Uncertain Victory: Information Management and Military Power

War, as Clausewitz reminds us, is fought in the domain of uncertainty. Human nature, friction, and chance combine to create a fog that shrouds both friendly and enemy activities. Accordingly, effective warfighting is as much a product of information gathering and processing as deliverance of kinetic energy. Existing theories of military power, however, privilege the latter over the former. This paper seeks to address this imbalance and push forward scholarly understandings of martial capability by advancing a new framework for thinking about the way in which militaries’ capacities to manage uncertainty condition their abilities to generate combat power. The manner in which militaries organize their command and control structures is identified as a key factor in the management of uncertainty, and its role in facilitating both information management and the generation of martial strength is theorized. The command structure theory advanced is provisionally assessed through an examination of a key battle in the Russo-Japanese War—an engagement that Japan won but, by all conventional measures of military power, it should have lost. The paper concludes with a discussion of open questions raised by the claim as well as scholarly and policy implications.