World War I and the Era of Bounded Rationality

I just finished listening to a Great Courses lecture series about World War I by Prof. Vejas G. Liulevicius of the University of Tennessee.  The course is a great learning experience. Understanding the tragic miscalculations of World War I is necessary to understanding the history of government, management and economics during the last century, including the expansion of state power and the rejection of classical liberalism on behalf of state activism, which is necessarily militaristic despite ideologically motivated claims to the contrary.  

 March and Simon’s concept of bounded or cognitive limits on rationality, which is usually applied to business strategy, is omnipresent in the history of World War I.   Bounded rationality, or the physical, financial, and mental constraints on rational choice,  is tightened with respect to the larger-scale decisions of government.  

Many aspects of the Great War suggest  a sharp expansion in the importance of cognitive limits on rationality.  These include the mistaken enthusiasm of the August Madness, i.e., the international public enthusiasm about the war when it first began; the difficulty of strategic and tactical adjustment to the technology of mechanized warfare; the resultant failure of many of the military strategies such as at the Battles of Verdun, Gallipoli, and the Spring Offensive; the Germans’ secretive propaganda efforts, which led to the stab in the back theory (itself reflecting limited rationality); the Germans’ strategic miscalculation with respect to the harshness  of the the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Russia, which led to the Allies' greater harshness at Versailles; both the reasoning for starting the war (leading to the termination of the Empires, which had seen the war as a means of expansion) and the Allies’ treaties, which led to the next war; and the naïve post-war idealism of both Lenin and Wilson. 

I would conclude that the Great War was a comedy of errors, except that few narratives are as tragic, and few have made me more pessimistic about the human condition.