Bridges and warfare

The Belmont Club looks at the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis and compares it to the failure of policy in the early going in Iraq.

It may be that history will show that one of the reasons the US did so poorly early in Iraq was because it labored under a mental structure with rigidities that facilitated failure. That contrary to conventional wisdom the fundamental problem with the Administration was that it had a plan -- but the plan was the wrong one. While I am not arguing against the utility of timelines and exit strategies in general, I have always wondered how applicable they were in complex situations. Anybody who expects events to develop according to a scheduled timeline and plan will be very lucky indeed. Every time I hear a politician citing some newspaper clipping to prove "the failure" to achieve a predetermined outcome I sometimes think that the citation itself is proof of intellectual failure of a different but more basic kind, one of which the politician is blissfully unaware.

What is really useful in complex situations is a loose kind of algorithm that will enable the decision maker to understand what is important, within a given period, and allow him to choose paths to an improved situation. Stephen Wolfram is of course, investigating physical and mathematical structures and I do not mean to translate his arguments directly into the messier human world. But being able to discern see the real information structure beneath the apparent randomness strikes me as a key skill. Otherwise we see, but don't really see at all; we plan but only to achieve our prejudices.

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The differences between engineering and designing bridges and planning wars are significant. The steel used to form the bridge does not fight back. It has certain design strengths that if acceded lead to failure, but that failure is not because the bridge had a will to resist what the designer fashioned.

The dynamics of warfare are significantly different. the enemy can push back or change his plan after he sees yours. In fact that is exactly what the US did when it came up with the surge strategy to defeat the enemy's current strategy in Iraq. To expect that war will always perform according to a schedule and time line is to confess ignorance of the basic dynamics of warfare.