Steven den Beste has been on a roll lately, as exemplified by this exposition on battle tactics and strategies and the value of wargaming.

While it’s all good, this part jumped out at me:

…One of the interesting things about a lot of these principles is that when they happen some people not truly versed in the art of war will assume that they indicate failure. When a plan breaks down and the officers start to improvise, when things don’t go the way they are expected to, when someone cannot say ahead of a battle exactly how it will come out, then they portray this as a failure of the command structure, and perhaps as an argument against fighting the war at all. For instance, one argument voiced by many about the prospect of our attacking Iraq is that by so doing we may throw the whole region into chaos.

Well, yes. We might. But while that’s a factor to be taken into account, it isn’t necessarily a fatal objection. When I’m playing Go against a player who is substantially inferior to me, who plays with a handicap, sometimes when I see a situation I don’t like what I’ll do is to make a series of moves which make the situation fantastically complicated even if I can’t see where it will end up. What I’m relying on is the fact that as it develops I’ll be able to use my superior understanding of the game and ability to analyze it to see my way through the situation before my less experienced opponent, and will have the situation in hand before he even realizes what I’m doing.

To some extent this happens in every war. No-one can ever predict at the beginning of the war the timetable for victory, or even where all the battles will take place. The Allies didn’t decide on an attack on Sicily (nor where on Sicily) in WWII until after the combat in North Africa was largely finished. It wasn’t the only possible choice, by any means. For instance, an attack on Sardinia might have provided well-placed airfields for heavy bombers which would have given them the ability to reach all of Italy and France and even southern Germany.

War is inherently chaotic, but you can use that against your enemy if you’re better at it than he is…

This is one aspect of a couple of things that folks in the blogosphere (and other places) have been saying over the past few months.

One is that Foggy Bottom’s (and Whitehall’s) elevation of stability in the Middle East to the highest value is preventing us from doing what needs to be done (and was the cause of our failure to remove Saddam the last time, and our treachery toward the Kurds and others who wanted to, and probably could have, overthrown him then). A chaotic situation with prospects for improvement is superior to a disastrous status quo, which is what we have now.

The other thing that it reminds me of is one of Rumsfeld’s laws. When a problem seems intractable, enlarge it. That’s probably the only way out of the mess in Israel.