The General became more and more bound to his office, and, consequently divorced from his men. He relied for contact not upon the personal factor, but upon the mechanical telegraph and telephone. They could establish contact, but they could accomplish this only by dragging subordinate commanders out of the firing line that they may be at the beck and call of their superiors. In the World War, nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading. How commanders dealt with uncertainty determined the level of control and the organizational orientation.
Organizational orientation determines the degree of uncertainty a commander is willing to tolerate.
Van Creveld declares that the history of warfare is an endless quest to decrease the realm of uncertainty, resulting in a race between more information and the ability of technology to keep up with it. Thus, the choice between centralized or decentralized control involves the distribution of uncertainty. Van Creveld believes that while centralization reduces uncertainty at the top, it increases that uncertainty at the bottom. Decentralization has just the opposite effect. It is human nature for higher-level commanders to reduce their uncertainty, driving their organizational orientation to greater centralized control.