Command and Control — Real Life

For Clausewitz, then, rationality means alignment. Pursuing tactical or strategic victories that are misaligned with political goals is irrational. The problem is that the bureaucratic nature of armies makes them highly susceptible to such irrationality. As discussed in chapter 3, by dividing reality into separate drawers, bureaucracy encourages th

Begin with theory and practice, both of which Clausewitz and Tolstoy respect without enslaving themselves to either. It’s as if, in their thinking, abstraction and specificity reinforce each other, but never in predetermined proportions. Each situation requires a balancing derived from judgment and arising from experience, skills acquired by learni

“No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” Clausewitz writes of war in On War. It’s a “paradoxical trinity,” composed of the passions that cause combatants to risk their lives, the skill of their commanders, and the coherence of the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Only the last is fully

You can look at these things as games and dismiss them, or you can look at them as very simple simulated learning environments. So, as an example, in a simple Pong game, the game is constantly telling you how well you’re doing by how well you score. And so the more you learn the underlying principles, the better you score.

The underlying principles

When we play games, we take on temporary agencies—temporary sets of abilities and constraints, along with temporary ends. We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity.