"A key element of reality for Clausewitz is the ubiquity of "friction," the
"only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish
real war from war on paper." This concept is
usually interpreted as a form of "Murphy's Law": whatever can go wrong,
will, and at the worst possible moment. That interpretation is not bad as
far as it goes, but its presentation is usually skewed. The implication
is that things go right until some exogenous factor ruins the situation.
But for Clausewitz friction is neither extrinsic nor abnormal:"
Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war....Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.... The military machine—the army and everything related to it—is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals,... the least important of whom may chance to delay things or somehow make them go wrong.... This tremendous friction, which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.
The concept of friction is not just a statement that in war things always
deviate from plan, but a sophisticated sense of why they do so. The analytical
world, epitomized by the "frictionless pendulum" or the "perfectly spherical
billiard ball on a frictionless surface" or "low-amplitude vibrations" so
common in elementary physics, is one of linear rules and predictable effects.
The real world and real war are characterized by the unforeseeable effects
generated through the nonlinearity of interaction.
"Friction" as used by Clausewitz entails two different but related notions
that demonstrate the depth of his powers of observation and intuition.
One meaning is the physical sense of resistance embodied in the word itself,
which in Clausewitz's time was being related to heat in ways that would
lead ultimately to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concept of
entropy. Friction is a nonlinear feedback effect
that leads to the heat dissipation of energy in a system. The dissipation
is a form of increasing degradation toward randomness, the essence of
entropy. Even in peacetime, the degradation of performance in an army
is a continual problem. In war, the difficulties are amplified. Military
friction is counteracted by training, discipline, inspections, regulations,
orders, and other means, not the least of which, according to Clausewitz,
is the "iron will" of the commander. New energy
and effort are sucked into the open system, yet things still never go
as planned; dissipation is endemic due to the interactive nature of the
parts of the system.
The second meaning of "friction" is the information theory sense of what
we have recently come to call "noise" in the system. Entropy and information
have some interesting formal similarities, because both can be thought
of as measuring the possibilities for the behavior of systems. According
to information theory, the more possibilities a system embodies, the more
"information" it contains. Constraints on those possibilities are needed
to extract signals from the noise. Clausewitz understands that plans and
commands are signals that inevitably get garbled amid noise in the process
of communicating them down and through the ranks even in peacetime, much
less under the effects of physical exertion and danger in combat. His
well-known discussion of the difficulty in obtaining accurate intelligence
presents the problem from the inverse perspective, as noise permeates
the generation and transmission of information rising upward through the
ranks. From this perspective, his famous metaphor
of the "fog" of war is not so much about a dearth of information as how
distortion and overload of information produce uncertainty as to the actual
state of affairs.
Clausewitz's basic intuition here is that organizations are always slower
and more inflexible than the natural events they are intended to control.
Seen in this light, training, regulations, procedures, and so on are redundancies
that enhance the probability of signal recognition through the noise.
On the basis of linear assumptions, one expects major obstacles to produce
proportionately serious errors in responding to the message. Clausewitz
emphasizes, however, the disproportionately large role of the least important
of individuals and of minor, unforeseeable incidents. "Friction" conveys
Clausewitz's sense of how unnoticeably small causes can become amplified
in war until they produce macroeffects, and that one can never anticipate
those effects. The issue is not just that "for
want of a nail the shoe was lost....," but that one can never calculate
in advance which nail on which shoe will turn out to be critical. Due
to our ignorance of the exact initial conditions, the cause of a given
effect must, for all intents and purposes, often be treated as unavoidable
chance.
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