to their graves without telling, the information that surfaced in 1995 following the defection of some of Saddam Hussein's closest associates would, one day, have become unrecoverable.

For those unpersuaded by the preceding pair of examples, consider a third: the temporal contingency of determining whether enough destruction had been imposed on the Republican Guard (RG) heavy forces by 28 February 1991 to preclude their being used to threaten Iraq's neighbors. By mid-1993, more than two years after Desert Storm ended, this question had become a subject of heated debate. (Note 20) Yet, as we saw in chapter 5, it was not unambiguously decidable by Western observers until October 1994, when RG heavy units, equipped with T-72s that had escaped destruction in 1991, again deployed to threaten Kuwait. Because resolution of the uncertainty depended on subsequent Iraqi actions, it exemplifies the essential temporal dispersion of fundamental knowledge about military effectiveness. (Note 21) Just as the problem of strategic surprise appears intractable, there can be no guarantees that such temporal dispersion of equally elementary knowledge about the efficacy of particular military actions will not recur in the future. Indeed, based on history, the most plausible conclusion to draw is that such dispersion will continue to be a feature of future war. If it does, then so will Clausewitzian friction.

The distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge offers additional support for this viewpoint. In this context, explicit knowledge refers to meaningful information that is available for entry into data bases and information systems. Tacit knowledge, by contrast, encompasses the implicit information and processing capabilities that humans carry around inside them by virtue of their genetic endowment and biological development, cultural background and upbringing, and cumulative individual experiences. (Note 22) Such knowledge is, in an important sense, not directly accessible, although it can be drawn upon implicitly in appropriate contexts. Michael Polanyi has used "tacit knowledge" to refer to human capabilities to know or sense more than can be explicitly told or specified, and offered the ability to recognize the face of a friend or relative based on subsidiary awareness of particulars as an example of such knowledge. (Note 23) A military example would be the tacit understanding of how fellow aircrew or flight members are likely to react to unexpected combat situations that is accumulated by regularly flying and training together with the same individuals. Military organizations such as squadrons, wings, and air divisions contain large amounts of such information, although it is widely dispersed among individuals, difficult (if not impossible) to enumerate in detail, and generally only called into use by concrete circumstances or instances of organizational activity. The right kinds of tacit knowledge can give military organizations a tremendous, long-term advantage over prospective adversaries, as the Israeli Air Force's dominance over Arab adversaries from 1967 through 1982 documents. (Note 24) Dysfunctional tacit knowledge, on the other hand, can have quite the opposite effect, as Scharnhorst discovered in the final weeks preceding the twin battles of Jena and Auerst(dt. These points not only illuminate the roots of friction in the narrow sense that originally led Clausewitz to coin the term, but suggest a fairly deep argument for general friction's future persistence at some non-trivial magnitude. Unless tacit knowledge can be wholly eliminated as a component of the combat capabilities of military units, friction in the narrow sense will remain a feature of future combat.

The inaccessibility of critical information involved in combat processes, arising from the essential dispersion of that information in space and time, argues that at least two sources of general friction listed at the end of 4, uncertainties in the information on which action in war is based and friction in the narrow sense of resistance to effective action within one's own forces, will persist in the future. It is conceivable that advances in information technologies may reduce the spatial dispersion of explicit knowledge. Perhaps related advances can even render some portions of tacit knowledge explicit, although one suspects, given how much of the brain's information processing is both dispersed and inaccessible to consciousness in any direct or real-time manner, that much tacit knowledge will remain so. (Note 25) However, temporally dispersed information and irreducibly tacit knowledge appear to present clear limits to how much of all that combatants might like to know can actually be gathered together and explicitly grasped. Hence the prospects for one opponent or the other to reduce substantially, much less drive near the vanishing point, the frictions arising from the dispersed information and tacit knowledge embedded in human organizations seem dim. These conclusions can be supported without appealing directly to the occurrence of similar phenomena in Hayek's extended market order and evolutionary biology. Yet the family resemblance across all three areas does not seem to be merely accidental.