J.C. Wylie's Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967) is widelyrecognized as a foundational text in strategic theory, yet its four core assumptions —concerning the inevitability of war, the aim of control, the unpredictability of war'spattern, and the decisive role of the individual combatant — have never beenformally developed. This paper demonstrates that these four assumptions are notindependent experiential maxims but structural properties of a single dynamicalphenomenon: cascading phase transitions, as described by the Landau-Stuartequation. Assumption 1 corresponds to the inevitability of phase transitions whenaccumulated instability exceeds a critical threshold. Assumption 2 corresponds toprobabilistic control via reshaping of the potential landscape — the only form ofcontrol structurally available in a system undergoing cascading reconstitution.Assumption 3 corresponds to the compounding unpredictability produced bysuccessive phase transitions, each of which reconstitutes the system's topology.Assumption 4 corresponds to the structural necessity that local actors at eachbifurcation point collapse the probability distribution into a specific outcome. Thereformulation reveals a latent causal chain linking Assumptions 2 through 4: controlis probabilistic (2) because cascading transitions render deterministic predictionimpossible (3), and probability is collapsed into actuality by local actors at eachbifurcation (4). This chain, invisible when the assumptions are read as independentpostulates, resolves the implicit tension between control and unpredictability inWylie's theory. The paper further reinterprets Wylie's concept of "power" as asystem's stored instability potential near criticality, and shows that thesequential/cumulative strategy distinction follows as a direct consequence of thephase transition framework. Implications for strategic analysis include themathematical tractability of attractor control as an optimization problem and thepossibility of early warning through order parameter monitoring for critical slowingdown signatures.
Franny Philos Sophia (Sat,) studied this question.