The U.S.-Israel war with Iran raises an awkward question. If the conflict appears strategically incoherent, why were the people responsible for it ever entrusted with such power in the first place? The conventional answer is that leaders sometimes make mistakes. Yet this explanation becomes increasingly unsatisfying when similar patterns appear across politics, business, finance, media, and administration. The individuals occupying positions of authority often display extraordinary skill at acquiring power while demonstrating far less aptitude for exercising it. The puzzle is not incompetence itself. Every human institution produces incompetence. The puzzle is why certain forms of incompetence appear so consistently compatible with success.
Perhaps this is because modern institutions frequently reward proxies for competence rather than competence itself. Confidence is easier to measure than wisdom. Certainty is easier to market than understanding. Ambition is easier to identify than restraint. A person can become highly successful by mastering the performance of leadership without necessarily possessing the capacities required for navigating complex systems. The result is a subtle but important inversion. Organisations begin selecting for the traits that help individuals rise through hierarchies rather than the traits that help them understand reality. In such environments, incompetence is not necessarily filtered out. It may be partially selected for.
If this is true, then strategic incompetence is not simply a personal failing but a systemic outcome. The same institutions that later suffer from poor decisions may have actively rewarded the characteristics that produced them. The war becomes less an isolated mistake than a symptom of a broader civilisational tendency to confuse visibility with insight, confidence with understanding, and wealth with wisdom. Reality eventually distinguishes between these things, but usually after the decisions have been made, the resources committed, and the consequences distributed across everyone else.
Daedelus Kite 