The Irrationality of War and the Failure of Human Reason

 

One of the first things I observed about war and warfare when I began studying them is that war is probably the most irrational of behaviors of humans.  Serious students of war have long agreed that few if any wars have brought greater return to the victor than what the combatants expended in blood and treasure in the war.  Such recognition that war is irrational is not a modern idea:

The outcome corresponds less to expectations in war than in any other case whatever.  Livy

All sciences have principles and rules.  War has none.  Maurice de Saxe

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.  Sun Tzu 

We must also consider just how bad humans are at waging war.  The number of commanders who won every battle they ever fought can be counted on your fingers while the number of commanders who lost every battle easily fills a graveyard.  Few generals across history can show a success rate that if translated into an MLB batting average would get them on a Hall of Fame ballot.  The master philosopher of war, Clausewitz, expended great energy at the beginning of his magnum opus in identifying the multitude of things that not only could but would go wrong if you chose to go to war.  Modern students of the field are not much more encouraging:

War is a wasteful, boring, and muddled affair.  Sir A P Wavell

War is always a matter of doing evil in hope that good may come of it.  B H Liddell Hart

A contemporary thinker on the subject, Edward Luttwak, wrote an entire book explaining how what is logical in war is usually what would be illogical in any other field of endeavor – “Strategy, The Logic of War and Peace”.  A classic example of the apparent topsy-turvy logic of war is the Roman proverb – “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

History is flush with examples of the irrational on the battlefield.  Watching the British Light Brigade of cavalry charge a line of Russian cannon while also receiving fire from guns on the Brigade’s flanks prompted the French General Pierre Bosquet to declare, “C’est magnifique, mais c’est ne pas le guerre” – “Magnificent, but it is not war.”

Conflict simulations and wargames and simulations will usually not allow players to carry out “irrational” actions even when historically documented.  “Infantry in Battle”, published by the Infantry Journal, presented case studies drawn from the Great War.  One in particular captured the irrational nature of war and warfare. 

On October 29, 1918, the 2^nd Bn/61^st U.S. Infantry received an expected order to capture the German held town of Aincreville.  The battalion commander knew the town was defended by an arcing line of machine gun posts outside of the town and that a prepared artillery barrage would fall about 200 yards in front of the machine guns roughly two minutes after the defenders fired a green star rocket.  The number and condition of the defenders was unknown, but the rumble of supply wagons could be heard along with enemy voices.

The American unit was very tired after almost three weeks of long marches, five days of heavy operations resulting in heavy casualties and little result, several days as reserve while under artillery fire, before receiving replacements and taking up their current position.

There was no covered approach to the German positions and an American artillery barrage would simply alert the German machine gunners and bring down their defensive artillery fire.  In the American commander’s estimation, his weary battalion might choose not to advance under fire across the open ground.  However, estimating that the Germans were just as tired, he believed that if he could bring his battalion to close quarters an attack could succeed.  Upon receipt of the order, he proposed an alternate plan.  Depending entirely upon surprise, the actual plan was known only to the battalion commander, to Lieutenant R W Young - charged with carrying out the attack, and to four or five sergeants in Company F.

The attackers jumped off at 2:30 am without artillery, machine gun, or heavy weapons support, the men moving silently in two waves.  The sergeants who knew the plan were mixed into the second wave to ensure everyone advanced together.  The plan anticipated that the attackers would get within about 30 yards of the German machine gun posts before they were discovered.  When fired upon by the one or two of the machine guns they would take cover.  Lieutenant Young would then fire a green star rocket from a captured German Very Pistol he had secretly carried.  Not seeing the lieutenant fire the rocket, the Americans still recognized the German signal for calling down the defensive barrage.  As soon as Lieutenant Young could see that everyone recognized the danger, he yelled, “Beat it for the town!  It’s your only chance!”  The men ran through the line of still mostly unaware machine guns, across a small shallow stream, and into the town where they were directed into houses and cellars to wait until morning when they would attack the German defenders from the rear.  Once the town was secured, they would signal that with another prearranged rocket.  The village was captured with only one or two casualties, one of them sadly Lieutenant Young.

If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.  Sgt Murphy

The biggest challenge for human beings pondering war and warfare is knowing when they actually must go to war as opposed to when they merely ‘want’ to go to war.  Given the irrationality of war and warfare, one should clearly go to war only rarely and under the direst circumstances.

A lot of what happens in war and on the battlefield and how you respond to it depends upon how you perceive it.  The facts and foibles of human perception one of the most critically important aspects of warfare.  I am reminded of the allegory from Socrates, who described a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. These shadows are the prisoners' reality, but they are not accurate representations of the real world.

Modern science offers us numerous explanations about the limits of human perception.  Our eyes do a pretty good job of capturing light from objects around us and transforming that into information used by our brains, but our eyes don't actually “see” anything. That part is done by our visual cortex. Our eyes being slightly apart creates an image that needs to be corrected.  Scientists describe what our eyes ‘see’ as simply a simulacrum constructed by the brain based upon the signals transmitted to it by the visual receptors at the back of the eye - a mental projection of what the brain interprets based upon the signals reaching it from the eye as the eye perceives light reflected from the world.  Researchers have also determined that human memory is subject to error as each time we access a memory our mind alters it.

Researchers of human behavior long ago identified one of humanity’s most deeply rooted reflex instincts – fight or flight.  Rooted deep in our mammalian past, this instinct pushes us to quickly identify threats and then act by either fleeing or fighting.  Either response frames others as a threat without benefit of a cooler assessment of either capabilities or intentions.  Actual human Intentions are one of the most difficult things for humans to judge.   The essential point is that humans basically are not very good at conducting wars, turn to warfare far too easily and too often as a solution to problems beyond war’s ability to resolve.

 

 

 

The “US” Versus “Them” Problem

Right off the bat I need to acknowledge that virtually none of what follows here is original – at best it is a distillation of the thoughts of many that accumulated and eventually forced themselves out of memory and into the forebrain.  That process has been driven by the rather common human need to make sense of the incomprehensible mess we seem to have gotten ourselves into as a species and wondering what   our options are to escape it.

In the film “Jurassic Park”, chaotician Ian Malcolm argues that “If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. ... Life will find a way.”

Humanity (I am trying to avoid using any such term as homo sapiens, which seems a permanent walking oxymoron, or the Human Race, because look where that kind of thinking and language has gotten us) seems increasingly challenged by the problem of even agreeing on what problems challenge it.  A great deal of the trouble arises from the persistence of ‘it’s them or us’ thinking at all socio-political levels.

Of course, in its deepest roots, “them or us” began as “him or me” – when the first two single cell organisms encountered each other, and each worked through a short question sheet – possibly headed by ‘can I eat it?’ – but at some point included the question of ‘what is this that is not ‘me’?  but usually concluded with ‘It’s him or me’ and there was again only a lone single cell (albeit perhaps bigger) single cell.

Eventually, enough experience with ‘him or me’ gave rise to the realization that if I can get more ‘me’s’ together then it won’t be ‘him or me’ but it will be ‘him or us’ – and I have a much better chance of coming out successfully on the other end if I am among the ‘us’.  It didn’t take long for ‘him’ to figure out what ‘me’ had figured out and so ‘him or me’ became ‘them or us’.

This launched the still ongoing discussion of defining who is ‘them’ and who is ‘us’.  History, political science, anthropology, etc. all pretty much agree on the succeeding conversations about ‘us’ moving up from family, to clan, to tribe, hamlet, village, town, city, nation, empire, and so on.  The technology available today has somewhat complicated the conversation of ‘us or them’ by introducing new criteria to the identification process – are you ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Star Trek’ [with no serious room set aside for ‘Galaxy Quest’ or ‘1999’]; are you Budweiser or burgundy or bourbon? are you baseball or football [aka soccer, introducing another criterion]?  Introducing such criteria into the conversation sometimes renders moot the answer to what family, clan, tribe, hamlet, village, town, etc. you are because the answers to these new questions have already placed ‘us’ or ‘them’ beyond the pale of recognizable human life forms.

I also agree with the idea that our world is now the equivalent of a planetary petri dish in the back corner of the rack.  Any intelligence out there capable of intergalactic/interstellar travel only approaches us in the equivalent of full PPE gear – essentially just checking to see if it’s time to scrape this petri dish clean and start over.

Which leads me to share my observation that whatever aspirations we, us, or them have for expanding humanity beyond this third rock from the sun are themselves moot until we get past the ‘them or us’ problem.  Humanity’s progress to date, whether measured by technology, economics, territory occupied, etc., has generally been linked to successfully expanding the ‘us’.  One sad option too often adopted has been to increase the ‘us’ by reducing the number of ‘them’.  History tells us how many times in how many ways humanity has done this, but it is worth noting that modern science has also discovered in our DNA traces of multiple human ancestry including both Neanderthal and Denisovan and now possibly others.  So obviously, multiple ancestors over time looked at ‘them’ and acted on the primordial desire to go from ‘me’ to ‘us’ by the most natural pathway.  Wow, we just ended up at “make love not war”.  Can’t get any more Boomer than that.

 

"Here they come again!"

 

The rioters have been removed from Capitol Hill, the tear gas, pepper spray, and fire extinguisher residue is being cleaned away, and individuals on all sides are looking at the lessons learned – emphasis on “all” sides.  The defenders have less than nine days to prepare for the next assault which will itself be informed by what the terrorists learned on January 6.

Adendorff:  “They’re counting your guns.  Can’t you see that old boy up on the hill?  He’s counting your guns.  Testing your fire power with the lives of his warriors.”

In addition to time, the preparations face other obstacles.  The theft of laptops and the access to Capitol Hill computers and communication systems during the occupation of the building means that these systems are compromised.  Those responsible for Capitol Hill security may want to consider avoiding these systems and dig out some old IBM Selectric III typewriters, use hand carried messages and typewritten documents.  Going old tech in this fashion enabled the Germans to surprise the American troops in the Ardennes Forest in the Battle of the Bulge.  Our codebreakers never caught a serious whiff of the planning.

My last century National Guard training and ‘related’ experiences emphasized the importance of the display of potential force but exercising it with restraint.  This was a missing element on January 6.  There were no reserves on hand and none on call.  Military history is replete with examples of mistaken reliance on poorly placed reserves too far away to be able to execute a timely and effective intervention.

The element of surprise will be crucial to the coming events, for both defenders and any hopeful terrorists seeking to act out their delusions.  Surprise can take many forms.  Years ago I was the officer in charge of a small overseas State Department post.  Local police informed us that a local student youth group intended to occupy our premises later that day.  The authorities would post a police presence at the entrance to the building in which we were located.  For ourselves, we had a small suite of offices which were secured against the public by a counter barrier topped with bulletproof glass and doors secured by Simplex locks.  I advised our one local hire security officer of our expectations and asked him to take one additional precaution – change the combinations to our Simplex locks and change not just the numbers but the pattern used.  We enjoyed a quiet day at the office and our security officer reported (with enjoyment) watching one individual trying to open the doors but failing because he did not know the new number combination or pattern.  Surprise!  Capitol Hill Police and their supporting agencies will definitely want to be able to ‘run some new plays’ leading up to January 20.