I want to share a reading recommendation with you all: Warfighting. This is not a manual but rather a philosophy for decision making under uncertainty.
h/t to Verdad Capital for the link in this excellent post (actually a newsletter piece), which opines:
I also learned at Quantico that complex linear planning fails in warfare because the profession involves “the shock of two hostile bodies in collision, not the action of a living power upon an inanimate mass,” as Clausewitz reminds us. In the military-industrial exuberance of the post–Cold War decades, we invested heavily in exotic platforms such as drones, cyber capabilities, and billion-dollar strike fighters. Our low-tech but moderately street-savvy opponents in this millennium decided to fight us precisely where and how these assets were near useless. With few exceptions, the most useful equipment for this environment came from the Vietnam era and the most enduring lessons from the time of the Spartans.
Financial markets, made up of people competing for an edge, are precisely the type of environment designed to bedevil static planning. The financial environment is one where valuation multiples persistently mean revert, where income statement growth is not persistent or predictable, where GDP growth does not correlate with equity returns, where market share and moats do not lead to competitive advantage or price return.
So what are we to do in such an environment where outcomes are determined not so much by the very little we can foresee but by what might unexpectedly happen relative to the expectations embedded in the price at which the security is bought? How would we affirmatively strategize and operate differently as investors if all of our most cherished and marketed crystal balls for forecasting price returns are shattered? How should we operate amidst the chaos without operating chaotically?
In Afghanistan, I found that the most consequential assets on our side were the most robust and persistent throughout the history of warfare. An asymmetric but intelligent adversary had refused to engage us on any terms but those where war devolved to a competition of wills, where discipline, resolve, adaptability, and habituated combat-arms tactics dictated the victor, not drones or robot pack mules. Our own persistent behavioral biases were our worst enemy.
This is precisely why I am so interested in things like tail hedging. And lest you be tempted to write this off as interdisciplinary silliness, consider for a moment that life itself can be viewed as an extended exercise in decision making under uncertainty.
UPDATE: After reading and reflecting on this, it seems clear to me it is essentially providing a mental model for what war is and how it is conducted.
At first glance, war seems a simple clash of interests. On closer examination, it reveals its complexity and takes shape as one of the most demanding and trying of human endeavors. War is an extreme test of will. Friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, and danger are its essential features. War displays broad patterns that can be represented as probabilities, yet it remains fundamentally unpredictable. Each episode is the unique product of myriad moral, mental, and physical forces.
Individual causes and their effects can rarely be isolated. Minor actions and random incidents can have disproportionately large—even decisive—effects. While dependent on the laws of science and the intuition and creativity of art, war takes its fundamental character from the dynamic of human interaction.
Also this bit:
War is an extension of both policy and politics with the addition of military force. Policy and politics are related but not synonymous, and it is important to understand war in both contexts. Politics refers to the distribution of power through dynamic interaction, both cooperative and competitive, while policy refers to the conscious objectives established within the political process. The policy aims that are the motive for any group in war should also be the foremost determinants of its conduct. The single most important thought to understand about our theory is that war must serve policy.