We Should Treat All Current and Future Prognostications About the War with a Massive Dose of Salt.

“No other activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” wrote the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War. To Clausewitz, war resembled a “game of cards,” full of uncertainty. Endless little things (“friction” in Clausewitz’s terminology) interfered in the best laid plans, rendering them null and void. There’s one thing you should never be surprised by in war—the fact that you’ve been surprised.

Writing in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz was reacting to the Enlightenment thinking of the previous century. This had tended to the view that reason could determine scientific laws for every form of human activity. Eighteenth century strategists like Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow and John Lloyd had regarded war as a science—all one had to do to succeed was to learn its laws and apply them. Clausewitz argued that this was nonsense. War was a human endeavour, and human psychology could not be reduced to mathematical equations. It was an “interaction,” “not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass, but always the collision of two living forces.” Mathematical concepts of war were wrong, said Clausewitz, because “They aim at fixed values, but in war everything is uncertain.”

And so it is. As events in Ukraine have shown, efforts to predict how war will progress have been proven wrong time and time again. Perhaps there is a pundit out there who correctly predicted that things would turn out as they have, but if so, he or she is doing a very good job of hiding. As the war in Ukraine nears the end of its second year, one must recognize that almost every prognostication about it has been wrong. Consequently, one should treat all current and future prognostications with a massive dose of salt.