COL McMaster's new article at World Affairs Journal and referenced at SWJ and FP

As did McNamara’s whiz kids, advocates of the Revolution in Military Affairs applied business analogies to war and borrowed heavily from the disciplines of economics and systems analysis. Both Graduated Pressure and Rapid Decisive Operations promised efficiency in war; planners could determine precisely the amount of force necessary to achieve desired “effects.” Graduated Pressure would apply just enough force to effect the adversary’s “calculation of interests.” According to the terms of Rapid Decisive Operations, U.S. forces, based on a “comprehensive system-of-systems understanding of the enemy and the environment,” would attack nodes in the enemy system with a carefully calculated amount of force to generate “cumulative and cascading effects.”

But the U.S. experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrated that it was impossible to calibrate precisely the amount of force necessary to prosecute a war. The human and psychological dimensions of war, along with the friction and uncertainty generated when opposing forces meet, invariably frustrates even the most elaborate and well-considered attempts to predict the effects of discrete military actions. Enemy countermeasures such as dispersion, concealment, deception, and intermingling with the civilian population limit the reach of surveillance and precision strike capabilities. Other factors, such as cultural, tribal, and political identities enhance complexity and influence the course of events. Emphasis in planning and directing operations, therefore, ought to be on effectiveness rather than efficiency. The requirement to adapt quickly to unforeseen conditions means that commanders will need additional forces and resources that can be committed with little notice. For efficiency in all forms of warfare, including counterinsurgency, means barely winning. And in war, barely winning can be an ugly proposition.
Lots to think about...