Again, potentially depends on what crank you pull. Some have more predictable effects than others.
How do you determine "predictability"? but thanks for not pushing back on need for predictability

Like I said, the predictability is part of the information you should be making decisions on.
The problem is if you only consider the predicable part you will an answer KNOWN TO BE WRONG for the system as a whole. Based on what information do you determine predictability? What sort of "exeriments" do you do and on what? THis is the sort of "next level of detail" - detatil that makes the theroy practical - that one never can seem to get to.

Except that oncology only affects cancer, while airpower has the potential to affect almost any situation involving the use of armed force (IE, airdropping HDRs to folks would be analagous to giving someone an IV of nutrients when their digestive function has ceased).
Cancer is analogous to a major conflict - which poses a "threat to our system - or that of an ally, which is the only context where we are talking about "breaking" an adversary's ability to resist and the Five rings.

This discussion is about Wardens' Contention that our concept of war needs to change, not about HADR. This is where the discussion gets so slippery - WE AGREE that airpower is necessary and can accoplish all sorts of REQUIRED things - things that NOBODY else can do. That is not whats controversial about Warden.

Its the implications he draws from it that "we are broken" and need a major reboot to get it right. The thesis statement again:


Regardless of airpower’s potential, it can never realize its real capability so long as it remains bound to an anachronistic view of war with an anachronistic vocabulary. On the contrary, if airpower is truly to come of age, it must do so in the context of a modern concept of war that associates the use of force as directly as possible with end-game strategic objectives, not with the act of fighting. If this is to happen, the operators of airpower must understand, believe, and teach end-game strategy as the foundation of airpower. Failure to do so will condemn airpower to suboptimization and deprive its owners of using force in such a dramatically different way that will achieve national objectives quickly and at minimum cost. To succeed, airpower advocates must stop trying to use airpower as a substitute for its military predecessors, connect it directly to strategic end-games, adopt a new vocabulary to match airpower’s promise, and become serious promoters not of machines but of ideas.
90% of the article is not cotroversial (other than why he sees the need to bring it up again) its the conclusion above, which doesn't seem to follow from his premises that is controversial.


You are conflating his arguement about the strategic process with the effects of changing that process- they are separate ideas.
EXACTLY and I'm AGREEING with most of his views on strategic process (with the exception of the degree of dependance on systems theory) , but DISAGREEING on what he sees as the effect!!! (in the sense what you need to do to achive the desired result.

I disagree. A better analogy would be surgery, where a surgeon might use simulations and operate on a cadaver to keep proficiency, with the cadaver being exercises. Additionally, I would argue that airpower is probably the best exercised and rehearsed element of the US military. While the army has NTC and JRTC, and the Navy does do JEFXs, I would argue that Red Flag is probably the highest level and most extensive rehearsal in the world. Not to mention a lot of studying of the real-world system going on in between.
Surgery is a tool, it is not class of disease. The structure of the anlogy was to point out that you have a pratictioner looking at a particular category of war (disease) in Warden's case compelling an adversary to do what you want by threatening to break or paralyze him - that is major war.

Your example of operating on a cadavor reinforces my point about the single sidedness of the whole framework! Doing surgury on a cadavor is "complicated" but not complex. You can practive technique, but learn nothing about the response of an actual patient to the shock of being cut open. Rehersal and exercises of any peacetime sort are heavily scripted - sure the individual pilots in Red Flag get to "freeplay" dogfighting to a great extent - but that is like operating on a cadavor - there is no actual response from the actual adversary! You learn a lot about surgery - the tactics of air combat and dropping ordnance, but you learn ZERO about how the enemy "live body" will reposnd to the actual surgery.

"Study of the real world system" is like observing the behavior of patients. It gives a certain level of information, but the probaility of a particular surgury being successful is NOT PREDICTABLE FROM practice on a cadavor and observatin of the human body. "Probabilities" in such cases are at best bayesian measures of belief, not actual physical propensities.

See above- separate the change in process from Warden's expected result that we will use airpower more. You're harping on the chemotherapy, when really Warden is saying the diagnosis is the important part.
And I agree that diagnosis is the most important part. I just don't want a guy diagnosing me that thinks he can learn everything required to be a good doctor by studying books and cutting open cadavors. And thinks the most effective treatment is to give me a handful of pills that will attack all my symptoms at once and will cure me i none fell swoop. There was a time when that was routinely done. It was called "patant medicine" and often resulted in the doctor getting run out town as "snake oil salesman"

I'm harping on chemotherapy because that is what Warden is selling! (see thesis statement above again - if that is not what you consider the thesis statement, please let me know. I'm trying to argue about the paper and its specific arguments - and hopefully made clear the parts of Warden's theory I agree with, are in harmony with current joint doctrine and conceptual thinking and are not controversial.


The unfortunate part is that Col Warden has reputation of being an airpower advocate, which colors people's perceptions of any arguement he makes. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would have been had someone else written a similar paper.
That may be, but that desn't change the fact that the article is fundamentally about airpower advocacy, Warden's overall strategic theory doesn't have to be and I ask the question a different way - whatif Warden had made all the points, but with a thesis statment about how strategic theory has been outpaced in recent years by the unexplored ocean of NEW 'WAYS' transformational technology (MEANS) has given us. Can these new WAYS significantly affect the way we approach achieving ENDS?

If he asked that question, hoping to generate a discussion, then I think the result would have been far more positive. The fact he did not approach the paper from the point of view of "What are the implications of new WAYS on how we think about ENDS", but rather from the point of view of an airpower advocay piece, detracts from the broader applicability of his ideas on strategy and almost deliberately invokes a viceral "Here comes the Airpower Mafia starting to lay the ground work for the budget battle over the new Bomber". I fully concede that this is probably as much a bias effect as not...

As I said, I conceed fully that the more complex a system is, the more difficult the application of Warden's theory will be - but again, that doesn't mean his points are invalid.

If I can leave you with one notion that I hope you can seperate from the increasing parochialsm in my argumentation :

Replace the notion that "complexity" is a continuum of "complicated-ness" with the notion that there is a threshold where a combination of "complicated" but casually simple systems reach a "point of no return" beyond which they are no longer "complicated arrangements of simpple things" but "Complex" entities that will no longer exhibit their full range of behaviors if they are simplified back below that line.

This is the fundamental, transformational idea that comes form complexiity science. It is what enables combinations of organic molecules to become life, nad what allows networks of entities that exchange information to create novel behaviors. If this fundamental property did not exist, we would not, and out societies would be incapable of surviving.

You can call BS on every other thing i've said in this thread. I can't begin to articulate the importance of making the cognitive leap between looking at the world as a collection of simply complicated things, and one of truely complex things.