Rogue Systems Recon: Brief Guide To Essential Concepts In Systems Science

A high-level overview of systems theory and science concepts applied to the challenge of understanding complex social dynamics in a holistic sense.

I’ve been closely monitoring the all-out ruscist assault on Ukraine using open source materials since it became inevitable three years ago, when the USA refused to fulfill the defense obligations America incurred in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear capabilities. In that time I’ve published a lot of analysis, but not enough about the science that powers my approach.

My ability to forecast the course of military campaigns in Ukraine as well as or even better than highly paid professionals is rooted in a particular paradigm of science. I’m waging my own private war against the russian world to help get the word out about the importance of Ukraine’s fight and the very real prospect of Ukraine’s victory - provided Ukrainians receive the support they’re owed.

And yes, it’s owed: everyone alive today experienced a more peaceful and prosperous world than would otherwise have been had the dissolution of the Soviet Union not been relatively peaceful. That happened in no small part because enough of the world assumed that the USA would defend a fellow democracy under attack from fascist invaders bent on genocide.

Thirty years later, Ukraine is living through what many worried, with much justification, might be in store during the 1990s. The price of a world that enjoyed a substantially lower risk of conflict, even nuclear war, was Ukraine’s disarmament, which along with American weakness and distraction led to where we are today: the death of the Postwar Order and the birth of something new. Maybe better, possibly worse.

This post, which I’m pinning to the top of the blog for easy reference, offers a high-level overview of key concepts in systems theory and science that I often refer to in my posts. This is open-source science: my goal is to help anyone who needs to manage complex situations do that more effectively. I’ll also update it over time to improve clarity and add some useful sources.

Ukraine is already applying it, or at least something starkly similar, unless I am badly mistaken. But not all Ukrainians, and even fewer allies, appear to fully comprehend what’s happening, which makes it difficult to properly support Ukraine in its struggle to survive. Though my analysis naturally comes off as biased in favor of Ukraine’s cause, it is that determination to help Ukraine achieve victory that forces me to constantly question my assumptions.

I am not confident in Ukraine’s ability to defeat Moscow’s aggression because I have blind faith, but because the best science that I know suggests this to be the case. All that those with the power to speed Ukraine to victory need to do is get the right resources moving before it’s too late to stop this from turning into an even bigger tragedy.

What I often refer to as the World System is a real, material thing, emerging from the interactions of States and their imitators, entities rooted in the claim to have a right to use violence to get their way. Eras of relative peace in the World System stem from widespread agreement that violence should be strictly minimized as counterproductive in most situations. But the incentives that produce such happy times are prone to shift: when they do, a cascade of shifting bets triggers inexorable change. Sometimes better, others worse. It all depends on where one stands, of course.

Key Terms

To work with systems, it is necessary to establish a common language. The classical science paradigm taught to most students has its own, and systems thinking does not override it - the two are complementary. But as much of the common terminology isn’t taught even at the university level, it’s good to be clear up front.

• System
  A group of distinct component parts that repeatedly interact, creating a new level of order dependent on all, something termed emergence. In social systems, ones involving people, necessary restrictions on individual behavior that enable cooperation generate a kind of free energy capable of doing work, like in many chemical reactions. Notably, systems encapsulate other systems, like molecules form from atoms. New rules of behavior then apply at that level, so long as the underlying conditions that sustained emergence hold.
  

• Theory
  A self-contained system of logic built from a combination of precedent, existing empirical evidence, and common sense. What most people call a theory is actually a hypothesis: a particular claim derived from applying theory to new or prospective evidence. Theory of gravity: a cosmic force pulls all objects with mass together. Hypothesis: if I jump off this building, I will fall to the ground. The latter is a test of the former. If a hypothesis that should follow from this logic - say, a thrown wrench will also fall to the ground - in fact fails, theory stands to be revised. Anyone develop a self-levitating wrench yet?
  

• Paradigm
  A system of developing theory, conducting experiments, and communicating results to people who care in a way they can understand. Also standard are social institutions designed to maintain a given paradigm, something extremely useful until planning horizons conflict with a need to rapidly adapt in a crisis. Interest bias also creeps in, the day to day work of a scientist creating incentives to work with known tools rather than adopt or invent new ones.
  

• Information
  Any signal deemed of relevance by transmitter or receiver in an act of communication. The content of the transmission remains independent of the channel, though bias introduced by random or directed noise will affect it. Though most widely used in the context of digitial communications, humans are utterly dependent on using signals to exchange information. Even body language is a potential channel: so is the choice to respond to signals at all.
  

• Communication
  The physical act of exchanging information in the material world. No idea, however brilliant, has the slightest bit of relevance if it cannot be effectively communicated to a willing audience. The subjective nature of human perspective makes this an infinitely more complex affair than most people consciously realize. And for a good reason: ordinary life is impossible if everyone is constantly questioning who they are and the nature of existence. The ability to communicate evolved for a reason: the capability allows for powerful forms of adaptation. But it takes place as a constant learning loop.

  A diagram to help visualize, derived from Claude Shannon’s formulation:

  

  Cybernetic communication loop. 0 and 1 in a human system must also interpret the context of the message. Noise interferes with transmissions. There is always room for error.

• Adaptation
  As biological systems that must maintain their metabolism to carry out acts of communication, humans are subject to the laws of evolution. These force all forms of organization to alter how they function over time or perish. Pressures from the environment shape individuals even before birth: lack of nutrition and healthcare will strongly impact the development of cognitive and physical potential. Adaptation is an eternal dialog between organism and environment, with evolutionary pressures determining what genes future generations have to work with. Some limited epigenetic inheritance is also proving increasingly likely, creating another channel of organism-level adaptation. As a social species, humans are born with an innate tendency to cooperate because this offsets the vulnerabilities inherent in our life cycle.
  

• Evolution
  Often misunderstood, evolution is not an active process any more than gravity: it’s pervasive and ongoing, meaning only that nothing stays the same. Evolution as a scientific theory simply explains why certain forms of life - and other systems - persist and why others disappear based on their inherent capacity to adapt. Nothing evolves to be anything: the frequency of certain genes appearing in a population goes up as genetic patterns which are less adaptive reproduce with less success after an environmental shift. Genes are merely biological information reproduced across generations.
  

• Reproduction
  Life is best defined by the capacity to physically self-reproduce: machines, so far, can’t replicate themselves from a basic set of ingredients, like DNA. Everything alive gets that way through reproduction, success determined by how fit novel mutations prove when exposed to the environment. In human systems, reproduction is not strictly physical: ideas and narratives also reproduce in the forms of memes and tropes, even entire storylines, which impact the behavior of future generations. Language is a self-reproducing cognitive system created to ease information exchange between individuals who share the code, so to speak. This implies association, even if it’s only a function of accidental proximity.

• Adaptive Cycle
  Reproduction and adaptation are closely linked, both tied to the same eternal four-phase cycle driven by shifts in the environment that impact the availability of scarce resources. In the Spring phase, analogous to what happens in temperate climes during the season that lends its name, increased resource flows lead to rapid growth. Summer sees a leveling off, and Autumn a decline that terminates in the relative quiet of Winter. Generally speaking, all systems composed of independent agents follow this pattern, though each time around the loop there is the possibility of a serious change of trajectory. This adaptive cycle is the engine of change in most dynamic systems. Fitness in evolutionary terms can only be defined with respect to particular environmental conditions, hence it making so little sense to say that something evolved to do something. This forgets survivor bias.

  
  A couple diagrams to help envision this concept.

  

  Not mine

  

  The above collapsed into a 2D representation of the two key variables. Resilience is the dependent variable, high in moments where the rate of change is slow, low when they’re fast.

  Boundary Conditions

  Thresholds, which if crossed, lead to irreversible consequences: a particular system is so strongly affected during a collapse that it loses coherent and falls into a new standard mode of operation. Think of a thriving forest turning to desert after a major climate shift. The rules that govern an emergent system are always in flux. Social systems are underwritten by core assumptions that, when proven faulty, drive a natural hunt for other hidden vulnerabilities. A broader loss of faith in the status quo leads to demand for alternative solutions. That in turn drives a further collapse, forcing a scramble that can reconfigure the system as a whole. This is what ancient Greeks termed Apocalypse, their counterparts in Northern Europe Ragnarök. Plenty of other cultures have their own metaphor describing the same pattern: the point of them all is the inevitability of change, death and life bound together.

• Rigidity and Poverty Traps
  Especially in systems containing humans, there is always a danger of failing to adapt at all. Adaptive systems face two natural traps, one often leading to the other. The first is a rigidity trap, where facing collapse and possible radical change powerful agents work to prevent it from happening by cannibalizing whatever resources they can. All they accomplish is to delay the inevitable, but those able to use the time to protect their interests may survive at the expense of others, so the incentive to hold out hope past the point of wisdom remains. Often, so many resources are consumed trying to hold back the fall that the prospects of the spring to follow are badly limited. This poverty trap can wind up reproducing itself until the system dissolves.
  

• Frames of Reference

  There are other kinds of adaptive systems than ones involving humans, of course, but as Rogue Systems Recon is all about the science of war, human affairs are the primary concern. It’s people who choose to use what power they have for whatever purpose, after all. One of the most important insights of any functioning systems paradigm is that perspective is everything if you want to understand human behavior. Einstein’s concept that most revolutionized physics was the brilliant insight required to conceive of a universe where reality looks different depending on where you stand. The same is true in social affairs. That’s the source of dynamism in every community, and why even language changes with time.
  

• Scale
  Another extremely important and often misunderstood concept in science is that of scale. Every system, whatever its size or nature, exists in the real world and has real impacts at a particular scale. Scale level, technically, but since almost nobody says it that way, I won’t press the issue (hazard of studying geography at a doctoral level is a tendency towards pedantry when it comes to spatial matters). By this, I mean the simple fact of processes and patterns occurring across kilometers, meters, millimeters, nanometers, and so on. One of the toughest things about working with systems theory is that its inherent abstractness can be off-putting. But often forgotten is the power of chaining all analysis to the natural levels on a simple distance scale. In military affairs, this is the basic cause of organizing people in fire teams, squads, platoons, companies, battalions, and all the rest.

Social Sciences: Warring Paradigms

Put these together, and you’ve assembled the necessary ingredients for looking at human organization in a very different way than has been standard since the modern social sciences were first defined. Most fields sadly remain trapped in a Newtonian paradigm, applying linear solutions to problems that can only be effectively understood using a systems approach. In most forms of management, if you can’t intervene at the decisive point, you have to resort to sheer force, which is rarely efficient.

A deeply abiding cultural reluctance to address serious flaws in the classical western approach to social science has persisted, especially in the United States, because of warped academic incentives that keep outdated and dangerous ideas in circulation. A postmodern paradigm has been embraced by nearly every field that directly studies humans. It actively abandons any attempt at comprehensive understanding in favor of elevating the aesthetics of prominent professors in a few select departments.

They are largely the same people who maintain the predatory culture of American academia that saps it of innovative talent, rendering the academy a mere church for ordaining bureaucrats who need to be incapable of true critical thought. Their job is to uphold the status quo forever, and they are lost when faced with complex circumstances. While harder sciences are less impacted, they are rarely allowed to comment on matters outside their designated sphere thanks to the way academic disciplines silo themselves to escape accountability.

The situation is not new. Thomas Kuhn referred to it extensively in his famous book about shifting scientific paradigms. “Science advances over the graves of scientists” indeed.

However, the state of the world these days demands rapid adaptation and new approaches. All around is evidence that the world anyone old enough to read this in 2024 has known is dying fast. Those who wait around for established institutions to save the day are apt to find themselves in the same situation too many passengers of the doomed Titanic faced.

There is nothing magical, mystical, or even controversial about the systems paradigm I employ. I built it while working on a doctorate I finally realized that I didn’t need. I’ve used it to understand and correctly forecast important developments around the world over the past few years, and with some training and practice, anyone else can too. At the very least, systems thinking tends to produce less catastrophic results than the linear style of thought taught to most students. It’s worth gaining basic familiarity.

Systems are at the very heart of the digital revolution - the fact that AI can now do a decent job of replicating generic human writing is merely a reminder of how repetitive most day to day tasks are. Likewise, quite a few of the social rituals that are widely assumed to be important are in fact becoming maladaptive, something it is only possible to perceive if you step back and evaluate the levels above and below the problem presently vexing you.

Frame of reference, though widely adopted in physics, remains controversial when applied to human perspectives. Yet it is the missing link that allows for the destruction of profitless divides that beset contemporary academic scholarship.

Social Systems: Emergent Levels

Ultimately, in the broadest sense, the systems paradigm I work with aims to demonstrate why change happens, when, and the form it takes. The goal is to generate a set of achievable futures and identify critical factors that must align to make one or another possible.

Most efforts at social forecasting are crippled by a traditional view of the world as composed of self-aware, strictly rational individuals. The life cycle of any given person makes this model unrealistic, as there are large portions of every individual’s life where their survival depends on other people. Bonds of trust and norms of reciprocity rooted in mutual exchange of information and services enable the sort of life most people would describe as such. Family, community, and broader social pressures, even global, all shape an individual’s behavior as strongly as their rational sense of what is good for themselves.

It is extremely difficult to bound individual behavior beyond stating that people seek survival and prosperity. Even those who come to believe that death for a cause is preferable to continued life are in some sense claiming a stake in the future through their blood sacrifice. In truth, life is limited for us all, and every moment of work functions as our own sacrifice of vital essence to the gods of the ancestors.

To understand people, it is necessary to understand that as an organism is composed of organs, so are individual minds a composite. Every person alive is in some way limited by what their minds and bodies can accomplish, with communication that enables cooperation allowing for groups to take advantage of emergent effects to improve the survival of all members.

Communication enables information exchange, which allows an individual to offset their limited personal frame of reference. The price is conformity to rules set by the group, whatever its size. Fortunately group membership is not necessarily exclusive - both class and race based analysis are flawed whenever they assume that identities are permanent. People can and frequently do code-shift as they associate with different groups.

Every individual mind is best seen as its own cognitive system that seeks to reproduce itself through constantly satisfying different needs. Maslow’s hierarchy is a useful summary, with certain needs being more fundamental in survival terms and bound to drive decisions if unmet.

Anyone who questions whether mind can defeat matter is free to go without water for as long as they are able. By day three, if not sooner, the body will compel the mind to seek what it craves by any means necessary - only incidents of self-sacrifice for a family member or close comrade defy this rule.

Similarly, groups of any size generate their own set of needs that are more or less a composite of everything their members desire. Within groups there are always rules about whose preferences predominate and when, with individuals seeking to gain prominence among their peers to secure their place.

This may sound grasping and materialist, but it’s really not: material reciprocity underpins all human interactions. The strongest divide between associations that matter to individuals in a crisis and those they swiftly shed cuts across the willingness to reciprocate for past support. This is the source of trust.

The strength of bonds between humans and groups is always affected by proximity. There is always history, too, a pattern of prior interactions that shape how everyone down the line views the relationship. That’s another reason why resolving conflicts is so difficult: perception matters, and past slights often beg to be avenged when a relationship has turned fractious anyway.

Proximity bias lends itself to the spatial hierarchy of association that defines broader society. Individuals group together in households, with households clustering in communities. Many communities will eventually come into contact through various means, not least among them trade, generating a need for institutions to smooth interactions. Though cooperation has many benefits, it also creates a risk of exploitation.

The incredible array of customs, norms, and speech that you’ll find as you move across the globe - or even a small region, sometimes - should come as little surprise when you think about how swiftly dialects will form even in a fairly small area, Britain being the classic example in the English-speaking world. To a certain degree, few more violent assaults on liberty have ever been devised than the written word, because it encourages a perception of languages as being fixed for all time. Yet if you go back just a couple centuries, English-speakers of today find their grandparents’ words ever harder to understand without deliberate study.

Complex society is an emergent construct that stems from the interaction of multiple distinct cultural ways on some landscape. A global society takes place at an even higher scale level, encompassing the whole in totality. Everyone interacts, and signals are exchanged. Markets emerge from interactions, as does politics.

Yet all human concerns take place on only a limited subset of the grand cosmic scale. Because it’s a good reminder of one’s own place in the cosmos, here’s a simple telescoping description of the cosmic system from base elements on up, divided into natural levels. Each emerges from the one prior, and at every level different scientific concerns express.

Natural Scale Levels Of The Cosmos

• Subatomic
  The cosmic soup of fundamental forces and particles that make it so that matter congeals into protons, neutrons, and electrons. Theoretical perspectives differ on why things are this way, and how gravity happens, but the Standard Model is default.
  

• Atomic
  Fundamental level of what we call matter, cosmic energy captured and congealed in tiny particles that have mass, charge, and other defined traits. Periodic table of elements is your defining image here. What electrons do is the big question that controls the bonds atoms form.
  

• Molecular
  Atoms assembled into larger structures that take on their own character. Substances like water are the foundation of living cells, while carbon is common in the structure of all kinds of things because of its handy quadrivalent bonding habit.
  

• Biomolecular
  DNA-land, a level where thousands of organic molecules interact in their peculiar ways to create the tiny proteins and other biological machinery that make life possible. Often, it’s their precise shape that matters - proteins fold.
  

• Cellular
  Somewhere along the line, nature managed to get complex molecules to fold back on themselves to form a distinct membrane that repels water. Inside, a distinct system could sustain itself in a distinct mode of operations, importing some molecules and exporting others.
  

• Organism
  When lots and lots of cells are organized by evolutionary processes into something coherent on an even larger level, you’ve got an organism - or, if it’s integrated as a distinct component in an even larger whole, an organ. These are what make complex life possible - but also impose certain limits.
  

• Individual
  What you and I experience as being… you and me. Philosophers have tried to pin down this ineffable sensation, but it’s probably part of the mystery of life, a function of being a kind of emergent system embedded in others. Assemble cooperating organs into a form capable of reproducing itself as a whole, and you’ve got a new level of life. If it has an advanced brain of the right kind, it will seek to communicate and cooperate while maintaining a distinct sense of self.
  

• Kin
  There aren’t a lot of creatures that can complete their life cycle independently, and family is a critical force in the lives of humans and many other species. This level is usually intimately connected with individual survival, family being ultimately a kind of insurance policy backed by close bonds.
  

• Community
  An individual family can be as vulnerable as any single person, and larger groups can accomplish more than smaller ones provided communication works. Social bonds tend to be tight, but not universally so, and rules become more abstract. Power inequality becomes a bigger issue once you get to this level, because proximity matters.
  

• Tribe
  Communities naturally enter into contact for the same reason that individuals and families do. Though the bonds are looser and relationships more speculative, regional associations have been powerful throughout history. And a fount of exploitation, in all too many cases. Still, tribes will often outlast a society they were long part of.
  

• Society
  At the level of an entire society, shared values become highly abstracted, often expressed on a regional basis if the society covers a large area. Differences in interpretation of values are common. Historically the ease of abusing claimed common values has led to a tendency for societies to become self-destructive. This is again tied to the distance between the society level and the individual or community.
  

• World
  The entirety of humanity and all the planetary systems it relies on to survive. At this level, over time whole social paradigms emerge and fade, though most western social science adopts a self-centered frame of reference that denies the legitimacy of other ways. This leads to a dangerous blindness. Even the World level is subject to the adaptive cycle, and dramatic change, if component parts collapse.
  

• Stellar
  Earth is itself just a speck of blue and green amid the splendor of a far broader cosmos, with the solar system being the natural level that makes Earth habitable for living things in the first place. At least for another billion years or so, probably - the sun’s fuel won’t last forever, and living on Mars won’t save anyone when that day comes.
  

• Galactic
  Beyond our solar system there are, of course, millions of others. Many host exoplanets, suggesting that the natural systems that lead to the development of planets like Earth are widespread. Good luck getting to them in a single human lifetime, though. My science fiction explores social systems at this scale level.
  

• Universe
  Millions of separate galaxies interact to make up the visible universe, which is only a fraction of all that is known to exist. Galaxies collide and merge and cluster together on massive scales the human mind can scarcely conceive. Precisely why is not fully understood.
  

• Cosmic
  Just like the question of what makes the fundamental level possible, the one of what a level of reality higher than our particular universe might look like is probably unknowable in this life. Scale may well be infinite, or perhaps it does something weird, like give rise to fundamental forces after somehow bending back in on itself thanks to a cosmic geometry my mind certainly can’t fathom. Trouble is, science is limited when it comes to what it lacks independent information to evaluate. When you hit the divine level, any theory goes because the divine can, in theory, hide its true effects. Open season for theology types. I like to plug science into mythology.

It can get positively bewildering to think about how complex the cosmos truly is. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, one of the worst tortures imaginable is said to be a device that shows the victim exactly where they stand amid the infinite cosmos. This truth was enough to drive anyone mad. The power of systems theory and science is that they can link any process in a chain from one end to the other. Systems fiction, which I guess my sci-fi is, can go even farther. Presume consistent rules, and some intriguing stories are possible.

On Military Systems

Because this systems paradigm handles military matters as a subset of social science, here’s a brief overview of some key concepts in military systems. Most people don’t get an education in basic military science, so hopefully this will help demystify some of what I write about when it comes to the Ukraine War.

The basic objective in any kind of fight is to impose your will on your opponent. You aim to coerce them into modifying their behavior. Ideally they can be convinced, but in the last resort superior force is required. Coordinating and applying this power is the task of military forces everywhere. The specific expression of the thing varies depending on many variables, chief among them terrain.

There are many forms of power, but however they manifest, all involve exerting control over space. Sufficient demonstration of this control will force opponents to alter their behavior, but they can be expected to adapt under pressure and fight back in creative, at times unpredictable ways.

As a human organization, every military force of any size is a social system driven by information and incentives. Teams are motivated to survive first and accomplish their mission second. The ideal is to create a self-aware, highly adaptive organism capable of reorganizing itself on the fly to cope with changes in the environment. Throughout history, different methods of organization have been tried, but all aim to achieve the same effect: efficient coordination of large-scale human action.

A natural hierarchy of scale not unlike that of nature defines the levels at which organization takes place. Section, squad, platoon, company - all the way up to the top, the point of the structure is to ensure that information and resources flow smoothly. The specific arrangements depend on the natural scale at which combat operations take place, something highly determined by technology. Those closest to the action have the best information about where resources are needed, but only those with sufficient distance from it can apply strategy to guide battlefield acts. The military organism that is quicker and more efficient at managing this process will, all things being equal, tend to fight better.

Thanks to the universal physical challenges involved in controlling space, certain key factors drive every fight, no matter the context. Throughout history soldiers have arranged themselves in lines, ideally ones that stretch between two impassible barriers. This reduces the complexity each individual has to cope with - it’s a lot simpler to put up a fight if the enemy is only coming at you from the front. That’s why they’re called fronts, and why the length of front a team of whatever size has to cover is very important.

Flanking is the fundamental tactic that every armed force attempts at every level it can, team to army group. If you can flank the target from two sides, that’s even better. Whether attacking or defending (and defending is really just attacking backward), you always want to complicate the enemy’s life. Identifying and exploiting points of asymmetry is essential, because the fewer friendly casualties, the better.

Surrounding a target is also powerful, because it cuts the area and anyone in it off from supplies. All fighting is an application of energy, which is always scarce in some regard. If enough control is exerted over an area that opposing forces can’t supply any teams they send into it, it becomes a useful buffer, easily occupied at need.

However, caution is warranted even when an enemy is surrounded. Leaving a narrow avenue of retreat is often wise, as the enemy is apt to fight to the death when they might otherwise flee. More importantly, an enemy seeking to break out has multiple directions to choose from, giving them an element of surprise. An attempted encirclement can swiftly turn around on the attacker.

Everything in warfare builds up from the simple requirement to sustain fighting teams wherever they need to be. Modern warfare differs from ancient mainly in the amount of territory the average soldier can control if properly supported. Rifles, grenade launchers, and portable surface to air missiles can give even a four-person team the ability to at least impede enemy activity out to a couple kilometers. Drones are extending this to ten or even twenty.

All of the diverse tools of destruction used in modern war are all, in the end, means to an end. To sustain combat power where it needs to be to prevent the enemy from taking over things you care about, teams with sufficient material and morale have to be constantly sustained on the front lines. Material resources are sustained through logistics, research, and production; morale through leadership, training, and organization.

The architecture of any defense organization evolves, like any organism determined to survive is bound to. It must develop doctrine to create a common working language, cultivate leadership to ensure effective management, and obtain the right equipment to give personnel in contact with the enemy the best possible survival odds. But the ultimate proof of its potential is the battlefield, where chaos and uncertainty are bound to upend the best laid plans.

In general, the organism that can most effectively manage its energy at every level survives. Reproducing proven practices is as important as adapting in the first place. That’s why military professionals study history - sadly, only a small fraction of historical work applies a systems-based view of the subject. That which does tends to be incredibly powerful.

Military affairs attracts jargon like roadkill does flies, so I think it’s worthwhile to offer a quick rundown of what many common terms used in military analysis mean. Journalists and pundits commonly abuse them, so here too it’s worth providing a brief glossary.

• Front
  Space near and usually facing the enemy. Context varies, as the term is both specific, applying to a distinct geographic area, but also in a global sense.
  

• Flank
  The side of any armed group’s position, which always wants to orient towards the front for safety. Being flanked means being attacked from the side, and isn’t fun.
  

• Rear
  As a cell’s outer walls form a distinct membrane, so does the front create a safer zone where the enemy usually needs help or special tools to attack. Bad guys here is very bad.
  

• Strategy
  A scientific theory of action leading to a desired outcome. Hope is never a strategy. Applies at any level, even tactical.
  

• Operations
  The actual actions taken in pursuit of a strategy, and all that goes into making possible. Logistics are key. Also applies at any scale.
  

• Tactics
  Techniques and tricks developed to solve problems that crop up during operations. Some are widely adopted, even universally drilled - like flanking. Scale-independent.
  

• Strategic Level
  Where big decisions about political objectives and operational goals are made and managed. Geostrategy encompasses the entire world and one’s own place in it.
  

• Operational Level
  The space where all the planning and management for operations is handled. Mostly run by experienced professionals, in smart organizations.
  

• Tactical Level
  What officers call everything happening at the actual front. It feels pretty universal when you’re on a fire team, though.
  

• Maneuver Warfare
  Fighting that seeks to swiftly flank targets and cut off their supplies. Goal is to breach the cellular membrane and exploit the chaos that ensues.
  

• Attrition Warfare

  Fighting that aims to impose an asymmetric loss ratio until the enemy is weakened sufficiently to support a breakthrough. A transition to maneuver follows.
  

• Asymmetric Warfare
  Fighting that aims to exploit weaknesses that emerge in the enemy’s organization over time, raising the costs of resistance. All combat aims to exploit asymmetry, but a massive disparity in resources can make this optimal for one party globally.
  

• Combined Arms Warfare
  Though all combat integrates different kinds of technology on the battlefield, what is referred to as Combined Arms Warfare goes further, implicitly or even explicitly modeling a fighting force as an organism. Different specialties integrate at the lowest possible level manageable to give front line troops maximum flexibility.
  

• Domains of Warfare
  The channels available to apply combat power to the enemy, usually tied to a portion of the physical landscape. Land, sea, and air are the three primary groupings, with different terrain types - open, mountain, forest, urban - or proximity to land - low/high altitude, littoral/ocean - almost as important. Other newer domains include electromagnetic, information, space, and network.

• Military System
  A paradigm for assembling the above ingredients to achieve battlefield aims. Different cultures tend to create recipes that echo, yet are drawn from distinct logics.

Final Note

This is obviously incomplete and will likely require revision down the line. But as far as a basic intro to systems lingo and how I apply key concepts, I hope it serves.

Changelog

1. (12/2024) The 1.0 version of the post. Revisions to follow.