Centralization and Decentralization
According to de Landa, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to centralize command and control of each event on the battlefield, and get "human will out of the decision-making loop" or, to the contrary, they delegate responsibility to individual soldiers (e.g., platoons or the German mission-type tactics) to avoid "friction". "Friction", according to de Landa, is like "noise" — too much undispersed friction blocks the war machine, which destroys itself. Thus, rather than waiting for friction to accumulate at the head of the control, command and communication center (C3), which is the case in centralized armies, decentralized war machines allow it to disperse itself at each level of the machine.
The 1805 Jacquard loom, which used the holes punched in pasteboard punched cards to control the weaving of patterns in fabric, is the first example of a "migration" of human control to machines control, and marks the invention of software according to de Landa. Command and control techniques adapted by the German were then introduced in army arsenals by Frederick Taylor and extended to civilian society: "the imposition of military production methods into the civilian society was accompanied by the transfer of a whole command and control grid." (p. 153) The system of Numerical control — and then the CNC — which was developed by funds from the US Air Force, "withdraws all control from workers in the area of weapons production and centralizes it at the top. But if the NC (and related methods) effectively shortened the chain of command be getting humans out of the decision-making loop, it also weakened the civilian sector of the economy by its adverse effects on workers' productivity," (p. 154) argues Manuel de Landa. He thus underlines that the US has become a net importer of machine tools for the first time since the 19th century, and points out that while in 1975 all major manufacturers of integrated chips were American, in 1986 only two were not Japanese. In 1982, the Japanese MITI had launched the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) initiative to create computers supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallelism.
According to Manuel de Landa, the Prussian army was thus Jominian, that it favored centralized command of the battlefield and the conduct of military affairs over diplomacy and politics. He opposes Clausewitz's classic theory exposed in On War (1832) of the preeminence of politics over warfare (if strategy is the art of assembling battles, politics is the art of making sense of victories). Although Manuel de Landa doesn't quote Sun Tzu, his use of Clausewitz recalls the Chinese's councils on the way to avoid wars as being the most effective warfare: one may be sure he won the war when actually the war didn't happen. Manuel de Landa claims that this Jominian theory influenced Prussian militarism and, later, the RAND Corporation and current Pentagon policies concerning research and development. This centralization always aims at taking out humans from the decision-making loop, and is therefore closely linked to the evolution of technology — although a major thesis of Manuel de Landa's book is that evolution of technology in itself is not either good or bad, as technophiles and technophobes hope or fear. It may be used to keep the human will out of the loop, or, on the other hand, to prioritize cooperative behavior and decentralization: the classic example used is the hackers' reappropriation of the military ARPANET in the early ages of the Internet.
Thus, the Schlieffen Plan, formulated by the German general staff after the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war, is a good example of centralized war planning and of Jominian theory: everything was so rigidly planned that there was almost zero ability to adapt for sudden changes. When World War I started in August 1914, the military told the emperor that they could do nothing but invade France, although the emperor changed his mind, hoping that if he didn't invade France, Great Britain wouldn't enter the war (in virtue of the 1904 Entente cordiale agreement). But the plan was too rigid and didn't allow for modification, thus potentially becoming one of the indirect causes of the war (although it surely wasn't the only one: de Landa, who begins his book quoting Fernand Braudel, doesn't believe in unicausality or determinism).
Read more about this topic: War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines