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> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then)

> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US. The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis. The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years. Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians. Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force. I could keep going...

drostie 14y ago
The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.") Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.") In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.

drostie 14y ago

The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.") Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.") In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.

Androsynth 14y ago
The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.