David T. Cloft
Nearly a hundred years ago, Sir Herbert Butterfield sat down and committed the unforgivable sin of telling historians, strategists, and polite academics something they still hate hearing today: war is not a clean system. It is not a spreadsheet problem. It is not solved by better charts, prettier maps, or a PowerPoint deck with the right color palette. War—every war—boils down to frightened human beings trying to reconcile self-preservation, honor, faith, and meaning while other frightened human beings try to kill them.
This was an inconvenient truth in the 1930s. It is downright heretical in the age of fifth-generation warfare.
Butterfield wrote before drones, social media, cyber operations, influence campaigns, and armies of anonymous experts explaining conflict through think-tank jargon. Yet he understood something that entire modern bureaucracies still manage to miss: the further war drifts from formal battlefields, the more decisive the human soul becomes—and the worse technocrats perform.
No comments:
Post a Comment