As the Iran campaign grinds into its third month, with unpredictable reactions and uncontrollable consequences pushing the conflict toward open‑ended escalation — a prolonged war — the contrast with January’s swift capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro could not be starker.
Yet the two interventions are by the same military and the same commander-in-chief. What explains the difference?
The contrast between the two campaigns points to a deeper issue. War has long been understood as having uncertain outcomes. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, any war unfolds in a “fog” where much remains unknown and therefore cannot be controlled. Yet military campaigns are still planned as rational and deliberate undertakings, utilizing strategies and tactics to manage or overcome this uncertainty and bring about the intended outcome: victory on the battlefield.
Friedrich Hayek offers a fundamental and revealing critique of the planning mindset that permeates the military and its campaigns. His work on knowledge in society as not given to a single mind, but dispersed across individuals, puts the very framework of top-down planning in question. War, as the coercive imposition of one centralized rule over another, suffers from this limitation.
Although Hayek developed this insight in the context of markets, it applies equally to war. Military campaigns seek to impose a single will, yet their success depends on navigating and overcoming the dispersed knowledge embedded in the societies they confront — and therefore the varied and unpredictable responses on the battlefield and beyond. Because the goal is to overtake and establish control over the enemy, war becomes a central planning problem.
Hayek’s insight is that much of what matters is knowledge of the “particular circumstances of time and place.” This knowledge is largely tacit, what Michael Polanyi described as knowing more than we can tell. Because it is practical and experience-based, it cannot be centralized or fully communicated.
The reason the knowledge gap is not merely a complication but a fundamental barrier lies in the nature of feedback. Hayek observed that markets correct poor planning through price signals, which generate decentralized, immediate responses that reveal planners’ errors.
War lacks an equivalent mechanism. As James Scott argued, by the time the knowledge gap becomes apparent, the intervention has already altered the society in which it is embedded. New, irreversible facts are created on the ground. In Iran, each month of campaigning generates reactions that no prior intelligence service could have anticipated, and each reaction reshapes the terrain for what comes next. The planner is initially ignorant, lacking the full knowledge necessary to make rational decisions, and it is the very act of planning that exacerbates this ignorance.
Even taking uncertainty into account does not solve it. Donald Rumsfeld’s distinction between “known and unknown unknowns” acknowledges uncertainty, but does not dispel it. However, Hayek’s point explains that the issue is not simply that some data are missing, but rather that the necessary knowledge found in the cultural, historical, and social spheres is not of the kind that can be compiled, centralized, or incorporated into a plan.
The swift resolution of the Venezuelan conflict and Iran’s prolonged involvement illustrate this well. Maduro represented a center of concentrated power — one man in a specific and well-defined position — and his removal required knowledge that intelligence could approximate. Iran, by contrast, is different: the task is broader and less well defined. Success hinges not only on military might, but also on the responses of a society deeply rooted in distinct cultural, historical, and religious dynamics. Although there is opposition to the regime, would it rise in support of a foreign intervention, remain passive and silent, or even side with the state in resisting it? Even the most sophisticated intelligence cannot reliably predict such outcomes, because the relevant knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals.
The danger is not that war is irrational, but that it is treated as if it can be made rational and predictable. This illusion not only justifies action without sufficient knowledge but also underlies the belief that societies can be reconstructed from the top down after conflict. War is not only a matter of military might and technology, but also of human response.
Hayek’s insight thus invites skepticism toward the idea of rational war. Outcomes depend on dispersed and tacit knowledge that no planner can fully access or control. War is therefore not only uncertain, as Clausewitz argued, but constrained by deeper epistemological limits.
Planning cannot overcome this limitation. As President Eisenhower put it, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
