#Wars Rarely Fix Issues - Unintended #Consequences Prevail

 

Wars Rarely Achieve Their Initial Goals: The Curse of Second-Order Effects

Initial victories do not guarantee the war will be won. Rather, they arouse the most dangerous enemy: the fatal hubris of over-confidence.

War tops the long list of human folly for a basic reason: it rarely achieves the initial goals of launching the war. It takes a special kind of human folly to discount all the negative possibilities that come from starting a war and focus exclusively on the one positive outcome in the belief it is inevitable, guaranteed, etc.

Wars carry a particularly heavy curse, that of long-term second-order effects.

The decision to launch a war must discount bad outcomes and extrapolate previous minor military campaigns as "proof" that the war will be won quickly and with minimal second-order effects. (First order effects: actions have consequences. Second-order effects: consequences have consequences.) Put these two gratifying assumptions together and you arrive at a third assumption: the war will be over before we know it.

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