I'm sure that war is complicated and confusing. I'm less sure that it is chaotic or complex.

War, Chaos, and History is an immensely frustrating and obscure book, that while erudite and interesting, ultimately fails to make a contribution. Beaumont promises to use the new sciences of complexity and chaos to make sense of war. The test of nations has escaped a complete description in history, from the partiality of records to the impossibility of grasping the evolution of a battle occurring across miles of space and the fallaible minds of thousands of soldiers. I'm sure that Beaumont knows his material, the footnotes make that abundantly clear, but Beaumont doesn't really advance an argument for the use of a interdisciplinary methods combining chaos, complexity, and military history. Instead, the rambling and disconnected chapters seem to repeat the same points, about non-linearity, the incompleteness of doctrine, and the importance of using German words in your sentences.

There are several interesting questions that could be approached: What distinguishes winners and losers in wars, or even success and failure for a single commander across different battles? Perhaps tracing the evolution of linear doctrine and geometric ordering of forces to modern small unit tactics and Maneuver Warfare theories. Or getting into the morass of procurement debates about qualitative edges vs cost and numbers. None of these important historical questions are specifically addressed.