The Scientific Way of Warfare

Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity

Antoine Bousquet, Antoine Bousquet

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781787387263
• eBook ISBN: 9781787387850
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bousquet’s book considers the impact of key technologies and scientific ideas on the practice of warfare and the handling of the perennial tension between order and chaos on the battlefield. It spans the entire modern era, from the Scientific Revolution to the present, eschewing traditional accounts of technological change in war and instead exploring modern warfare as the constitution of increasingly complex social assemblages of bodies and machines whose integration has been made possible through the deployment of scientific methodology. Scientific conceptual frameworks have been increasingly applied to the theoretical understanding of war, particularly when they have been associated with influential technologies such as the clock, the engine, or the computer. Conversely, many scientific developments have been stimulated or conditioned by the experience of war, especially since the Second World War and the unprecedented technological and industrial effort that characterised it. The constitution and perpetuation of this scientific way of warfare, marked by an increasingly tight symbiosis between technology, science, and war, are best understood in the context of the state’s attempts to make war into a rational instrument of policy. Bousquet also explores the relative benefits (such as providing a unique chain of command over the decision to use nuclear weapons) and disadvantages of centralising and decentralising approaches to military affairs, as exemplified in network-centric theory and in the activities of non-state actors such as insurgents.

1

TECHNOSCIENTIFIC REGIMES OF
ORDER IN WARFARE

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

Wilhelm Reich

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and that of the enemy.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Throughout the ages, military leaders have sought to prepare, organise, and direct their armies so that they can best preserve their order and coherence when faced with the centrifugal forces of chaos unleashed on the battlefield. They have tried by all available means to avert for as long as possible the state of disorganised free-for-all that threatens every army under the stress of combat. The forces that have succeeded in remaining organised while precipitating their adversaries into disarray have invariably prevailed. Martin van Creveld thus explains that

the history of command in war consists essentially of an endless quest for certainty—certainty about the state and intentions of the enemy’s forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together constitute the environment in which the war is fought, […] and last, but definitely not least, certainty about the state, intentions, and activities of one’s own forces.¹

Likewise, John Keegan notes that the fundamental purpose of training ‘is to reduce the conduct of war to a set of rules and a system of procedures—and therefore to make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive.’² The practice of warfare can accordingly be understood as the attempt to impose order over chaos, to exert control where it most threatens to elude, and to find predictability in the midst of uncertainty.

States, along with other political entities, seek to employ organised violence for the attainment of political objectives. Military force is only one of the instruments of statecraft, however, and its rational and measured employment demands that its use be commensurate with the overall objective to which it is intended to contribute. Indeed, the pursuit of war solely for its own sake or as part of a warrior lifestyle that seeks merely the perpetuation of its own existence is antithetical to any raison d’état. This is the meaning of Clausewitz’s oft-repeated dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means, formulated just as the modern state and its particularly instrumental approach to the use of force were ascendant. The exercise of judgement over the appropriate means to be deployed in the pursuit of a given political end belongs to the domain commonly known as strategy. The formulation of strategy and an assessment of the role of military force within it requires an understanding of the probable effects any course of action is likely to result in. Or as Colin Gray puts it, ‘if the essence of strategy is instrumentality, the essence of instrumentality is predictability.’³ Strategic thought and behaviour are therefore necessarily accompanied by a rationalisation of military force as an instrument of broader political objectives and a theorisation of both the potential and limitations attendant to the use of organised violence, all in an effort to bring order and predictability to an activity that would otherwise be surrendered to the vagaries of chance and contingency.

A clear parallel can be drawn between the ordering of military organisation and instrumental application of armed force on one hand and scientific endeavour on the other. Scientists continuously strive to extract ‘patterns’ from ‘noise,’ to identify regularities in the fog of randomness, to uncover the ‘laws’ governing the behaviour of nature and reveal the hidden order behind the apparent chaos of its phenomena. For the scientist Norbert Wiener, one of the pivotal characters in this study, the ‘highest destiny’ of mathematics, the universal language of science, was ‘the discovery of order among disorder.’⁴ Alfred North Whitehead expressed the same idea, albeit in a more poetic fashion, when he proposed that the pursuit of mathematics was ‘a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.’⁵ With the discovery and formulation of regularities comes greater predictability of phenomena and enhanced control over the natural world. Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, explicitly made this link: ‘from science comes prevision; from prevision comes control.’⁶ The scientific project is inextricably connected to the drive for greater control and power over the world, as originally formulated by one of its earliest expositors, Francis Bacon: scientia potentia est.

For their part, engineers and technologists seek to put together technical objects whose operation is made reliable and predictable by harnessing natural laws while resisting those physical forces that would undo them. For van Creveld, it is precisely the repetitive and predictable character of physical nature that first made technology possible in primitive societies. Technological progress from then on depended increasingly on the specialisation and integration of different tools and tasks. The coordination necessary to constitute such systems hinges on the ability ‘to predict the behaviour of each and every part of the system. Ultimately, what is involved is nothing less than an attempt to insulate the system from uncertainty by creating a perfectly controlled and perfectly stable—since change means disruption—artificial world.’⁷ This quest for the order and predictability necessary to the adoption, employment, and diffusion of technical objects inevitably extends to the larger systems, including social, in which they are inserted.

In his piece on The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger claims that ‘the essence of technology is nothing technological’ but rather that, along with science, it is an expression of enframing (Ge-Stell), a disposition towards the world that sees ‘ordering as the supposed single way of revealing [it].’⁸ The philosopher sees in enframing a will to dominate nature, to convert the whole universe into an undifferentiated ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand) available to be put to work whenever needed. For Heidegger, this disposition is implicit in the very scientific project:

Man’s ordering attitude and behaviour display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.⁹

Science and technology are therefore the means through which the world is made to ‘reveal’ itself in a certain way so as to best order it. Heidegger does not merely acquiesce here to a common instrumental understanding of modern technology as a means to an end; he is suggesting that instrumentality itself flows from the way that technology ‘brings forth’ or reveals the world through enframing, that is, in our way of ‘knowing’ it. Van Creveld says as much when he observes that ‘behind military hardware there is hardware in general, and behind that there is technology as a certain kind of know-how, as a way of looking at the world and coping with its problems.’¹⁰

Although the ordering Heidegger speaks of corresponds to a specific technoscientific rationality, ordering as a codification of the world which seeks to abstract regularities and correlations from its experience and dictate corresponding ways of being within it appears to be central to all human societies, whether manifested in the form of tradition, religion, law, or morality.¹¹ For Sigmund Freud, it can be traced back to a fundamental psychological impulse:

Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable. It enables men to use space and time to the best advantage, while conserving their psychical forces.¹²

If the process of ordering appears to be a defining characteristic of social existence, the specific forms it takes are not inconsequential, particularly with regard to their specific mediations of order and chaos. What follows is an account of the distinctive technoscientific regime of order that emerged in the modern era, its relationship to the theories and practices of warfare, and the various ways that the tensions between order and chaos have played themselves out within it.

The Technoscientific Regime of Order

In the Western world, a particular regime of order emerged with modernity, displacing previously established mechanisms for the production of order.¹³ Order came to be increasingly justified and organised on the basis of a scientific and technical rationality. Knowledge produced through the inductive methods of scientific enquiry gained ascendancy over deductive theological and scholastic claims about the world. Both the state entities and capitalistic forms of economic organisation that emerged in this era relied on the rationalisation and systematisation of social processes and interactions to manage enlarged bureaucracies and sites of production. Efficiency considerations and cost-benefit calculations increasingly supplanted traditional or customary grounds as the ordering principle of social organisation, driving forward a methodical and ever-complexifying division of labour alongside accelerating technological development. The establishment of a new regime of order meant that a new way of speaking about the world and dictating social arrangements within it had acquired predominant legitimacy.

Michel Foucault would here speak of a ‘regime of truth’ realised through discourse and on the basis of which relations of power are instituted and perpetuated:

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourse of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.¹⁴

It is crucial in this context that discourse should not be reduced to the semantic field of spoken word and written text. Paul Edwards makes clear that:

discourse goes beyond speech acts to refer to the entire field of signifying or meaningful practices: these social interactions—material, institutional, and linguistic—through which human knowledge is produced and reproduced. A discourse, then, is a way of knowledge, a background of assumptions and agreements about how reality is to be interpreted and expressed, supported by paradigmatic metaphors, techniques, and technologies and potentially embodied in social institutions.¹⁵

In accordance with this broad understanding of discourse as a nexus of ideas and practices that (re)produce social reality and a certain set of power relations with it, modernity is to be viewed as ‘a structural organisation of state, economy, society and culture; a power complex and a mode of consciousness.’¹⁶

With the advent of the Scientific Revolution at the dawn of the seventeenth century, a new set of beliefs, tools, and practices was established for the interrogation of nature and the uncovering of its fundamental laws. The agenda of its initiators was explicitly one of extending control over the physical world, as evidenced by both Descartes’s invitation to seek a ‘practical philosophy’ through which to ‘render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature’ and Bacon’s injunction to ‘extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe.’¹⁷ Scientific discourse rapidly grew in influence as it accumulated successes, soon acquiring a paramount role in the ordering of social life within Western societies.¹⁸ Some of this authority derived from its ability to predict natural phenomena, but an even greater prestige was obtained from its close association with technology. The synthesis that would emerge remains one of the defining characteristics of modernity.¹⁹

The development of tools and technical artefacts has always been a feature of human civilisation, but until the modern era its activity generally remained distinct from the theoretical contemplation of nature’s laws. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers thus claim that we find in the natural philosophy of Plato and Aristotle:

[a] distinction between theoretical thinking and technological activity […] The words we still use today—machine, mechanical, engineer—have a similar meaning. They do not refer to rational knowledge but to cunning and expediency. The idea was not to learn about natural processes in order to utilise them more effectively, but to deceive nature, to ‘machinate’ against it—that is, to work wonders and create effects extraneous to the ‘natural order’ of things. The field of practical manipulation and that of rational understanding of nature were thus rigidly separated. Archimedes’ status is merely that of an engineer; his mathematical analysis of the equilibrium of machines is not considered to be applicable to the world of nature, at least within the framework of traditional physics. In contrast, the Newtonian synthesis expresses a systematic alliance between manipulation and theoretical understanding.²⁰

Within this systematic alliance between science and technology, artefacts such as the clock, engine, and computer have come to play an essential role. Their operation has allowed for the isolation and study of physical forces with the resulting theoretical understandings feeding back into the design of these and other devices. For this reason, it is more appropriate to refer to a phenomenon of technoscience in the modern era, an ever tighter symbiotic bond between these two fields to the extent than any distinction is now largely nominal and of limited conceptual purchase. Established at the very foundation of modern science, this convergence has meant that any major technological advance has been linked inextricably to an extension of scientific knowledge. Far from being merely the output of applied science, technical objects are crucial in serving as instrumental apparatuses and isolating physical phenomena for scientific study.²¹ Thus, it is possible to claim that ‘thermodynamics owed much more to the steam engine than the steam engine ever owed to thermodynamics,’ even as an understanding of thermodynamics is now indispensable to any contemporary engine design.²² Several other examples of this back-and-forth will be discussed throughout this study, illuminating the co-constitutive interrelationship of science and technology.

Conversely, the technological and industrial development of Western societies in the modern era cannot be understood as the mere introduction of successive forms of machinery. Equally important are the forms of social organisation that allow for the implementation of specific technologies, enforcing new arrangements and combinations of individuals and machinery. In societies in which the productive activity is organised through an ever more complex division of labour entailing continuous specialisation and rational administration, the integration of humans and machines must necessarily follow ‘a highly abstract and general plan’ commonly arrived to through appeals to the scientific method.²³

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Dedication
• Introduction: The Scientific Way of Warfare
• 1. Technoscientific Regimes of Order in Warfare
• 2. Mechanistic Warfare
• 3. Thermodynamic Warfare
• 4. Cybernetics and the Informational Paradigm
• 5. Cybernetic Warfare
• 6. The Order of Chaoplexity
• 7. Chaoplexic Warfare
• Conclusion: An Autonomous S(war)m Machine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover