[JimMorrison]

I would tend to have to disagree with this, on principle.

The art of warfare, is to work with known quantities - be they positive or negative for your cause - and engineer a situation that is likely to result in victory for your cause.

If 2 armies are unwilling to engage - a scenario that has historical precedence - then other tactics such as stealthy/flying raiding, and assassination, need to be implemented to either force an unfavorable maneuver by your enemy, or erode their position of strength so that your assault has the weight of success already in your favor.


Introducing any wholly random element takes this away, it says that no matter how well you plan and organize your decisive strike, you may be throwing everything away - not because you failed to accurately predict your opponent's behavior, but because you could not rely on a known quantity.

The great leaders of history, often were credited as achieving astounding victories through the taking of "great risks". I would argue wholeheartedly against this assertion. It is a simple fact that a mind that weighs everything in abstract possibilities will see a situation from that perspective, where the reality is that the highly ordered and focused mind of that great leader, took every possible factor into consideration, and as if the battle were a giant chessboard, predicted the reactions of his opponent to each of his moves, thereby engineering a dramatic victory over a numerically stronger opponent.


Thus, rather than requesting that your opponent be divested of a known quantity, it would better suit a commander to better plan for the implementation of that tactic. Know thine enemy. As many battles are lost because someone pursued a tactic that wasn't able to compete with their opponent's tactic, as were won because someone learnt what tactic their opponent was developing, and specifically arranged to render that tactic less effective, ineffective, or detrimental.