Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

Some arrangements of connections will make a system resistant to change and others canfacilitate instability 135 . When one element or relation cannot change unless others do, smalland slow adjustments will not be possible, each element has a veto over all the others. Inother cases one element controls another, which in turn controls a third thereby producinggreat indirect influence. The point is however that the character of interconnections are notalways obvious. If the chains are short or the processes are familiar the character of therelationship may be obvious but when chains are long and intricate the results are more likelyto be surprising. The importance of this observations is that the perception of the characterof interconnections strongly influence policy preferences 136 .So we cannot understand systems if we only know the attributes and goals of asystems. The shape of the interconnections is crucial. The result of interconnections is thateffects of actions are oftentimes indirect, mediated and delayed and indirect effects may bemore important than direct ones. Related to this is that the short term impact of any actionwill be different than the long term outcome and if an actor is basing his subsequent actionson the short term results of his previous actions it will be hard to establish effectiveness ofany action.An extension of this observation is that actions often interact in non-linear ways.Where two chemicals are not toxic when taken in separately, when combined they may belethal. The problem for strategists is that a variable in a system may operate through a nonlinearfunction, that means that it may have a disproportionate effect after a while when theeffects of an action have passed through the chain. Another interesting trait is that thedirection as well as the size of an effect can be reversed as the stimulus increases. After aninitial scare from being bombed researchers have noted a stiffening of resistance inpopulations in Germany and Great Britain, so instead of breaking the morale, it actuallystiffened it. The conclusion of this is that because the trajectory being followed is notunilinear, moving toward a goal may bring one further from it rather than closer to it. 137An important observation for a strategic planner is that complex behavior may leadto false conclusions about the effectiveness of attacking a variable. The fact that one hastried to change the behavior of a system by affecting a variable without the expected effectdoes not mean that variable is unimportant but that change requires that more than just thisone variable needs to be altered 138 . Non-linearity and the interaction of variables also lead tothe fact that jumps rather than smooth incremental changes and progressions characterizeoperations of systems. 139 Complex systems often fail because of the failure of severalcomponents, each of which would have been harmless had the other not occurred 140 .So results cannot be predicted from the separate actions. The effect of one variablefrequently depends on the state of another and it is therefore difficult to apportion theresponsibility among them as the extent and even the direction of the impact of eachdepends on the status of the others. Further complexities are introduced when we look at theinteractions that occur between strategies when actors consciously react to others andanticipate what they think others will do. An actor’s policies can make possible or foreclosethe adversaries strategies, so judgment about the merit of a strategy should always keep inview the one of the opponent. But actors often fail to appreciate both the degree to whichtheir strategies are sensitive to those of others and the ability of the adversary to change its135 Ibid, p.18.136 Ibid, p.24.137 Ibid, p.37.138 Ibid.139 Ibid.140 Ibid, p.41.157