This AM I heard Nathaniel Fick, who I guess trains counterterrorist officers in Afghanistan, when he isn't doing other important CNAS stuff. He opined that if we kill one innocent in the work of killing one Taliban leader, we have achieved a net negative. He further stated that we leap for that very high bar more times than we get over it. Net sum negative. Fick claims he's not a Nagl acolyyte, nor COIN cultist

I was on a river float trip with a bunch of PhD cell biologists when the chess board came out. My game was way rusty, the competition overconfident, so I resorted to the expedient of attacking any piece offered in an even trade that didn't obviously sacrifice my board position. By shredding their plans before they could be developed, I beat every comer, and wisely quit as they were figuring out my device, which maybe looked like chaos. (Unlike Mr's Hall or FIck, I cared nothing for my losses.)

A whitewater river's motion is observable and predictable within limits. The paddling skills can be practiced in increments. The river isn't consciously hiding a force to push you into a fatal sieve, or disrupting your next move as SOP. It doesn't take the power of Great Falls to thwart a good urban COIN plan. As we saw in E. Baghdad, sabotaging trash collection and throwing a dead dog into the sewer drain may be enough to raise the risks and defeat the rotating US battalion's ability to clear the bar in body armor.

Thx for posting Mr. Hall's thoughtful essay. Mr. Fick's 30 min. UC Berkely lecture will be online at this link soon, and he's scheduled for other topics in the conference..
http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=18110#schedule

It is a thoughtful response, and as he has been there and I have not I have to defer. But I would have to ask the writer if he is sure about this assessment: "Chaos, the kind I know, has little to do with a traffic jam in Calcutta or whitewater rapids. There is chance in those systems, but, as Ricks notes, it does not reign supreme. In warfare, chance does reign supreme." Is it that chance really reigns supreme in war, or is it that the experience of the individual is too atomic a level at which to understand the order at work. Every individual is, of course, primarily concerned with his survival and that of his closest associates. And in the course of events, one person's survival can be seen to be utterly arbitrary and governed by chance when placed next to an adjacent person's destruction. And this is, of course, the most salient way for any participant in war or just life in general to look at his surroundings. But, of course, we know that there is order at work in war: cause and effect plays a role. We know that in the wars between the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. military, the level of casualties taken on each side was not governed by pure randomness, but rather the relative ability on each side to inflict casualties. That is order; that is cause and effect. But where the casualties are taking place, their distribution seems random, or chaotic. This is the nature of physical logic in the universe: it is not always apparent to those most directly involved in the processes at play. Order is seen when we abstract the phenomena, either by temporal or spatial perspective and gathering of ever-more-complete information, or else abstracted statistically by isolating the controlling indicators of the process. The question to ask in the case of war is to what extent the planners of wars are abstracted away from its human reality in their (necessary) efforts to determine cause and effect in this most inhuman, and seemingly chaotic, of all human endeavors.

Chaos is a higher form of order that our minds have not yet grasped or understood fully yet. The Universe and the local part of it we call our World seem chaotic on the surface, yet there is an order underneath it. The Indian sages call this world, Maya, the dream. Given a long enough period of time, nothing lasts and today's events and people seem as if they were part of a dream. As a thought in one's head has a brief lifespan, so do people and things in this world. The physical Universe in this analogy is the mentation or thoughts of a Universal Consciousness or an intelligent entity. Each individual is more than a mere thought or idea, but just as ephemeral nonetheless.

Rick's pointed out an incident that E. B. Sledge had where a voice told him that he was survive the Pacific Theater and the war. There are moments every human has of a particular clarity and specialness. They are moments of acute perception and awareness without a trace of thought. They can be experienced, but never fully comprehended by analysis or thought afterward. The Zen Buddhists call them satori. Christians call them mystical visions. A variation of satori likely happens quite a bit to soldiers in combat because of the stress and fatigue of combat, and the necessity of being constantly aware of your environment. Both physics and metaphysics are converging on the truth that the Universe is both the observer and the observed. That fact leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is a Universal Consciousness that exists and that everyone and everything in this Universe are part of that "Mind". The existence of such a consciousness would explain instances where people knew their loved ones were in trouble or people being prescient. (There is a story in Halsey's Typhoon of a sailor's father knowing his son was in a life threatening situation. The father could not know his son's destroyer had sunk and his son was threading water in a massive typhoon, but he did know his son's life was in extreme danger. So, he got his wife and they prayed for their son's safety.)

We will likely need new ways of thinking and analysis. Since both Nature and thought are fractal (interactive repetition) as are most human endeavors, our mathematics and behavioral analysis should probably go in that direction. We've seen the limits of Gaussian distributions, economic models, and risk management against the fractal reality (and fraud) of Wall Street. War is no less complex a system as Wall Street, but it is rooted in the fractal nature of the human and natural world as Wall Street is. Any analysis of human endeavors also has to deal with the loss of observational information just as a physicist loses information by the measurements he or she conducts on the object being measured. Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle is not just a quantum law. The ultimate skill is not fighting or analyzing the war, but avoiding the war in the first place. Was not this the first of Sun Tzu's rules? Skill in analyzing and fighting a war is a poor second to the first skill of avoiding the war in the first place through shrewd analysis and diplomacy.