The article doesn't say that no one is scheming, just that what starts as a plan devolves into a mess of reaction and counter reaction. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and all that.

Schemes are occasionally successful, but that is because the schemer either got lucky and everyone reacted the way they wanted, or because the scheme was incredibly simple.

What the article is talking about is the mythical scheming that involves correctly predicting the behavior and reactions of the opposition through multiple iterations of attack and counter attack--the hypothetical chess master who can see 5 moves ahead.

The systems we are dealing with are generally just too complex for that.

> No battle plan survives contact with the enemy

I always (as a Vet) thought this was a misnomer - it's often best described as "no battle plan survives contact with reality" - reality being the new info you get that you didn't get or couldn't have gotten.

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -- Mike Tyson

It's also a great quote, but it's a different one. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" is more like you get punched as much and in a way that you didn't expect, even if you planned to get punched. Tyson's saying "When you get punched the sensation is so unexpected that your brain stops working for some time". The 'counter' to the changing environment quote is to be flexible from the beginning. The 'counter' to Tyson's situation is to train so much, that your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain doesn't.

> your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain doesn't

Indeed, it is only when you encounter an actual combat situation that you understand why the karate elders insist on so many thousand mindless repetitions of basic movements back & forth: even though you have no time to think (and even if you did it would do no good because combat stress reduces your intellectual capacity by 80%), it instantly executes spontaneously and afterwards you find yourself thinking "wow - I did that ?". Brutal repetitive training that focuses on the basics: it works.

I feel like the there is something similar at play in long distance running. By repeating the same motion a lot, your nervous system probably works out the most efficient pathways to activate and can work without your conscious mind getting too involved.

This "chess master who can see 5 moves ahead" definition of scheming is fiction. Every software developer knows: The more complex the more fragile.

Great schemes are simple. It means looking for opportunities where you cannot lose. More generally, either you win or your opponent loses or both. You can try to influence things to produce such situations, but in general you need some luck and/or time. You can actively search for opportunities of disruption or work on some hard stuff for decades.

Thanks for the link. Props to Kucinich for not being a political opportunist like so many others and for pointing out the frightening context of the Flynn leak.

The frightening context that the White House belongs to Putin? I find that pretty frightening, personally.

Putin happens to be someone who is good at scheming. This is because he is largely unfettered by politics, and he sticks to fairly simple goals like "destabilize the enemy".

There appears to be a popular confluence of high-discount-rate political leaders nowadays. Wonder if MAD will eventually be outmoded by instant & retaliation-disabling schemes.

Bert the turtle was very alert..

The truth is somewhat in between. In war you have to make fewer screwups than your enemy, or if you can't then you need a good feedback system so you can recover more quickly.