Fighting the Last War

The tendency to respond to present circumstances using strategies that worked in the past, even when conditions have fundamentally changed.

The paradigmatic example is the Prussian army’s catastrophic defeat at Jena in 1806. Prussian generals had internalized Frederick the Great’s tactics from fifty years earlier. Their soldiers drilled relentlessly in elaborate maneuvers; their strategies followed textbook principles. When Napoleon, who improvised constantly, moved faster than anyone expected, and fought in entirely new ways, crossed their path, the Prussians were methodically destroyed in days.

The pattern is universal:

• Education “burns precepts into the mind that are hard to shake”
• Success creates attachment to the methods that produced it
• Formulas provide psychological comfort but crowd out situational awareness
• The further we go, the harder it becomes to reassess

“What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats.”

The antidote is not more knowledge or better theories, it’s cultivating mental fluidity. The ability to see each situation freshly, as if you know nothing, and let strategy emerge from circumstances rather than from doctrine.

Related: 07-atom—friction, 01-atom—presence-of-mind