You could still apply statistics. That's what people who breed animals or plants do. Every organism is different and individual, too.
There's plenty of studies in economics (especially micro-economics) that have statistical laws just like biology does. Similar for psychology. And even for war:
It's hard to run controlled experiments at the largest scales, but there have been plenty of experiments and studies at smaller scales. And some of them yielded statistical 'laws'.
There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.
And while men with guns very often get shot, they never starve.
Maybe, but we're evaluating the quote "For war, you need three things: money, money and money" which is presumably about money.
I'm from Zimbabwe - everything in Rhodesia was about money. Money needed by the government of the time to stop the guerillas and money needed by the guerillas to house them in neighboring countries, feed and arm them.
Now that Zimbabwe is in terrible economic trouble and has obviously rigged elections and much suppression of opposition voters and of course a military coup that everyone denies was a coup, there is no rebellion and there are no guerillas because they would have no support (no money, no safe harbour, no weapons). The Russians, Chinese, South Africans and DPRK have the situation they want and the US etc don't care about it either.
This seems to imply that money will win you wars, which is not the case. You don't need "money" to get foreign military aid, nor to manufacture small arms in your own factories, especially if you use slaves for that (like the Nazis did).
I've got great news for you! There are universal economic laws that always hold true in all situations.
For example, "man acts". You can't deny that, because denying it would be an act in itself, leading to a (performative) contradiction. From this law, and just a few others of a similar kind, you can build a whole structure of logically provable theorems that have profound implications for economics and the social sciences in general.
> the more of something you have, the less of it you want. This phenomenon is referred to as diminishing marginal utility by economists.
Okay, but I have a counter-example. Money. The people who have the most sometimes still act like penny-pinchers, and lust after even more, and haggle over the smallest things. Therefore the "law of diminishing marginal utility" is more a rule of thumb than a law.
If you own a good G, that you could use to satisfy either a desire D1, or a competing desire D2, you will logically choose to use G to satisfy the greater one of these two desires - the one with the greater subjective utility to you. Let's assume that is D1.
Now, if instead of 1 you have 2 of G, you can satisfy both D1 and D2. As we have already established that the utility you have derived from consuming the first G to achieve D1 must be greater than the utility derived from consuming the second G to achieve D2, the utility of the additional unit of G is diminished when compared to the previous one.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/greaves-human-action-a-tre...
https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-ma...
Anyway, if it isn't -- no, there are no universal economic laws, for the very simple reason that "humans are not always rational" and economics is fundamentally about human behavior, in groups, no less.
Let's do us all one better and nail this down.
"Predictable, repeatable action"
Repeatable is even untrue, unless I misunderstand your meaning. First of all, the ranking of your goals or desires is not assumed to be constant over time. Also, it is not assumed that your world model is constant. Quite the opposite, it is often explicitly emphasized that humans have the ability to change their mind about things, for example by learning.
As many people pointed out, there are plenty. Humans don't change over course of centuries.
- soldiers need to be fed
- attacks on undefended locations are more likely to succeed
- if you can set your enemy on fire, do so, people really don’t like being on fire
To me the problem is that the study of war, like the study of economics or any other social study; isn’t a real science. There is no repeatable theoretical model, including The Art of War. There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.