CIAO DATE: 05/02

Clausewitzian Friction and Future War

Barry D. Watts

Institute for National Strategic Studies
National Defense University

October 1996

The Once and Future Problem of General Friction

Since the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, there has been growing discussion of the possibility that technological advances in the means of combat would produce ftmdamental changes in how future wars will be fought. A number of observers have suggested that the nature of war itself would be transformed. Some proponents of this view have gone so far as to predict that these changes would include great reductions in, if not the outright elimination of, the various impediments to timely and effective action in war for which the Prussian theorist and soldier Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) introduced the term "friction." Friction in war, of course, has a long historical lineage. It predates Clausewitz by centuries and has remained a stubbornly recurring factor in combat outcomes right down to the 1991 Gulf War. In looking to the future, a seminal question is whether Clausewitzian friction would succumb to the changes in leading-edge warfare that may lie ahead, or whether such impediments reflect more enduring aspects of war that technology can but marginally affect. It is this question that the present essay will examine.

Clausewitz's earliest known use of the term "friction" to "describe the effect of reality on ideas and intentions in war" occurred in a 29 September letter written to his future wife, Marie von Briihl, less than 3 weeks before France defeated Prussia at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt on 14 October 1806. ¹ By the time Clausewitz died in 1831, his original insight regarding friction's debilitating effects on the campaign of 1806 had grown into a central theme of the unfinished manuscript that his widow published as Vom Kriege [On War]. ²

American military officers today most often refer to Clausewitz's unified concept of a general friction (Gesamtbegriff einer allgemeinen Friktion) as the "fog and friction" of war. ³ The diverse difficulties and impediments to the effective use of military force that those possessing military experience instinctively associate with this phrase are generally acknowledged to have played significant roles in most, if not all, of the wars since Clausewitz's time. Even in a conflict as inundated with technically advanced weaponry as the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), there was no shortage of friction at any level, tactical, operational, strategic, or even political. Indeed, close examination of Desert Storm suggests that frictional impediments experienced by the winning side were not appreciably different in scope or magnitude than they were for the Germans during their lightning conquest of France and the Low Countries in May 1940.

The historical persistence of friction, despite vast changes in the means of war since Clausewitz's time, suggests that his concept may reflect far more than a transitory or contingent feature of land warfare during the Napoleonic era. Yet, as we try to think about how war may change over the next couple decades in response to technological advances, nothing precludes us from wondering whether the scope or overall magnitude of Clausewitzian friction may change. Some U.S. military officers who have grappled with how future wars may be fought have suggested that foreseeable advances in surveillance and information technologies will sufficiently lift "the fog of war" to enable future American com-manders to "see and understand everything on a battlefield." ⁴ Nor are visionary military officers alone in this speculation. In a 6- month assessment conducted by a Washington, DC, defense-policy institute on the prospects for a "Military Technical Revolution" (MTR), the participants concluded that "what the MTR promises, more than precision attacks or laser beams, is . . . to imbue the information loop with near-perfect clarity and accuracy, to reduce its operation to a matter of minutes or seconds, and, perhaps most important of all, to deny it in its entirety to the enemy." ⁵

These forecasts concerning conflict in the information age raise at least three first-order questions about Clausewitz's unified concept of a general friction. First, contrary to what Clausewitz probably thought, is it likely that general friction is a transitory, nonstructural feature of the violent interaction between contending political entities we call war and amenable to technical solutions? Second, even if friction is, instead, an enduring, structural feature if combat processes, can technological advances appreciably reduce the aggregate quantities of friction experienced by one side or the other in future conflicts? Third, do wars since Clausewitz's time, or foreseeable advances in the means of waging future wars, demand major modifications of Clausewitz's original concept? Alternatively, how might Clausewitz's original concept change if interpreted in light of contemporary knowledge, particularly from the standpoint of disciplines such as evolutionary biology and nonlinear dynamics?

The first task in trying to answer these questions is to clarify Clausewitz's mature notion of general friction. To establish a common baseline for discussion, we will review the evolution of friction in Clausewitz's thought (chapter 2) and its origins in the intellectual clarity of his mentor and second father, Gerhard Johann David von Schamhorst (chapter 3). Using this baseline, the taxonomy of Clausewitz's mature concept will then be clarified and extended (chapter 4).

The second task is to subject our baseline understanding of general friction to the test of empirical evidence. What does the Persian Gulf War suggest about the persistence of Clausewitzian friction as recently as 1991 (chapter 5)? And does friction's role in that conflict provide any grounds for concluding that its potential role or "magnitude" has appreciably diminished since World War II?

The third task is to examine friction's prospective role in future conflicts. This task presents special problems insofar as direct evidence about wars yet to be fought is not possible. Instead, arguments for friction's undiminished persistence in future war will have to be constructed on the basis of related structural limitations in other areas. The discussion will aim, therefore, at establishing three conclusions by various indirect arguments. First, the prospects for eliminating friction entirely appear quite dim because friction gives every evidence of being a built-in or structural feature of combat processes. ⁶ Second, whether friction' so verall magnitude for one side or the other can be appreciably reduced by technological advances is less important than whether such advances facilitate being able to shift the relative balance of friction between opponents more in one's favor. Third, recasting Clausewitz's concept in contemporary terms is a useful step toward better understanding its likely role in future war regardless of what one may conclude about the possibility of either side largely eliminating its frictional impediments.

What sorts of arguments and evidence might build a case for these conclusions? Before military conflict even begins, there is the apparent intractability of the prospect of strategic surprise, which offers a "pre-combat" parallel to general friction (chapter 6). The inaccessibility to central economic planners of all the information needed to run a national economy more efficiently than market forces driven by a myriad of individual choices reveals an economic "friction" comparable to that built into military organizations (chapter?). The propensities and constraints built into humankind by biological evolution provide a wellspring for general friction that seems likely to persist at some level as long as Homo sapiens does (chapter 8). Finally, air combat data and related experimental evidence can be used to quantify, within a single area of tactical interaction, the degree to which the presence of man himself "in the loop" dominates engagement outcomes (chapter 9).

With these indirect arguments for general friction's relatively undiminished persistence in future war in hand, the final task is to exploit the modem notion of nonlinearity as a basis for reconstructing Clausewitz's original concept in more contemporary terms (chapter 10). Among other things, the contemporary understanding of nonlinear dynamics reveals how nonlinearities built into combat processes can render the course and outcome of combat unpredictable in the long run by repeatedly magnifying the effects of differences between our constructs of unfolding military operations and their actuality.

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Notes

Note 1. Hans Rothfels, quoted in Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the Slate: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 124, note 3. Clausewitz married Marie von Bruhl in December 1810 (ibid., 209). Once married, Marie Clausewitz identified herself whole-heartedly with her husband's work, "acted as his amanuensis and after his death as his editor," presiding over "what still remains the complete edition of his works which she published in 1832-4" [Michael Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 8]. Back

Note 2. von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Bonn: Dummler, 1980 and 1991), 265; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 119. Back

Note 3. The March 1992 edition of Air Force Manual 1-1: Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force states that war is characterized by "fog, friction, and chance" (vol. I, 2). The reigning view in the U.S. Army is that "[a]mbiguity, uncertainty, fog, friction, danger, stark fear, and chance . .. continue to describe accurately the conditions with which military forces have to contend and will continue to contend" (General Gordon R. Sullivan and Lieutenant Colonel James M. Dubrik, "Land Warfare in the 21st Century," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 4th annual conference on strategy, February 1993, 26). Also see U.S. Marine Corps, Warfighling, Fleet Marine Field Manual 1, 6 March 1989, 4-7. Back

Note 4. [Admiral William A.] Owens Says Technology May Lift 'Pog of War': Breakthroughs Could Give Forces Total Command of Future Battlefield," Inside the Navy, 23 January 1995, 3. See also, Admiral William A. Owens in Dominant Battlespace Knowledge: The Winning Edge, eds. Stuart E. Johnson and Martin C. Libicki (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, October 1995), 14-15; and Owens, "System-Of-Systems: US' Emerging Dominant Battlefield Awareness Promises To Dissipate the 'Fog of War'," Armed Forces Journal International (January 1996): 47. The meaning initially associated with Admiral Owens' notion of Dominant Battlefield Awareness was that, by connecting largely existing sensors and shooters together via appropriate information and command-and-control systems, it should be possible to detect, track, and classify most (or all) of the militarily relevant objects moving on land, the surface of the ocean, through the air, or in space within a cube of battlespace some 200 nautical miles on a side. Back

Note 5. Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey Shaffer, and Benjamin Ederington, "The Military Technical Revolution: A Structural Framework," Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington, DC, final report of the CSIS study group on the MTR, March 1993, 58. Back

Note 6. While the ideas in this essay are the author's responsibility alone, Andrew W. Marshall encouraged exploration of the possibility that warfare might possess structural or built-in features that could not be wholey eliminated by advances in the means of combat. Marshall, however, was also willing to entertain the possibility that advances in Ihe information aspects of conflict could substantially attenuate the magnitude of frictional impediments, particularly at the operational level of future Back