Book excerpt: Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess thecharacteristics of complex adaptive systems: combat forces arecomposed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts and areorganized in a dynamic command-and-control network; local action, which often appears disordered, self-organizes into long-range order;military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium;military forces adapt to a changing combat environment; and there isno master voice that dictates the actions of every soldier (i