War as a machine. Karl Clausewitz's friction concept and modern battles

On the fields of his copy of the book "About War" the famous pilot and military theorist John Boyd complains that Karl von Clausewitz does not mention how to create friction for the enemy: "Overcoming friction is good, but why not increase friction for friction for Enemy commanders? He does not take into account that friction increases can be profitable.

" If, continuing Boyd, Clausewitz knew about "the concept of entropy, the ideas of Gedel, Heisenberg and 2 the law of thermodynamics to generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder as an advantage instead of simply overcoming friction. " In general, Boyd considers Clausewitz too enthusiastic "reduction/overcoming (friction) of confusion and disorder" and devoid of desire to "make the enemy make more efforts. " Focus has translated the new text of Olivia A.

Garard, dedicated to rethinking the theory of friction Clausewitz. I imagine how Clausewitz refutes Boyd. If a person cannot be confident enough or in his own inclinations, then how can he be sufficiently confident in the opponent to influence him so? The war takes place in the fog: "Three -quarters of things we expect, planning the voy actions, are more or less hidden by the fog of uncertainty.

" Inheriting mathematical layouts, we see that most of the knowledge of the enemy is uncertain - just like knowledge of our own strengths and dispositions. Moreover, even the degree of uncertainty is uncertain: "Mehr Oder Weniger" - more or less. This German phrase is one of the most commonly used Clausevis, a check that indicates that it is always racing. Although Clausewitz's criticism points to the epistemic discrepancy, it also emphasizes the friction concept's misunderstanding.

Clausevice friction is not an object, but a condition. In general, friction is a Newtonian concept, which means the power of resistance between the two interacting surfaces. According to Clause, friction means that "the action in the war is the movement in the precipitate. " From the collision and the twofold struggle (Tsweikampf), the war creates its own atmosphere, which impedes the activity in it.

It is in this kingdom that danger, bodily efforts and suffering, uncertainty and chance is another, distorted interaction of man with the world. "In the war, everything is very simple, but the simplest is difficult. " The difference is this complexity. To understand what, let's first look at the word "leak" is one of my loved ones. The leak is the amount of air that does not fill the bottle or container. The amount of air closed in a bottle of wine is an unfilled volume.

Although friction is also a disadvantage, it is not a disadvantage in general. Friction is a concept that explains the difference between war on paper and war in reality. In this case, a leak is a deviation from hostilities planned on paper, while friction is the basic condition that creates a difference. According to Clausewitz, it causes a "gap" between planned or expected actions and how they unfold in war.

The danger, tension and suffering, bias, thought and contradictory information, scale, freedom and number - all this impedes actions. However, they only have an indirect attitude towards the enemy, since they occur in the face of combat. The enemy can create situations that cause more friction - more uncertainty, more danger, more suffering, more accidents, more distortions between expectations and the material world - but it is impossible to avoid friction itself.

Friction is just a concept that reflects the relationship between you, your plans and intentions and your actions. It can be said that Hamlet is a play about friction. This may explain why Clausewitz as an example of friction is not a war, but a journey. Clausevitz is considering a traveler who tries to "overcome two segments in one light day" riding on (driven) horses when dusk thickens to darkness. It may be easier for you to imagine that you are flying somewhere in Southwest.

You arrive at the airport, register and pass through the security service just to find out that your flight is delayed because the plane has been delayed from the departure. The arrival flight land, but is sent to another gay. Collecting your luggage, you look at the monitor and see that your flight flashes "Landing Completed. " Getting lost, you run to a new garden. The agent smiles when you run up and confirm that the landing on the flight has not yet started.

Instead, he was again detained for maintenance. You can't find a free space and you need to charge your phone so you go away. From the internal connection, they announce not about landing, but about the cancellation of the flight. The delays have exceeded the work day of the crew - the term during which pilots can fulfill their duties before they are forced to leave. And so on. Personal impressions of flights give a rich experience of friction.

The journey, like moving from one point to another, may seem simple - but it is also complicated. The journey can deal with any difficulty, but in war, these difficulties intensify. In the event of war - in the book "On the War" - the journey turns into a march. The fifth book "Military Forces", which the majority ignores, is devoted to difficulties in life: march (movement), bivuaks (housing), maintenance (health), supply and logistics (food).

After all, all actions in the war are aimed at "a soldier is assembled, dressed, armed, trained; he sleeps, eats, drinks and marching, and all this is just to fight at the right time and in the right place" . Simple actions that are complex are not actions in battle, especially today, given the complexity of technologies, but actions that are reduced to the very fact of life. In the war, they become not easy to make death.

It is difficult not only to walk, talk, sleep and eat, but also think, because the appearance of the world is distorted. Danger as a substance distorts the mind because of fear, excitement of passions and over -stimulating sensitivity. The existence becomes difficult. Substance-as-physical-treatment breaks through the exhaustion of people (and now cars). There is a limit to use that requires rest and recovery. The endurance is heavy.

Substance-as-information is refracted through the process of obtaining information or news. In the process of processing, information either helps the judgment by leading a person to critical analysis, or interferes with him, leading to the lowest tendencies of human prejudice. It is difficult to think. Substance-as-terry-events exacerbate those little things that are indifferent or unpredictable in ordinary life, for example, the weather. It is difficult to act.

In early work, "principles of war", Clausewitz also tries to determine friction. This work is often regarded as a great military theory - it should be remembered that it is written directly for the future King of Prussia. Its fourth section ends with the application of the principles discussed in the war. There is no difficulty here to understand how to fight, but to simply "remain true principles.

" For the Crown Prince, this point about the difficulty of applying theory is actually the most important. And again at the heart is friction.

Clausevitz recognizes that, although "it is impossible to list the causes of friction", the main ones are: confidence in their assessment of the enemy; mitigation of the impact of rumors and distribution of information flows; trust in subordinates; acceptance of failures or, as Friedrich II called "difficulties"; inaccuracy; reassessment of their forces; supply and logistics (which is also considered "the main cause of the bulkyness of the entire military machine, which leaves the results so far from the flight of our great plans"); and distortion in wartime.

Although these eight cases of friction are more specific, they are not contrary to what is written in "about war". On the contrary, they are examples in which the environment "danger - tension - information - friction" prevents existence, withstand, think, and in different ratios. But the clause friction is not just conceptually related to the idea of ​​mechanics - the war also tries to turn into a machine.

In "The Principles of War" he writes: "Waring is reminiscent of a sophisticated car with huge friction, so combinations that are easily planned on paper can only be made with great effort. " This is with the main criticism that Simon Weil expresses in his essay "Iliad: or the Poem of Power" in which people are instrumental. In her opinion, "strength is something that turns into a thing of anyone who is exposed.

" And yet, notes Clausewitz, even in the most measured conditions, the details will wear out, the process will go jerks and shocks, and the machine will be subject to "the least [of those who] are capable of accidental push and even some violations. " The question is this: how long will the commander be able to support the car? And also is there any "oil that can reduce this friction?" The oil is getting used to the war and its theoretical double - methodism.

Due to the peculiar conditions that create structures for the mind and body, individuals can act as one before resistance - to act, despite the overstress of feelings and prejudice of intelligence. "The habit gives strength of the body at heavy loads, mind at great danger, judgment against the first impressions. " While methodology creates "readiness, accuracy and hardness . . . which reduce natural friction and facilitate the movement of the machine.

" And so, unlike will, who watches as "battles lead and solve people deprived of these abilities . . . who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity or to the level of blind force, which is a pure pulse", Clausevitz claims that the war is never pure - neither about strength nor a momentum. War is always "more or less".

The scale of this "more or less" is the result of how a person counteracts the friction habit and methodology-in other words, rigid, dangerous, realistic training. The logic of the force described by Wil is correlated with the three Klausevice extremes that arise, regardless of politics, in collision: maximum violence, displacement of the enemy and maximum force. The pulse logic correlates with the surprise of fading, which becomes a product of the advantage of a defensive form of war.

Defense is also not a form of pure passivity, which is a contradiction for Clausewitz: the attack entails elements of defense as a protection of forces, and defense entails elements of attack as a counterattack. But since all these logic breaks the meaningful reality of the world itself, the war does not reach its own extremes.

And so Clausewitz should take into account two restrictions on war and hostilities: politics, that is, a macro -joint, and a friction at the micro -level of the individual. Francois Julien in his wonderful "treatise on efficiency" is sophisticatedly paraphrased by Clausewitz: "The essence of the war is to deceive its expectations", and the concept of friction was his attempt to explain why it is to "theorize this lack of theory.

" So, we went a long way to go back to Boyd and his essay "Destruction and Creating. " Returning to Boyd, we can see his criticism in a new light. If friction, as Julien puts it, is an attempt to reconcile with the fact that the war will deceive the expectations of our own model, then we need a way to update and adjust our model. Board argues that with the help of destructive deduction ("non -stringing") and constructive induction ("restructuring") we can change our perception of reality.

It is a dialectical process: "Structure, non -steming, restructuring, non -stemming, restructuring are repeated endlessly. It is quite difficult in everyday life, not to mention war. " In other words, Boyd identified an additional problem - the thing is not only that the war will change its own model, but also that we should also adapt and update this model during the case.

The complete cycle "Watch, Focus, Solve and Ode" uses feedback to constantly adjusting conceptual installations in the process of fighting. So, if you paraphrase Boyd's complaint, it will turn out that he wants to create a situation that there is a lot of distance between the enemy model and the world, but not so that the opponent realizes this gap and adapt.

Clausewitz would now agree with this, but still emphasized to minimize his own friction - adjusting his models according to the difficulties that arise during the war - not on attempting to adjust the enemy models. In other words, it is easier, because it is quite difficult. Olivia A. Garard is an officer of the US Marine Corps from 2014 to 2020. He now teaches the Eastern canon at St. John's College. Her first book is an anNotated Guide to Tactics: Carl Von Clauswitz's Theory of the Combat.