This is a very unchaotic view of land warfare and I am ashamed you left out guerilla warfare and politics. You put forward a very factual brief on the role of economics and technology however.

By unchaotic I mean your description of objective taking war consists of set volumes and properties, a very simplified view of terrain and the situations military units face. You left out Vietnam, possibly because you thought it was a cliche, but it wasn’t. It was a wake up call as much as ww1 was a wake up call to the situtation of mechanized war. When people are forced into desperate situations they come up with things no one can predict. This is why the most succesful wars are won through sudden death as they don’t give the enemy enough opportunity to be unpredictable. The 2nd Gulf War was a failure, shock and awe doesn’t incapacitate an army, it merely shatters it. There must have been thousands of Iraqi Lieutenants disenfranchised and severely frustrated and hateful for the occupation, each with a garage in the desert full of AK47s and grenades aswell as tens of thousands of unemployed 19 year olds ripe for indoctrination and foreign fighters. In this sort of situation, people go into fanatic mode. Just like the Vietcong.