Quote Originally Posted by pvebber View Post
The crux of the issue is that Combined Arms warfare has been a very determinsitic and mechanistic discipline. Moving large military units, supplying them in the field, applying their firepower, and assessing the results were subject to encapsulation in mathematics that gave a sence of predictabily (those pesky outliers always gummed up the REAL execution, but IN THEORY we knew what was going on...).
The basic problem is that combined arms warfare has NEVER been deterministic or mechanistic. You're correct in saying they were subject to encapsulation in something -- I'm not totally sure it was all math... -- and that fatal error gave a false perception, not a sense, of predictability.

It's an art, not a science and every attempt by the US Army -- more than any other organization -- to try to make it into a 'science' has failed and will continue to do so.
Now we have moved from the realm of turning the crank on a really complicated machine, to one of trying to convince people to change their mind, to accept new - to them radical - ideas about how to live. The closest thing to a theory for that is Everett Rodgers theory of Diffusion of Innovation.
Heh. Got that right. This will likely have even less success than 'organizing' combined arms warfare...

Warfare, all warfare, is a human endeavor. Attempts to remove or enumerate the human factor are not going to succeed. There are few things more fun than matching wits with a reasonably well matched opponent in a tactical effort, real or exercise but it will always be a close thing. You can stack the deck but that stacking consists of finding guys with great instincts and intuitions. You're not going to do it with matrices or numbers (with apologies to Trevor Dupuy and friends...). I've been told by those who should know that's correct but you can get close.

That only counts in horseshoes...