On War
Friction
Even the simplest thing is difficult
On War, Book One, Chapter Seven
He borrowed a word from physics for the study of war. This is where friction comes from and why it can only be budgeted for.
What actually happened?
In the seventh chapter he coins it: everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and produce a friction that nobody who has not seen war can imagine. His picture of it is concrete. The machine is made of individuals, each of whom keeps his own friction: an order passes through hundreds of people who get tired, frightened, or misunderstand it, and on top of that come weather, ground and false reports. Friction makes what looks easy hard. It is, he says, the one concept that distinguishes real war from war on paper.
Friction comes from a plan having to pass through people
A plan is a frictionless abstraction; execution is warm-blooded transmission, and each person it crosses adds a layer of fatigue, misreading, self-interest and delay. So the complexity of a plan is not counted in logical steps but in how many people it must pass through.
A three-step process spanning five teams is harder than a ten-step one closed inside a single group. Count handoffs before you count steps.
Friction cannot be removed, only allowed for
He does not teach you to eliminate it, because it cannot be eliminated. He teaches conversion. The good commander prices friction into the plan and leaves slack at every link. Scheduling to the theoretical limit is not efficiency; it is never having been in the field.
A timeline summed from each stage's best case declares that one head cold gives the whole line a fever. Old hands plan at eighty per cent and call the rest friction.
What resists friction is habit, not willpower
The only lubricant, he says, is the habit of war: drill and combat grinding a force until difficulty is the default. Willpower in the moment does not hold against systematic friction. Only rehearsing the common failures into muscle keeps friction from eating your decisions.
The teams that hold up are not the ones with high morale. They are the ones that have rehearsed a rollback, run a degraded mode and sat through a night shift.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a plan that is simple on paper, and you are about to schedule it along the ideal path.
Ask first: how many people does it have to pass through, and where exactly did I leave slack?
Where it goes wrong: treating friction as an excuse and refusing every claim of it; or using it to excuse all delay while never drilling the habit that absorbs it.
Lines to keep
Friction is what distinguishes real war from war on paper.
Three quarters of the factors in war lie in a fog.
Same situation, other people are asking
I explained it and what came back was not it.Everything is orderly now and we've somehow got slower.What I ask for and what I get are never the same thing.We added people and less gets finished than before.Nothing ships · all 12 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.