The language of business is the language of dreams but the language of war is the language of
nightmare made real. Yet business dreams of driverless cars on intelligent roads and of other
real-time critical systems under the control of algorithmic entities have much of war about
them. Such systems including military institutions at the tactical operational and strategic
scales act on rapidly-shifting roadway topologies whose 'traffic rules' can rapidly change.
War is never without both casualty and collateral damage and realtime critical systems of any
nature will inevitably partake of fog-of-war and frictional challenges almost exactly similar
to those that have made warfare intractable for modern states. Into the world of Carl von
Clausewitz John Boyd Mao Tse-Tung Vo Nguyen Giap and Genghis Khan come the brash
bright-eyed techies of Alphabet Microsoft Amazon and Uber who forthrightly step in where a
phalanx of angels has not feared to tread but treaded badly indeed. In this book we use
cutting-edge tools from information and control theories to examine canonical and idiosyncratic
failure modes of real-time cognitive systems facing fog-of-war and frictional constraints. In
sum nobody ever navigates or can navigate the landscapes of Carl von Clausewitz unscathed.
