Non-Linear Intuition

Non-Linear Intuition

A Fundamental Requirement for Military Leaders and why they should read Clausewitz

by MAJ Rob Thornton

September 11th, 2001 was a watershed event in that it was a vividly graphic demonstration of a war declared by a non-state actor on our domestic soil — perhaps not since the British sacked Washington D.C. in the War of 1812 has a foreign entity extended its power across an ocean to threaten us here — what made it all the more frightening was that they had obtained the means to attack us within the confines of our own country. The attacks of 9/11 had both a physical and a moral presence and altered the collective way in which we had considered the world before it occurred. It was the catalyst which changed the way Americans thought about securities and liberties, created organizations and legislations, created a stronger relationship between domestic and foreign policy and has led to our waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on a much broader sense deployments world wide in the Global War on Terror. By most estimates the way we consider the world (and the way in which the world considers us) has changed permanently, and we may well be in a state of persistent conflict for decades to come — a generational struggle as it has been called by some.

There is much the 19th Century Prussian military theorist and philosopher Carl Von Clausewitz can tell us about the objective nature of the war we are in — which is to say that there are some things intrinsic to all wars. Clausewitz also has some things worth hearing on the subjective nature of war — or that each war is different in some ways because at every level it is social and that it may mean different things to the people who wage it, and that their reasons for waging it may be different. That is important –particularly when the scope of the conflict is global in scope and indefinite in duration and because our political goals are broad and enduring. They are global because the people of the world and their interests are increasingly global, and they are enduring because we see preservation of our freedoms to interact globally as self-defining — it is who we are. As Thucydides said, “we go to war for fear, honor and interests” — the wars we fought yesterday, fight today and will fight tomorrow are no different — in that regard they are waged by people and their political bodies within the same context as the Athenian General and Historian laid out almost 2500 years ago as he described the generational struggle between the two dominant city-states and their people of Hellenic world.

The demands on our military have been great, and increasingly those demands are extending to other branches of the government as we begin to understand the subjective nature of the broader context of this global war. Resources have been stretched and expanded to meet the requirements of waging war on a scale that we did not perceive prior to 9/11. Our ongoing quest for the best technologies to equip our forces with, the efforts to sustain them in remote and environmentally challenging places and the need to maintain the institutions which cross cut the DOTLMPF (Doctrine, Organizations, Training, Leadership, Material, Personnel & Facilities) spectrum in order to address the subjective nature of the wars we fight today in Iraq and Afghanistan, compete with the fears of being prepared for the subjective requirements of the threats on the horizon — still vague and hard to define in some cases.

What have become increasingly clear are the increasing requirements on military leadership to take general purpose organizations originally designed for flexibility, but trained, manned and equipped to handle the most likely threats we viewed before 9/11 and adapt them to the subjective nature of the OIF, OEF, TF HOA, and a host of other humanitarian and world-wide commitments to which they were not optimally designed — but will suffice. While we have had doctrinal descriptions of those types of missions in the past such as MOOTW (Missions and Operations other then War), SASO (Support and Stability Operations), LIC (Low Intensity Conflict), by and large our strategic cultural preference and emphasis was elsewhere. It was reflected in the acquisitions we made, the institutions we built, the doctrine we wrote, the training we conducted and the leaders we turned out. It was framed by our policy goals and our perspective on the way we would politically and militarily inter-act with the world. Even though there were some who perceived changes in the world, their arguments were not quantifiable or qualifiable enough to justify large scale organizational changes needed to optimally prepare for the future that eventually became the present.

Even today, with requirements for COIN (Counter Insurgency), UW (Unconventional Warfare) and other specialized SSTRO (Security, Stability, Transition, Reconstruction Operations) roles and missions being the basis of current operations, seemingly emphasizing the types of conditions and political environments described by the writings of Barnett, Friedman, Kaplan and others where globalization and instability have not only benefits but also adverse consequences; we must also contend with the possibility that nascent states might gain new conventional technologies and challenge our security at home, the security of the global commons and regional stability of our friends and allies. While this is not an essay about force structure design for the future, it is necessary to frame the problem of leadership development within controversies and conditions at hand — as Clausewitz would point out — and I’ll paraphrase greatly to get to the heart of several chapters, “war is infinitely complex by nature of its being the product of human interaction, and despite our attempts to reduce it, the chaotic nature of war remains constant & defiant”. Yes, the last sentence was full of contradictions, and that is what he was getting at.

Alan Beyerchen, a professor of History at the University of Ohio, wrote a piece for International Security (referenced on an end note) entitled “Clausewitz, Non-Linearity, and the Unpredictability of War”. It is a piece that Army majors will recognize from ILE, and which was first given to me during the FA 59 (Functional Area for Plans and Policy) BSAP (Basic Strategic Arts Program) core class at the Army war College in Carlisle, PA. It is not easy reading — no surprise since anything associated with Clausewitz is usually not — but it is worth it. I was first introduced to Clausewitz as a CPT in conjunction with reading Antoine Henri de Jomini – the 19th Century Swiss military theorist and philosopher — a contemporary and rival of Clausewitz. I was asked to compare the two and discuss “why”, in an essay I was writing in pursuit of an online advanced degree. I was much more comfortable with Jomini’s very rational and linear prescriptions — it was recognizable, and fit better within the confines of my military experiences to that point.

My post command studies were interrupted by an OIF tasker to a MiTT where I was an embedded trainer with an Iraqi Infantry BN, and so changed my understanding of war. There are simply things which cannot be trained outside the context of it, and as has been observed by so many over time — war is terrible, it is hell and it visits destruction unlike anything else. Consequently, my appreciation for Jomini greatly diminished as being too mechanistic (he did a good job describing the gears, but could not tell me how or why it worked), but my appreciation for Clausewitz is ever increasing. Clausewitz is hard to read because he commands you to think about what you are reading and place it within the context of your experience — perhaps that is why I did not understand it before — I simply lacked the commensurate experience to place it within the context required to make the leaps of understanding war that it offers.

Back to Beyerchen — interpretation of Clausewitz rests on the premise that war is non-linear, or that in war sum of two parts will not necessarily equal the same thing within the changing contexts typified by the political environment that gives rise to war. Even if the means are the same, the outcome will be different; or put mathematically 2 + 2 will not always = 4. This is exactly the nature of war that I saw exhibited in Iraq, and that good leaders understand and carry out every day on the battlefield in applying the notion that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, and what worked in one place may not work in another — it must be adapted. There are no constants because the forces at work are so subject to randomness that any two contacts, battles, campaigns, or wars will never play out the same. The leader might recognize similarities, and apply variations of the solutions that worked before, but to try and replicate the tactical, operational or strategic solution totally ignores the nature of war and is a gamble at best. We sometimes describe this as fighting the plan and not the fight, or ascribe it to leaders who ignore the reality of the situation at the peril of the mission and the unit they lead.

Within the Essay, Beyerchen uses the science of non-linear equations to explain the applicability of many of Clausewitz’s better known, if misunderstood principles, and explain how the concept of non-linearity expresses itself in War. We often turn to History and marvel at the way an unforeseen event of seemingly small importance is explained to have some effect visibly out of proportion on its surface. A unit gets lost, comes out from an unexpected direction and at a time where other factors have influenced an enemy to the point where he abandons his position and breaks contact. The enemy’s perception of real and unreal events forced a decision, that from our point of view, we may have seen as unreasonable. Consider how many times you may have driven past an IED ambush, but for whatever reason the enemy decided it was not the right time to execute that ambush. Consider the chance contact with AIF enroute to some other location that was quickly exploited while the non-linear forces acting upon the enemy were greatest, and resulted in destroying a large cell or seizing a large cache. It is the insticntive feel for knowing that there was more to it then just two Opals and a Bongo truck traveling in just a certain way that intuitively separated them from the thousands of other Opals and Bongo trucks in close proximity. Beyerchen makes relative the concept of fog, friction and chance by placing them in the chaotic environment of war as it exists in living, breathing, inter-active life vs. scripted, limited and designed events subject to artificial constraints.

So by now you may be asking what is the impact on leadership — after all we have the traits of innovation and adaptive to guide us, and we have a fantastic OER bullet of “pentalthlete” to describe it on our report cards. Beyerchen has a quote in his essay (pg. 88) I think we should consider in our leadership development programs:

One implication is that full comprehension of the works of Clausewitz demands that we retrain our intuition. For historians, who have often been attracted rather then repelled by the subtleties of “On War”, this may not be too unsettling of a task. But for those trained in the engineering and scientific fields, as are so many military officers and analysts, this retraining is likely to be a more wrenching and unwelcome experience. As the various scientists and mathematicians cited above (ed. within Beyerchen’s essay) have suggested, the predominance of a linear intuition is endemic. Such an intuition guides value judgments and choices, with real world consequences.

With the range of military operations being so diverse while the means to accomplish political objectives remains relatively established with regard to those policies, the value of leadership is the only way to make up the difference. Leadership is the element of combat power that allows us to work within our limitations of organizational flexibility and the rest of the DOTLMPF to achieve the missions given to us. It is also the element we have the most control over in terms of shaping and preparing for the objective and subjective nature of war. While we do produce doctrine to frame problems, we should not appeal to it as a prescriptive solution, but rather as a descriptive outline. War is non-linear, it is full of contradictions and conditions which sometimes masquerade as problems and have no concrete final solutions, but instead offer only a slew of choices of which the best one must be constantly applied, evaluated and altered to meet a dynamic enemy subject to the same forces of war, but who perhaps interprets them differently to produce unforeseen actions, reactions, counter-actions. It is our leadership ability which will determine who best understands the conditions at the moment and near future, makes the best choice available and seizes the initiative to deny the enemy freedom of action. From my personal experience, I believe Clausewitz’s description and contemplation of war has great depth and utility across the full spectrum of war and range of military operation. If they send a soldier to do it, then it stands to reason the potential for violence which requires armed force to counter it exists, and that the chaotic nature of war will require leaders to utilize non-linear intuition to make better decisions.

So What?

Is Clausewitz’s fog, friction and chance, and Beyerchen’s non-linearity applicable outside of pure combat, and therefore relevant to the other complex tasks asked of leaders today and tomorrow? Lets consider another area where social inter-action, or what Dave Matthews referred to as “The Space Between” is subject to non-linear influences. Army leaders have said one facet of the total person they want to produce in officers and NCOs is the “strategic communicator — for most of us that sounds like a good thing — so sign us up — now what? On the service it is about a opaque as the term “Public Diplomacy” — which I “think” means that we are trying to articulate our policy goals in a public way so that they are transparent to not only the governments with which we interact, but with the populations of those governments. I like that definition because it potentially acknowledges the complex environment in which communications takes place, and the ever-increasing number of forces which shape and alter messages and discourses surrounding new information.

Communications requires a sender, a message and a recipient at a minimum. Is it a good idea to assume that “message sent, message received” when the same message is addressed on multiple levels to a diverse, global audience where levels of culture, sub-culture, counter-culture etc. naturally filter, pervert and block messages? How about the interactivity between themes or narratives with other complex environments or systems? Even if a message were so clearly articulated that it were communicated well to the target audiences to the point they all heard the same thing at the same time, the other social systems within their environments would soon alter that message — social systems are interactive by design and as such can’t be stable from one moment to the next — only more stable or less stable.

This is one reason it is so difficult to match our actions on the ground, or behind the doors where politics, business and other social actions are negotiated — while the message communicated at a given time remains recorded and frozen for others to bring forward at will and scrutinize against our actions which are constantly under the unstable forces at work in the interactive spaces. The non-linearity of social activity between people defies attempts to perfectly arrange events that are frozen in time — like a speech, or a testimony with events that are in a consistent state of flux such as relations between people, and their cultures, organizations, states, etc. This is nothing new, but it’s a question of managing expectations and navigating the effects of non-linearity. So if you can’t engineer a linear solution that is resistant to the effects of constant interaction, can you mitigate the effects?

It should not be surprising that we seek to “linearize” the future (in both the immediate and long range sense) given the appearance of linearization in historical events. For many, history (and other social sciences) often appears deterministic — as if its various cause and effect relationships can be readily traced by working backwards- but is this true? How much of history is contingent upon nuances and events that go unrecorded because the context of their significance was never weighted accordingly, went largely unnoticed or was discounted as a non-factor given some bias present in personal accounts. While historical methodology goes to great pains to exclude bias it can only account for events which eventually make themselves evident so that the historian can account for them. That is the problem of considering complex social relationships absent the real-time context in which they took place — they become somewhat isolated from their social setting.

By seeing History through a deterministic lens we often establish expectations for linear outcomes and ignore the complex environment which shapes the outcomes. For those familiar with 15-6 investigations — we wind up looking for determinant causes of the incident under investigation. By doing this we try and establish a chain of responsibility and identify where the chain was broken. While we are often able to exclude those things not of direct consequence to get to the breakdown, we also take the breakdown out of the environment where it occurred to some degree. When we apply this same methodology to future events subject to context that has not even occurred yet, we risk isolating the event only to be viewed as we first envisioned it. The further in the future and the more complex the environment in which it will occur — the greater the probability its character will be vastly altered from the way we imagined it would be.

So if we can’t arrange complex events to guarantee a future outcome — what can we do? We can start by acknowledging the requirements of a complex environment, and emphasizing what seems to come natural in some in order to spread those qualities to the extent possible to the broader leader population.

How do we do it?

So how might we equip leaders with the capability of non-linear intuition — and what is it anyway? Non-linear intuition is, as many have said, about making leaders more adaptive and agile, but to the purpose of taking advantage of the environment as it unfolds and putting the enemy to a disadvantage or putting friendly efforts to greater advantage. So, how might we send people to complex operational environments already comfortable operating in “uncomfortable”? How do we cultivate non-linear intuition within our formations? Can we apply non-linear intuition to the many “other then military” tasks that confront military leaders on yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s battlefields?

While this essay is not about advisory duty, it is the perspective I’ll need to use it to talk about complex environments and how it changed the way I thought — others doing different jobs I war, may have had like experiences. It is also timely given the current increase in advisors, the debates about future Army force structure and the ways in which we might approach the security challenges of tomorrow. While many of my experiences in command and staff positions, and traits like confidence and courage fostered by military service did help me adapt and overcome some of the problems with operating as a small team with indigenous forces, there were many things that were unfamiliar and complex in ways beyond my experiences to date. I had to influence several layers of Iraqi command structure (in some cases the range went from below the battalion to which we were advising to Iraqi MOD levels), our own MiTT levels, our Coalition Force partner unit at various levels as well as learning where we might have indirect influence that would benefit the mission such as the local PRT and local business men, muktars and sheiks. On any given day I’d touch some or all of those at various levels — and they all would often want different information, have different requirements or possibly be working counter to some or all of the rest — I was hip deep in trying to create a common operating picture, explain motivations, and synchronize efforts. Some of this I was conscious of, and some I was not — I suspect that some or all of the others were just as involved with either the same group, or parts of the same group.

It was a highly ambiguous environment where I did not really own any resources, had very little (if any) authority to directly arrange things, and one in which measuring progress toward goals was subjective, and hard to articulate to all involved. It was uncomfortable and hard to get used to at times because not only were others working on their own timelines, but because my other experiences as an Infantry officer to that point were largely objective — it was as though the subjectivity normally only associated with my personal life (you know, marriage, kids and other complex relationships) had suddenly taken over my professional life. I had been raised to look at everything as a tactical problem that had an obvious and immediate solution which could be engaged and put to bed so I could move on to the next objective. This was very different — I might spend months working on what was by outward appearance a very inconsequential thing, but which my gut told me had much broader and reaching consequences. Often I went to sleep wondering what if anything I had accomplished that day. It was unsettling to a professional soldier who had largely trained and operated in the physical world where buildings and hills, or elements of an enemy force were the measures by which I graded my efforts. It was not until I could consider the whole tour from a very macro perspective that I got any real satisfaction from what we’d accomplished.

Recently in an interview with Inside Defense, LTG Caldwell talked about an Army learning culture that was built on teaching “how” and not “what” to think. I think there may be a need to take what we do in the classroom of our PME and create opportunities for, and foster a culture of looking toward opportunities where we can be uncomfortable — situations that provide the opportunities for the application of non-linear intuition to solve problems and reward risk takers. Advisory duty with indigenous forces, Inter-Agency Stints, duty on the Hill, perhaps even working at the state and local levels with civilians and public officials are good ways to place our leaders in uncomfortable situations that help them temper our A type personalities and tendencies prevalent in our culture of “series of Branch Qualifying jobs & stepping stones to the next echelon of command”.

There is a linkage I believe between learning to be comfortable in the “uncomfortable” and developing non-linear intuition, ultimately however what a leader learns from an experience is up to him or her. The institution can provide the education, the opportunity and can even foster cultural flexibility by being tolerant of risk and encouraging diversity by reflecting it in its reward system (promotions and assignments), but ultimately this is an individual choice. If a leader believes they are an A type personality and that they can never be comfortable in a non-linear environment, then they probably never will be.

Now I realize that by today’s academic standards I may not have applied adequate scientific rigor in coming to my own conclusions about non-linear behavior in complex social relationships and interactions. However, for me it is about reflecting on my own experiences so that in light of new perspectives gained from others considering similar experiences, I might better understand my own and gain insights that help me meet new challenges and responsibilities in the future. Clausewitz did a great deal of thinking about war that go well beyond examining it in the Napoleonic context, his insights into the nature of war as a social phenomena, as an extension of political behavior and that enduring objective qualities as well as those subjective qualities that are derived from the locations in which war originates hold the type of value that can not be digested in one setting and can be read and reread time and again to gain new insights.

Works cited include:

Byerchen, Alan, “Clausewitz, Non-Linearity, and the Unpredictability of War, International Security, VOL. 17, No. 3 (Winter, 1992-1993), pgs 59-60

Victor David Hanson and Robert B Strassler editors of The Landmark Thucydides; a comprehensive guide to the Peloponnesian War; Touchstone Books, NY NY 1998

Carl Von Clausewitz, ON WAR, ed. and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret; Princeton Univ Press, Princeton NJ,1976

COIN Seminar with DR David Kilcullen at MCB Quantico, VA. On 26 SEP 07.