On War
Carl von Clausewitz, 1832 — strategy.
Assembled from a decade of drafts and published by his widow Marie the year after cholera killed him — unfinished by his own account, which is fitting for a book about irreducible uncertainty. Clausewitz's permanent contributions are epistemic: war as the continuation of policy, so no conflict can be modeled apart from its political object; friction, the accumulated small resistances that separate war on paper from war in fact; and the fog that keeps most of the data on which action must be built obscured while the action is taken. The rare strategist whose core subject is the forecast error itself — read here in the Graham translation of 1873.
Marked passages
Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.
Book I, chapter 7, Graham translation. Friction is the formal name for the gap between model and execution — the engine budgets it as the irreducible error term in every conflict scenario, which is why no war projection on this site carries a tight band.
War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.
Book I, chapter 1, Graham translation. Why the geopolitics domain scores political objectives rather than order-of-battle arithmetic: the fighting is downstream of the policy, and ends only when the policy does.
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The shelf exists because the engine reads it. See the Core, the projections, the sealed ledger, or all 81 texts.