ABSTRACT
Strategy is difficult to do, but it is not impossible: chance always threatens to rule in war, but it does not reign. Clausewitz can mislead when he writes: ‘In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.’1 In emphasising rightly the roles of guesswork and luck in war, exactly because ‘No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance’,2 he risks turning a sound point into an unsound one. It is almost mischievous for Clausewitz to hazard the analogy between cards and war, because there is a truly vital difference between them. Cards are dealt literally at random. By contrast, the dimensions of war and strategy include chance and uncertainty (perhaps gathered in the broad church of ‘friction’),3 but they do not reduce to them. Card players are obliged to perform with assets randomly selected, strategic players are not. To develop the analogy further, strategic performance is not akin to skill in poker. The superior poker player plays the person not the cards. The poker wizard will always win conclusively against inferior players, regardless of the cards that are dealt (at random of course), provided only that a series of hands is allowed. The luck of the cards has next to nothing to do with it. Needless to add, for players of equivalent skill, better cards could be the difference between them. In war, as in life, while a cruel and capricious fate may thwart rational calculation and predictability, by and large it does not. Ceteris tolerably paribus, objectively better armed forces tend to win wars.4 Strategic skill is important, but unlike the case of poker, alone it is not a reliable foundation for victory. Inputs for strategic behaviour can reasonably be assumed to bear some usefully proportional relation to strategic outcomes. This is to say that strategic behaviour is substantially linear in character. None of this challenges the importance of chance, risk, accident, uncertainty, friction of all kinds, or guesswork. But it does challenge the strangely counterfactual and counterintuitive proposition that ‘chaos rules’ in war. Chaos does not rule. To paraphrase and expand on the biblical aphorism: ‘the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong’,5 but that is the way to bet.
