Really? Why do you call it a mistake then?
Iraq was no mistake.
Thank you! Superb summary. Until now, the thread seemed to have gotten stuck in a highly dualistic mode: Will is a Key Ingredient in Victory, or Will doesn’t Exist. Your analysis is spot-on in threading between these extremes. Yes, propaganda exists, and has a meaningful influence, especially in case No. 2, the level of civilian societal support for the war. It leads factory workers to put in longer hours making munitions, and mothers at home to donate copper cooking utensils for scrap-metal drives. And it leads people to write letters to their representatives saying, “We shall fight on” rather than letters saying “Let’s end this farce.”
Looking back through the thread, it’s now apparent that smiling bandit and I are simply speaking different languages. When I think of what wins wars, I think of the things than can be done by people to increase their military advantage over the adversary. So, I think of things like development of strategy, logistics, weapons, etc.
It seems that smiling bandit is looking at the question from the perspective of, there was a war, and what sociological, philosophical, or other intellectual factors determined how the war ended up? So, he comes up with rather absurd (in my view) factors like “politics,” and observes that “political factors heavily affect the progress of a war.” To me, this is like saying that football teams that score more points tend to win the game. I find this to be a totally non-instructive measure of predicting the outcome of future wars. And if something isn’t a useful predictor of future events, it isn’t a very useful tool in creating a useful theory on why past wars were won or lost.
If I were to add another example of things to his list, I’d absolutely add luck. In retrospect, we can always find examples of luck determining the outcome of some battle or another. But I think it is of zero value to study luck, because there’s nothing anyone can do about it, because luck doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Chance does exist; luck does not.
Not quite all I said, but the point is to identify the factors; then you can decide how much each one impacts and THEN how they can be used to affect a war. I make no claim to deciphering the final point, and the lack of an Engineering discipline devoted to politics implies that asnwers are not so easy. But on that point, I tried to point out a few significant ways that they did so; I’m sure you can forgive me for not writing a long and tedious book on the subject. When I have a few spare decades, I can go catalogue all known wars, analyze what contribute to victory, and then extrapolate into principles, eh? 
That’s metaphysics and can’t really be determined; more to the point, odds are that somebody would actually be lucky simply from sheer chance. I would point out Napoleon’s famous apohorism that he “chose the lucky ones [generals]”, and that military histories often emphasize the ability to take swift and decisive advantage of an unexpected opportunity (while being perceptive enough to avoid traps).
Ok, but I don’t see how “will” is any more metaphysical than “luck”. I’m terribly willful, thankfully I am also certainly lucky. I can’t quantify either, and I can’t explain how you could become more of them if you wished. Are you saying that something metaphysical is one of the qualities that helps wins wars? If so, I’d agree with the general idea. But, I’d say that luck is more important than will, and neither is usually sufficient alone.
Hey, if you started a thread with the title, “What wins golf tournaments?” and then said that the four things needed are:
- players
- clubs
- balls
- caddies
..I’d have the same reaction. Yes, players are an important factor in winning golf tournaments, and deserve to be analyzed. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s utterly unprofound and doesn’t really shed light on anything. Politics deserves to be identified as a factor in war? Well, knock me over with a feather!
You don’t need to write a whole book about players, etc. to boil things down to a couple of actual answers. In my example, I’d say that tournaments tend to be won by good putting, strong recovery play, individual skills matched to course layout, etc, as opposed to listing a few things that are obviously relevant to golf.
Yeah - that was my point. Arguments over whether luck exists is pointless; it may or it may not but all you can do is aggressively shape the situation in your favor.
Which is what I did. I wrote a considerable post defining some specific ways that poltiical systems alter how people are motivated, how nations mobilize, and what they and their leaders are willing to do. This is not the first time you’d criticized me for not doing something I explicitly did; are you sure you’re reading my posts here?
With all due respect, maybe the problem is that you have a crappy argument, not that I’m not reading your posts.
I’d say it is highly valuable to study luck – so that leaders, today, can recognize it when it happens. It might enable them to take advantage of it more quickly. It might also help them react to it defensively when the other side gets a big stroke of good luck.
U.S. Grant recognized that battles were gambles. He said, in his autobiography, that if he had a sufficient advantage in troops, materiel, etc. to win a battle with 90 per cent certainty…he’d rather split his forces and fight two battles, each having only a 75 per cent chance of victory. The odds of losing both are still actually less than the odds of losing that one, single battle (.25 * .25 < .1) and there’s a decent chance of winning both, and thus even more decisively whipping the enemy’s backside. And, yeah, it’s more expensive in terms of casualties: that’s Grant!
But see, that’s my point. I don’t think I can quantify will any more than I can quantify luck. If you can’t measure it, then it is at the very least difficult to account for when making your plans. I’d also go further and say that when it was accounted for by leaders when making their war plans, its importance was usually over valued. Those that have counted on it usually don’t get it, and those that have it usually didn’t come to it through any actions of their own. Germany and Japan in WWII made much of how their will would ensure victory before attacking their neighbors. They both found that their attacks instilled the will to obliterate them in their victims. I’m not sure anything short of being attacked would have made either Russia, the U.S., or any of the Allies motivated enough to prosecute WWII to the end it had.