Power as Criticality: Wylie's Four Assumptions Reformulated as Complex Systems Dynamics

J.C. Wylie's Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967) is widely
recognized as a foundational text in strategic theory, yet its four core assumptions —
concerning the inevitability of war, the aim of control, the unpredictability of war's
pattern, and the decisive role of the individual combatant — have never been
formally developed. This paper demonstrates that these four assumptions are not
independent experiential maxims but structural properties of a single dynamical
phenomenon: cascading phase transitions, as described by the Landau-Stuart
equation. Assumption 1 corresponds to the inevitability of phase transitions when
accumulated instability exceeds a critical threshold. Assumption 2 corresponds to
probabilistic control via reshaping of the potential landscape — the only form of
control structurally available in a system undergoing cascading reconstitution.
Assumption 3 corresponds to the compounding unpredictability produced by
successive phase transitions, each of which reconstitutes the system's topology.
Assumption 4 corresponds to the structural necessity that local actors at each
bifurcation point collapse the probability distribution into a specific outcome. The
reformulation reveals a latent causal chain linking Assumptions 2 through 4: control
is probabilistic (2) because cascading transitions render deterministic prediction
impossible (3), and probability is collapsed into actuality by local actors at each
bifurcation (4). This chain, invisible when the assumptions are read as independent
postulates, resolves the implicit tension between control and unpredictability in
Wylie's theory. The paper further reinterprets Wylie's concept of "power" as a
system's stored instability potential near criticality, and shows that the
sequential/cumulative strategy distinction follows as a direct consequence of the
phase transition framework. Implications for strategic analysis include the
mathematical tractability of attractor control as an optimization problem and the
possibility of early warning through order parameter monitoring for critical slowing
down signatures.