What is the essence of war?
It is the marriage of opportunity and execution. One should not think of assets, because this makes them seem immutable. Someone could steal them, for example. They are opportunities.
The eternity of defeat only indicates the eternity of victory.
Desire is the root of all conflict.
Desire is the root of all life lol.
I think there’s something interesting in describing war in terms of opportunity and execution rather than fixed “assets.” It emphasizes that what matters in war isn’t simply what you possess, but what you are actually able to do with what you have.
That said, I’m not sure opportunity and execution capture the whole essence of war. Opportunity seems to depend heavily on perception: the same situation might look like an opportunity to one side and a liability to another. And execution alone doesn’t explain the political or psychological dimensions of war—why the conflict is being fought in the first place, or how fear, morale, legitimacy, and uncertainty shape what each side considers possible.
Maybe a more complete formulation would be that war is the interaction of possibility, intention, and action under conditions of opposition and uncertainty. Your point about assets being opportunities fits nicely into that, because their value isn’t inherent; it depends on whether they can actually be converted into effective action.
Absolutely. This is why it is the ultimate measure of skill. We might reword this: it is not that opportunity depends on perception, but that perception is one of the elements that constitutes an opportunity. You have to see it, in order to know it.
It’s interesting you fall upon this, because it was The philosophical point of contention between the German and US military establishments in the post-WWI, pre-fascist German period. And, of course, fascist German military philosophy was simply pre-fascist military philosophy with funds (and a deleterious, though not completely destructive, political inherence). The US, of course, took the wider view you expose.
The contradiction, though, is an illusion. War is not shaped by those things, it incorporates them. Opportunity includes all of those things and more. For example, post WWII US had, for basically the entire Cold War, the assets to crush the USSR many times over. But it lacked the political capital. At least, it lacked somebody with the perception to configure those things and others into an opportunity. Whatever opportunity, then, would have been fleeting: thus the marriage with execution that conforms the essence of war.
Of course, not every parameter is always equally relevant, and borders are never definite. If I am a section commander tasked with holding a position, and notice an open flank in the enemy directly under my firing range, and I know enough about the rest of the line to know I will not be impeded within a given time frame, and decide to execute, I am not considering the political standing of, say, my general with respect to whatever. But, even if I don’t consider it, it is “priced in.”
By the way, this already unnecessarily narrows war down to a context.
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I might add, in my opinion, the US put way too much weight on the “wider strategic considerations” side of the economy of war between armies. The balance still held in their favour: they were able to leverage those opportunities against the German fascists. They might even have had against the Russian comunists, but the leftist leadership had no serious desire to do war on them.
It led to a complacency in field tactics such as the Germans and the pre-purge Russians were expert at (in very different ways). This deficiency later hurt them badly in theaters like Vietnam, where they tried to out-spend and “wide angle strategically” subdue foes who had come to power precicely by being able to prevail basically broke and with no geopolitical leverage such as the US understood, in terms of formal state structures. Kissinger defined it as the establishment trying to fight a war of attrition against an enemy that could simply, and did, melt into the population. Whereas a well defined, mature understanding of tactical small arms warfare might have clinched them a clear victory before any of the wider strategic considerations that they did not see, but the communists did, came into play. You can’t necessarily plan for what you don’t know, such as these considerations, but you can definitely plan for what you do, such as advanced small arms strategy.
One can count on the fingers of one hand, though, and have fingers left over, the men who have had a balanced perception of all relevant factors and been in an executive position to include it in a diet of possibility.
Another interesting thing to consider is what would have happened if any of the Cold War superpowers, initially just the US and Russia, but later also China, had decided to use small nuclear arms in secondary theaters. What that escalation would have looked like. A study of the period suggests that, even then, the desire not to be themselves decimated would have prevented them from employing massive, or even direct, retaliatory strikes.
Say if the USSR had used them in the Middle East, or the US in Indochina.
Biological life and it’s rules/behavior.