SITREP 191200ZMAR23

Updates, clarifications, and a confession.

A situation report, or SITREP, is a brief summary of activity during a defined time period (usually since your last SITREP). They are timestamped with a Date Time Group (DTG) broken down as DATE-TIME-TIMEZONE-MONTH-YEAR. In this case 19-1200-UTC-MARCH-2023. What can I say? I’m indoctrinated.

Since launching The Powder Horn in December, I’ve been publishing feature posts every 3-4 weeks. This is the second meta post, the first since “Situation Friendly”. Every week more readers click the subscribe button and we’re up to a few dozen regulars now. From what I can tell, subscribers are a diverse set. There are professors, practitioners (both officers and non-commissioned), active duty, retired, and civilian. All are welcome. I feel exceptionally privileged and grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read The Powder Horn.

I will strive to continuously improve the quality of the writing. Not every post can contain great or novel insight, but I want every read to be worth your time: “All Killer No Filler”. My editor is mediocre but unfortunately I can’t get rid of them, so expect that typos will be fixed as they are detected. If you see typos, feel free to point them out in the comments section and I’ll fix them.

I recently went through my previous posts and did some copy editing. I gave some thought to re-working this paragraph from “Plans Are Predictions”, but decided to leave it as-is:

“This dance of action-reaction-counter-exploitation, when performed by organized groups who can coordinate the simultaneous and mutually-supporting activities of many sub-components, is what makes war "highly dynamic". Trying to do all of this in under conditions of uncertainty makes war "complex." The use of force makes it lethal.”

While re-reading Jim Storr’s The Human Face of War for “A Question of Loyalty”, I realized that the way I used “complex” here was unclear, since it could have easily applied to the previous sentence about sub-components. Like John Boyd, Storr draws on systems theory and chaos theory in his writing. This is how I understand Storr’s taxonomy:

1. Simple systems are ones in which each component has a very small (e.g. binary) number possible states and few interactions with other components e.g. a chain is a system in which the links have two possible states (slack or tension) and each individual link interfaces with two other links, so there is a direct causal connection between input (load) and output (tension).
   

2. Complicated systems have multiple sub-systems which can be in different states and have more interaction with other sub-systems. Inputs into complicated systems produce predictable outputs. A multi-engine passenger jet is very complicated, but it behaves very predictably when operated by trained aircrew.
   

3. Complex systems have multiple sub-systems each with many possible states. These sub-systems interact with each other in unpredictable ways. I joined the Army to avoid math, so here’s my grunt’s-eye-view of this is:
   
   Complexity = Complication + Uncertainty
   
   For example, it we can easily picture two Army brigades which appear identical on paper but which operate with different levels of efficiency and effectiveness.¹ Even if it were possible to see data on every sub-system and sub-sub-system in real time (each of which is constantly interacting with others) by the time a human processes all of that data into information and understanding, then the moment has passed. Military forces are complex, so is the interaction i.e. combat, between opposing forces. Complex systems can reliably connect inputs to outputs (e.g. there are planning figures for how many shells must be fired per square meter of trench in order to achieve neutralization or destruction of a target) but there is some inherent randomness in the system that effectively prevents operations from running mechanically. When this randomness impairs operations, we call it “friction”. Empowered junior leaders who can fix problems at their level are the grease that mitigates friction.
   

4. Chaos is a property of systems in which the means that connect inputs to outputs are so complex as to make prediction past a short-term planning threshold unreliable, if not impossible. For a better example than I can provide, check out Superb Owl’s “Causal Explanations Considered Harmful”. By all accounts, close combat is characterized by chaos.

Finally, I have a confession to make: I wrote “Bullets, Beans, and Bullshit” with a caustic tone in the sidebar notes.² Reading the two sidebars one after the other, the irony is obvious and I can cop to the fact that I probably wasn’t giving manoeuvre warfare theory a fair shake. I’m still a skeptic, but I want to be clear that I’m skeptical of the “manoeuvrist approach” as it has been taught and exercised during my formal training and Professional Military Education (PME). Skepticism is healthy but cynicism is corrosive. When a lesson isn’t learned, a bad teacher blames the student and a bad student blames the teacher.

I am a firm proponent of the principle of charity and The Powder Horn is not in the game of knocking down strawmen for clicks. In the spirit of tsoyuko naritai, I’m going to re-engage with some foundational texts on manoeuvre warfare in order to gain a better understanding of it. Think of this SITREP as me emptying my cup. On that note, if anyone knows where to find John Boyd’s slides from Patterns of Conflict or his other lectures, I would love to have a look at them.

I will be away from books and keyboards for much of the next six weeks. I’ll still be reading, but writing will take a back seat during this time.

SITREP ends.

1. Reading brigade post-exercise reports from the U.S. Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center is both fascinating and a great source of blood for morale vampires.

2. I’m not a fan of the sidebar as a formatting convention and will be using footnotes going forward.