Having taught and read on topics dealing specifically and explicitly with randomness (but not history), I am always fascinated to see examples of the seen and unseen outcomes of battle.
While the actual book, Amazon.com: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in…, deals with the mathematics and philosophy of randomness in a market context, the greatest text on the art of war speaks clearly to the role of randomness in war:
While it's clearly and continuously manifests itself at the tactical level, I'd love to see examples of this at the operational and strategic level.
For example, in reading about the Overland Campaign, the random timing of Longstreet's arrival to the Wilderness results in a rout of Union forces that restores the Confederate lines and seizes the initiative from them. If Longstreet arrives 30 minutes earlier, then his forces would have been routed alongside with Hill's.
Following the Wilderness, Grant steals a march from Lee to Spotsylvania Court House, but Anderson, who takes over Longstreet's Corps when he is wounded, leaves early and doesn't bivouac due to the brushfires set by the fighting in the Wilderness. If he instead is able to follow the instructions given to him by Lee, then his Corps is by all means most likely to be defeated piecemeal by GK Warren's V Corps, and instead of being fired ingloriously by Sheridan 11 months later at Five Forks, he instead becomes the hero of Spotsylvania, the battle where the ANV is broken and defeated, allowing the AoP to march and occupy Richmond.
On the flipside of the coin, Grant's smashing of the Mule Shoe, which nearly allows the AoP to flank the other two Confederate corps, is made possible by the combination of a random disobeyance (not in defiance, but rather due to a slow response) of orders to return artillery to the Mule Shoe (after Lee had it withdrawn in belief that Grant was going to withdraw to Fredericksburg based on Burnside inexplicably falling back with his Corps after seizing a portion of the Confederate right flank) and heavy ground fog that disguises the massed formation of Hancock's Corps as it approached the salient.
Those are three examples just in the span of a week of fighting in the Overland Campaign of where randomness rears its head and changes a potential outcome. I'd love to hear your examples.
While the actual book, Amazon.com: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in…, deals with the mathematics and philosophy of randomness in a market context, the greatest text on the art of war speaks clearly to the role of randomness in war:
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/O...3/BK1ch01.html
20.—It therefore now only wants the element of chance to make
of it a game, and in that element it is least of all deficient.
We see from the foregoing how much the objective nature of war makes it a calculation of probabilities; now there is only one single element still wanting to make it a game, and that element it certainly is not without: it is chance. There is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as war. But along with chance, the accidental, and along with it good luck, occupy a great place in war.
20.—It therefore now only wants the element of chance to make
of it a game, and in that element it is least of all deficient.
We see from the foregoing how much the objective nature of war makes it a calculation of probabilities; now there is only one single element still wanting to make it a game, and that element it certainly is not without: it is chance. There is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as war. But along with chance, the accidental, and along with it good luck, occupy a great place in war.
For example, in reading about the Overland Campaign, the random timing of Longstreet's arrival to the Wilderness results in a rout of Union forces that restores the Confederate lines and seizes the initiative from them. If Longstreet arrives 30 minutes earlier, then his forces would have been routed alongside with Hill's.
Following the Wilderness, Grant steals a march from Lee to Spotsylvania Court House, but Anderson, who takes over Longstreet's Corps when he is wounded, leaves early and doesn't bivouac due to the brushfires set by the fighting in the Wilderness. If he instead is able to follow the instructions given to him by Lee, then his Corps is by all means most likely to be defeated piecemeal by GK Warren's V Corps, and instead of being fired ingloriously by Sheridan 11 months later at Five Forks, he instead becomes the hero of Spotsylvania, the battle where the ANV is broken and defeated, allowing the AoP to march and occupy Richmond.
On the flipside of the coin, Grant's smashing of the Mule Shoe, which nearly allows the AoP to flank the other two Confederate corps, is made possible by the combination of a random disobeyance (not in defiance, but rather due to a slow response) of orders to return artillery to the Mule Shoe (after Lee had it withdrawn in belief that Grant was going to withdraw to Fredericksburg based on Burnside inexplicably falling back with his Corps after seizing a portion of the Confederate right flank) and heavy ground fog that disguises the massed formation of Hancock's Corps as it approached the salient.
Those are three examples just in the span of a week of fighting in the Overland Campaign of where randomness rears its head and changes a potential outcome. I'd love to hear your examples.
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