Military practitioners and thinkers have long recognized that battle is a unique enterprise subject to its own bizarre dynamics and logic. Indeed, the logic of battle frequently seems to be intrinsically paradoxical. The great historian of strategy, Edward Luttwak, favors the simple example of an army choosing between two roads to advance towards an objective - one paved and direct, the other circuitous and muddy. As Luttwak puts it, “only in the paradoxical realm of strategy would the choice arise at all, because it is only in war that a bad road can be good precisely because it is bad.” The benefit of taking the bad road, of course, may lie in the fact that the enemy is unlikely to expect it, thus allowing the advancing force to circumvent the enemy’s defenses.

Let us begin at the beginning. Everybody dreads when authors define their terms, but I think in this case it is truly apropos. Let us define Battle as follows: organized groups of men deploying armed force against each other for the purpose of destroying the other’s ability to offer armed resistance. This purpose, of course, can be achieved by killing the enemy, capturing them, driving them from the field, or breaking their ability to resist by destroying their will to fight.

When we say “organized groups of men”, we mean this in only the crudest sense of differentiating friend from foe. No doubt, the most archaic battles, fought as mankind first climbed out of hunter gatherer life into the first forms of political organization, consisted of little more than loosely organized mobs - but the political form, the identification of “us” and “them” with some political issue at stake, is what makes a battle a battle, rather than crude, animalistic violence.

The crudest and most basic form of battle would consist of two groups of men of equal size and armed with equivalent weaponry hacking at each other in a disorganized melee. This sort of scene is instructive - imagining this as the most primitive form of battle, we can see that neither side holds any advantage or leverage. The outcome of the battle would simply be the compounded result of numerous close order fights between similarly armed men, fighting one on one. Writ large, the result of such a battle would be almost entirely up to chance - the leader has nothing to do but pray for the best.