Edward Luttwak mentions many times throughout his work that in terms of military strategy, efficiency is undesirable. It was a wild a novel thought to consider that it was better to be inefficient. Weren’t we always trying to become more efficient?
It only becomes evident when thinking it through from the perspective of an adversary who is eager to harm you.
The examples goes: it’s one thing building a bridge efficiently over a river, but the river is not trying to stop you building the bridge. Business have competition but they don’t have adversaries trying to bomb them or harm them.
Most business try to become more efficient:
- economies of scale,
- just-in-time logistics,
- reusability of components,
- reduction of model types,
- only use as many people as needed,
- centralisation of resources,
- take fastest path …
But all of these efficient things are ideal targets for an adversary.
If the resources are all in one place: great, let’s bomb that. If all the missiles are the same type – great: once we’ve hacked one, we’ve hacked them all, and so on.
The inefficient approach is:
- keep stock in different places,
- take the difficult path (better: take a route where there is no path),
- have lots of different model types,
- extra personnel,
- increase variation,
In short, it’s about increasing redundancy. But there’s always a trade-off between what can be afforded in terms of redundancy, and what can be optimised within the system towards its objective.