Crow's Snowmobile

Problems are easier to solve in controlled environments, and often there is a single solution to a problem. But what do you do when you do not control the environment, and the effect of a solution is not measurable?

Deep within Charlie Wilson’s War, the search for a “silver bullet”, a single weapon that will decisively turn the Afghan war against the Soviets, is not going well. They have looked at various weapons such as the Swiss Oerlikon, the British Blowpipe, and have the Israelis working on the “Charlie Horse”, but various obstacles remain. The protagonists are: Gust Avrakotos (CIA man), Mike Vickers (Weapons expert), and US Congressman Charlie Wilson:

“As with everything else, Vickers did not miss a beat when Avrakotos asked him what they should do. He said that Wilson was thinking about the solution to the problem the wrong way. Rarely, in war, is the battle won by a single weapon. It wasn’t necessary to find the perfect weapon. Once again, the answer lay in the broad concept of the weapons mix.

[...]

Vickers explained that it was not necessary to look for a single new weapon to serve as a “silver bullet”. The way to defeat Soviet air power was by introducing a symphony of different weapons that, when put together, would change the balance in favor of the mujahideen. He then painted a verbal portrait of the melange of weapons he was urging Gust to deploy to bring down the Hind.

[...]

It was like having his own intellectual hit-man, and Gust could feel Charlie’s excitement, as Vickers concluded by conceding that none of these weapons individually would be that effective, but the whole whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. It was their collective impact that must be considered, because all they needed to do was to convince the Soviet pilots that this mix of diverse anti-aircraft weaponry existed and was in the hands of the guerillas. Every Soviet pilot would then know there was no one diversionary tactic they could rely on. [...] once the weapons mix was in place, they simply wouldn’t know what the mujahideen might have coming up at them.”

This is an example of a symphony of solutions (here weapons) that chip away at a complex problem (combating Soviet air power), loosely orchestrated by a strategist. The solutions in this case are resources decentralized in the hands of “clients” (Afghans). The grand strategy is to win the war; the immediate objective is to deter Soviet Air pilots from their aggressive tactics.