"In war, everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult".
Carl von Clausewitz, On War


In war everything is simple, but even simple things are difficult. This famous quotation from On War says much more than it seems.

Who has not started a project that is ostensibly simple, and yet be bogged down with extraneous consequences. This is a restatement of Murphys' law, the idea that things will go wrong at the most inconsiderate time.

Everything is simple is reminiscent of chaos theory, or the butterfly effect; that small things can have disproportionate results.

I read On War in a political theory class. This book has had a huge impact on my life. Quotes like
"War is merely the continuation of politics by other means".
have resonated with me over the years.

Everything is simple, but even simple things are difficult is a truism that seems to reflect the phenomenal world.

Who has read Clausewitz?

Comments

I think what he's saying is that war (especially given the time he wrote this) is made up of performing a number of simple tasks. You need to ensure the soldier is fed, watered and equipped. In war these simple tasks become difficult. I guess an analogy is an astronaught taking a drink - a simple task but logistically complex and difficult.

Ask any infantryman - life comes down to a series of simple tasks; sleeping(when they can), cleaning weapons, eating, drinking, toileting - by themselves simple tasks, but inherently difficult in certain circumstances.

If you like military history, a good read on the workings of a platoon at war is 19 Platoon by Sydney Jary. It's quite hard to find but is wonderful insight.

Yup. I've read On War. Far better than Sun-tzu, I think.

The quotation does lead back to the discussion of chaos theory, but I think the eminently practical Clausewitz was talking about the complexity of human organization more than anything else. The difference is in nuance, not substanc.

What I mean is that war is the summation of thousands of variables. The best strategists can identify and plan for many of them, perhaps most of them. Problems in such a massive human endeavor tend to arise from minor complications in minor variables with ultimately serious ramifications--some unforeseen alteration in a mundane factor that turns out to be on the critical path. That could be the late delivery of boots for Napoleon's army as it crossed into Russia, or perhaps the late arrival of mules--a simple thing that played a disproportionate role in the defeat of the French army.

The butterfly effect I see as conveying a slightly different meaning. Weather might be a good example, or financial markets. In such complex systems there are always variables that humans miss, feedback loops or, in financial markets, an evolution in the underlying system due to deregulation in, say, the Australian housing market. The analogue may be a one-degree increase in global temperature, which undermines the assumptions in models that might have been reasonably accurate before that change. So in these systems big risks tend to arise from the unknown unknowns, to paraphrase someone who deserves to be forgotten.

So Clausewitz, logistics; butterfly effect, incompletely understood systems. The theories largely overlap but emphasize different facets of the problem of complexity.

I think someone saw a Lorenz Attractor, thought it looked like a butterfly, and made up a cute little story about it. It's a bit like how religious traditions start.

The collective unconscious doesn't usually support war, so making it work is usually an uphill battle. It's the opposite of a cosmic giggle.

I look at things this way: To do job A, you have to do jobs B and C, but to do jobs B and C, you have to do jobs D through F.

And you never get job A done.

Good thing I'm not in the military....

His daddy said "3 reasons (we) [the U.S.A.] didn't go into Iraq: it would cost too much $, too many lives and take too long", but Georgie didn't listen.