The Scientific Way of War
Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (A Mindful Miscellany, #44)
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, where we focus on sense-making and story-telling in the turbulent twenties. We are devoted to cultivating the conditions for sagacity to emerge, like Punxsutawney Phil, from his wintry lair. No guarantee that it will happen, but we are over the moon when it does. I humbly serve as your blundering yet intrepid wayfinder, touching the elephant of reality in most unseemly ways. Bio here.
Whilst this summary appears war focused, many of the concepts and principles apply to other domains as well—business and social movements in particular. There are interesting resonances to Dave Ronfeldt’s Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks framework of changing human organizations through time.
TLDR/BLUF: In the modern era, theories and practices of warfare in the western world reflected the dominant paradigm of scientific ideas for the time. Warfare cannot be completely predicted or controlled, knowledge is imperfect, and redundancy allows for great adaptability and resilience in the face of contingency. This does not change with integration of networks. The forces who have succeeded in remaining coherent while forcing their adversaries into disarray have almost always prevailed. Humans use the dominant scientific metaphors of the day to describe war, much in the same way we use dominant metaphors to describe the mind (the mind is a computer, etc).
Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (2009)
Arguments:
The scientific way of warfare refers to an array of scientific rationalities, techniques, frameworks of interpretation, and intellectual dispositions that have characterized the approach to the application of socially organized violence in the modern era. Four distinct regimes have emerged— mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and chaoplexic, with their respective paradigmatic technology the clock, the engine, the computer, and the network. In each regime, a different dimension of warfare comes to the fore and dominates its execution, whether it is the ordering and disciplining of motion on the battlefield, the channeling and projection of energy, or the flow and distribution of information.
Engineering sought (still seeks) to characterize and predict the behavior of every element in the system.
Technology became part of the social organization following the Scientific Revolution, especially in the West.
Four regimes of fighting have evolved: mechanistic war (machines and drilled routines), thermodynamic war (engines and energy), cybernetic war (computers and C2), “chaoplexic” war (networks and chaos + complexity theory). Force fed mechanics; Energy fed thermodynamics; Information fed cybernetics.
Mechanistic (1600-1700s)
Became dogmatic in science and culture.
Predictability of clockwork mechanisms, plus belief that everything was clockwork, led to assumption that everything could be predicted.
Mechanistic war combated chaos by predetermining every action and interaction (Jomini).
Thermodynamic (1800-1945)
Driven first by the steam engine; rail enticed trade, travel, and communications.
Thermodynamic war gave speed and movement power to greatly increase destruction (ultimately in the form of nukes).
Less emphasis on trajectory (pretty deterministic) and more on explosion (not very deterministic).
Strategy and tactics granted adaptability and flexibility on the battlefield that was largely lost during the mechanistic regime.
Motorization ended the concept of front lines.
Friction cannot be dismissed as a minor and mostly insignificant deviation from the ideal mechanism; rather it is a fundamental and irreducible property of war.
Cybernetic (1945- Present?)
Like most technology, integration was more important than the advance itself.
Info increases order, and can be used to reverse entropy’s effects.
Moving back towards clockwork control through computer automation and prediction.
The term ‘command and control’ adds a negative feedback loop to what was once just command, one-directional function.
More computers led to a trend towards reductionism – everything is an equation to be solved.
Despite rigor, systems analyst gurus caution that modeling is neither reality nor objective (even it's accurate it can look at the wrong things or have bad assumptions).
After 1945 the length of procurement cycles increased with the time necessary for the research and development, production, and deployment of any new technology . Furthermore, closer cybernetic integration of vehicles, projectiles, communications, radar, and electronic counter-measures created weapon systems whose components could not be designed separately if integration into a functioning whole were to be successful.
Vietnam revealed the failure of Cybernetic approach— whiz kids and body counts.
Network Centric Warfare is halfway in between Cybernetic and Chaoplexity, one foot in both. Greater “topsight,” but not true decentralization.
Chaoplexity (Present???)
Demands both order and disorder to generate truth .
Networks allow self-organization and emergence.
Positive feedback and non-linear processes led to chaos theory – scientists decided linear stuff was the aberration, and non-linear was the norm in nature.
Chance isn’t random; we just can’t know enough about the initial conditions to make an accurate prediction.
Complex adaptive systems do decentralized decision making with fast OODA loops.
OODA is non-linear and will result in unpredictable, emergent behavior.
Quicker OODA loop isn’t about faster cycle time, it’s about faster response to stimuli, more sensitive to stimuli, faster to make interconnections. Faster feedback in each phase of OODA. Better Orientation!
Initiative, surprise, and deception are thus key; merely increasing the speed at which one acts by responding to stimulus from pre-established templates will not speed up overall ability.
Clausewitz’s interaction, friction, and chance predicts Chaoplexic age.
Network is cyber and social, modifying how and why people do and think things.
Swarming is the best of networking – hard to beat a swarm; it’s massively parallel, and each individual is of only small import.
Swarms react and adapt rapidly and effectively to unexpected stimuli, sustained pulsing.
Networked forces should be able to concentrate and disperse faster than hierarchical forces.
Trade control and predictability for adaptability and resilience (Connects with USMC MCDP-1)
More conservative advocates suggest greater decentralization, to allow for self-organization and emergence.
Information relieves uncertainty, but opinions differ as to how much uncertainty it can relieve (some suggest 100%).
Three problems with this belief:
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
No true adaptive system of C2.
No real acknowledgement that some of the information is bad/decayed.
Embrace uncertainty instead, by building flexible and adaptable structures.
Networking can provide decentralization and better big-picture understanding at the same time.
Net-centric war makes the network a critical vulnerability; therefore net-centric war may not quite be chaoplexic war after all. – The historical record certainly substantiates the idea that attempts to render war predictable have been largely counter-productive … the most effective forms of warfare built into military organization a tolerance to uncertainty and even a capacity to profit from it.
Van Creveld Command in War conclusion: Successful command systems do not employ breakthrough technology but, rather, so organized themselves that they could function with less information flow. They did this by either compressing the organization so less communication was needed (e.g., the phalanx) or decentralizing decision making so that information did not have to flow as far up or down the organization.
Implications for Strategy:
Network Enabled Warfare (replaced Network Centric) gives the capacity to centralize & decentralize at the same time.
Information may overload actors rather than allowing them to self-synchronize.
Makes the network a critical enabler and potential target.
Standards (such as network standards) gives militaries significant leverage through sharing & cooperation of data, plans & action.
Today reveals cybernetic effects in a chaoplexic environment.
Role for autonomous UAVs re: swarming, increasingly the form of choice for this age.
I hope that you can move your body, touch grass1, and brighten the day of other humans. You can punch above your weight class in being a good dude/dudette if you choose to.
I never miss a chance to drop this into conversation with my teenage daughter, in order to cringe-max, as the delightful Mary Harrington recommends.
Speak english, tell a story. Too much hypothetical language.