Fog, Friction, and Failure in Organized Conflict: A Formal Study

Organized conflict, while confined by the laws of physics-and, under profound strategic incompetence, by the Lanchester equations-is not a physical process but rather an extended exchange between cognitive entities that have been shaped by path-dependent historical trajectories and cultural traditions. Cognition itself is confined by the necessity of duality, with an underlying information source constrained by the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories. We introduce the concept of a 'basic underlying probability distribution' characteristic of the particular cognitive process studied. The dynamic behavior of such systems is profoundly different for 'thin-tailed' and 'fat-tailed' distributions. The perspective permits the construction of new probability models that may provide useful statistical tools for the analysis of observational and experimental data associated with organized conflict, and, in some measure, for its management.