Strategy, Evolution, and War

From Apes to Artificial Intelligence

Kenneth Payne

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781626165809, 9781626165793
• eBook ISBN: 9781626165816
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Decisions about war have always been made by humans, but now intelligent machines are on the cusp of changing things – with dramatic consequences for international affairs. This book explores the evolutionary origins of human strategy, and makes a provocative argument that Artificial Intelligence will radically transform the nature of war by changing the psychological basis of decision-making about violence.

Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last three thousand years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare—a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.

The implications of AI are profound because they depart radically from the biological basis of human intelligence. Rather than being just another tool of war, AI will dramatically speed up decision making and use very different cognitive processes, including when deciding to launch an attack, or escalate violence. AI will change the essence of strategy, the organization of armed forces, and the international order.

This book is a fascinating examination of the psychology of strategy-making from prehistoric times, through the ancient world, and into the modern age.

PART I

The Evolution of Strategists

CHAPTER 1

Defining Strategy as Psychology

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY THAT STRATEGY IS PSYCHOLOGY? SOME definitions are in order, starting with strategy itself. My view of strategy extends over the long term, connecting prehuman life with artificial intelligence. Yet strategy as a distinct and coherent activity is sometimes seen as a more recent development, reflecting the increasing complexity of warfare in Enlightenment Europe of the eighteenth century. Larger armies, with more specialized skills, required professional generalship, not just to manage the action on the battlefield but to make practical use of violence for some wider aim. Strategy in this sense is intimately connected with the era of Clausewitz and Napoleon, although that didn’t stop Clausewitz and his peers from reaching for more generalizable themes that might be applicable across a range of cultural and historical circumstances. This era also intensified the intellectualization of strategy as the study of war (as opposed to its practice), and Clausewitz himself epitomizes the process. Strategy emerged as a distinct academic discipline, one that could be subjected to the analytical rigors of natural science, after the style of the times—certainly one that drew on themes from philosophy and history (Gat 2001).

The etymology of the word “strategy” is much older, dating back to classical Greece of Thucydides and reflecting both the institutionalization of command and the increasingly technical challenge of command in war and battle (Heuser 2010). The wars of states, even early modern ones, required organization far beyond those of the hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists. Strategy in turn demanded abilities beyond the battlefield—albeit that commanders could still be expected to lead from the front, at great personal risk, like their premodern antecedents. There were forces to raise, logistics to organize, and domestic politics on a larger canvass with which to reckon. Generalship nonetheless remained intimately connected with battle until Napoleon’s time, with the emperor himself embodying the supreme political and military power of the French state. Thereafter, however, the appropriate separation of policy and strategy became a key debate in strategic discourse and is still a hardy perennial of staff college debates.

In the modern era, the term “strategy” has gained widespread usage in domains far beyond its military origins, especially in business and politics. As a result, as Hew Strachan notes, strategy has sometimes lost some of its coherence (Strachan 2005). And in the military domain, its meaning has changed too—strategy has been forced upward and outward by the development of a subordinate “operational” level of war during the twentieth century, largely as a consequence of the increasingly professionalized and specialized skills associated with modern industrial warfare and the huge resources and long-term planning that go into facilitating it. Additionally—in Western democracies, at least—operational warfare interposes a barrier between civilian political oversight and the activities of uniformed military. The result has sometimes been frustration on all sides: among the uniformed military who chafe at interference in properly tactical affairs by inexperienced politicians and the politicians who meet the resource demands of their generals only to be frustrated by the failure to attain the overall goals of strategy. Whatever its benefits, the “operational level” also obfuscates the essential Clausewitzian notion that war is politics all the way down. At the same time, it pushes strategy away from the action, both in time and space—stretching that intimate connection between political goal and violent activity.

Yet there is considerable value in trying to extend the scope of strategy beyond the conventional, historical usage, as Lawrence Freedman does in his wide-ranging overview, taking into account a broader epistemological basis for understanding strategy than most orthodox treatments (Freedman 2013). Freedman, like me, begins in evolutionary history by appraising the strategic interactions of other primates. He then ranges broadly, taking in business theory and the development of social sciences as well as more traditional military affairs. This has the great advantage of seeing strategy in its broader human context—of adversarial, competitive relations. Some of the psychology underpinning these may be similar, regardless of the particular competitive context. My focus, in contrast, is more narrowly on strategy in conflict. In this particular context, strategy is the purposeful use of violence for political ends. This definition is sufficiently broad to extend the scope of strategy beyond our species, and even beyond biological life, while still retaining a connection to its violent essence.

Enter Evolution

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that the goals we seek and the ways we seek them are ultimately connected to the onward propagation of genes (Dawkins 1987). This need not necessarily entail reproduction itself, since the continuation of the genes of kinsfolk who share genetic code will be almost the same, albeit in directly diminishing proportion to how closely related they are (Hamilton 1964). The result is the possibility of altruism (sacrificial behavior) toward others who share our genes, thereby explaining the suicidal behavior of social insects.

This basic underlying motivation is common to all biological life. But strategy is not common, at least not in the sense of the term employed here. Evolutionary processes have worked on humans to produce unique characteristics, most notably a sophisticated “theory of mind.” These attributes in turn create the possibility of a rich human culture and localized patterns of behavior and thought (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992). Theory of mind—the ability to intuit, albeit imperfectly, what others are thinking—is the basis of our tremendous adaptability and evolutionary success as a species. We have specialized in social brains—and later I’ll argue that the threat of war was an important spur to that specialization. Cooperation amid sometimes violent competition is perhaps the key driver of human evolution. This delicate balance between competition and cooperation is the essence of politics. Thus “man is by nature a political animal,” in the title of Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott’s account (Hatemi and McDermott 2011).

Other organisms must interact with their environments, which contain an array of hazards, including others of their own species. Yet while they may learn from that interaction via feedback loops, there is often a degree of automaticity to such behavior that disqualifies it from being strategic in a human sense. Some social animals may possess something like our theory of mind and be able to produce something akin to our strategic behavior. But there are still profound qualitative differences between their social strategizing and ours.

Some modesty about human strategizing is in order. In common with other animals, human evolution has done a good deal of the “learning” on our behalf, even though such embodied, hardwired adaptations can be limiting when the environment changes in any profound way. But humans also possess additional cognitive flexibility, thanks to our intense sociability, especially with nonkin. The possibility of parochial altruism for kin and “reciprocal altruism” for nonrelatives endows human strategy with a richness lacking even in other primates. Who should we trust to help us? Who may take advantage of us? We spend a good deal of our time reflecting on our relations with others and discussing it via our unique linguistic abilities. We also possess some uniquely human abilities for metacognition and rational reflection, via our conscious mind, which I discuss further in the next chapter.

These attributes endow human strategy with rich variety and an ever-changing character. Yet, despite this tremendous variety, the foundations of strategy remain inescapably psychological, because strategy entails pursuing selfish goals in an arena with other similar minds. The need to think strategically drove our evolution down particular pathways. If we see strategy as instrumental or purposeful, political, social, and violent, one master theme unites these, whatever the local context: strategy is, at its core, a psychological phenomenon (Payne 2015b).

Allowing that strategy is inherently psychological enables us to extend our understanding of warfare beyond the modern industrialized world, to earlier and radically different cultural expressions of strategy, including in human prehistory. It even allows us to extend our discussion beyond human experience to that of human ancestors and of other social animals that engage in something like strategic behavior. And, in the other direction, it allows us to peer into the future to explore the impact of artificial intelligence on strategic behavior.

Consider, for example, the psychological concepts of perception, judgment, curiosity, creativity, and imagination. All are integral to strategy and all elevate it above the automated, routinized response of simpler organisms in making decisions about how to respond to environmental competition in realizing goals. The extent to which a machine would be able to evince creative decision-making or be motivated by curiosity is the subject of cutting edge AI research. While there is considerable uncertainty about the prospects for AI of this sort, framing the issue in this way permits a more rigorous discussion than commonplace and breathless hyperbole about “machines destroying humanity.”

One caveat: the distinction between human and other animals is not entirely clear cut. This question of psychology separates the war-like activities of an ant colony from those of a chimpanzee community. But what about the distinction between humans and chimps? Chimpanzees follow similar (but not identical) motivations and ways as do human communities (Wrangham and Glowacki 2012). For the ants, behavior is situationalist—driven by immediate environmental cues (Gordon 2011; Keller and Gordon 2009). Primates, by contrast, seem able to take a step back and reflect on group dynamics, including the perspectives of others. Still, even chimpanzee strategy is qualitatively different from human strategy because humans have a more sophisticated theory of mind.

Strategy Is Purposeful, Even If We Don’t Know It

So strategy is both psychological and shaped by our sociability. And we can discern other broad features, applicable across species and human history. One is that strategy aims at some goal. The violence entailed in strategy is instrumental—it seeks to achieve something, rather than being nihilistic. That something need not be material gain, like resources or territory. These are the most obvious evolutionary imperatives, along with the opportunity to reproduce. But the goals of strategy could also be more existential in nature—and even then they may nonetheless have evolutionary value (for example, if resultant behaviors confer status or if it boosts resilience). Complicating things still further, sometimes the goals may be obscure to the strategists themselves (Payne 2015c). Indeed, decision-making can be shaped in the moment by a plethora of unconscious stimuli that influence how we decide to act and to what end (Eagleman 2011).

Sometimes the connection between our goals and the replication of genes is obscure. Consider religious motivations—the desire to please the gods through virtuous behavior, for example. The propensity to believe in supernatural, personified deities and to follow their dictates may be the result of an evolved tendency to see human-like agency lying behind events. That tendency could be the by-product of our extremely useful ability to imagine other minds, including minds not physically present. Moreover, imagining active deities, or even absent ancestors looking on from a distance, is an effective way of strengthening group identity and policing norms (Johnson 2016). These are adaptations that on the whole serve us well in an intensely social environment in which intuiting the intentions of others is of critical importance for our own well-being (Epley 2014).

Thus, any argument that strategy is instrumental clearly needs some caveats. Neither the purpose nor the ways in which strategy is pursued may be entirely clear to the conscious human agent who feels he or she is in control. Indeed, the promptings of our unconscious mind—quick, adaptive, and cognitively efficient—likely evolved ahead of our rich conscious human experience.

Even after we have acted, any attempt to intuit why we behaved in a particular way is tricky—plenty of reasons might occur to us as we consciously construct a plausible, satisfying narrative to retrospectively account for our behavior. Perhaps it’s not entirely unjust to suggest that the conscious mind, the one conducting an internal monologue, is rather more a rationalizer than a rationalist. So, while we may flatter ourselves that we are conscious, deliberative agents who purposively shape our own destinies toward some clear end, our unconscious minds are typically hard at work applying evolved heuristics or simplified models to streamline decision-making (Kahneman 2011). A powerful experiment by Benjamin Libet demonstrated this by showing that the motor neurons of a participant begin firing in preparation to move his hand well before the conscious decision to actually move the hand was under way (Libet 1999). This is often (and in my view erroneously) seen as a challenge to free will, but at the very least it demonstrates vividly the activities of the unconscious mind and the arrival, sometime after that fact, of conscious awareness and conscious justification. Strategy, this view of the unconscious mind suggests, is sometimes improvisational and discerned through a glass darkly. It unfolds in real time according to a logic that is often dimly perceived, in pursuit of goals that are likewise obscure.

Meaning and Prestige as Strategic Goals

Can we say more than that the goals of strategy are related to evolution? Or even that they are sometimes obscure and even unconscious? Yes, but only by keeping our focus on the intensely social world in which we evolved. Of course humans need to be concerned with security, access to food, and reproductive success. Yet our intensely cooperative and encultured evolution has imbued human existence with a bewildering variety of possible additional goals, including some that at first blush seem to run directly counter to evolutionary logic (e.g., celibacy among priests or the desires of a kamikaze or modern-day suicide bomber). Even here, however, an evolutionary account is possible. It’s just that the intermediate goal (extreme group loyalty) that serves the ultimate evolutionary goal (survival in a dense social network) is manifest in counterintuitive, and perhaps ultimately counterproductive, ways. Once again, strategy falls out of our social existence and the need to fit in and to understand what others want.

Two prominent social goals that animate strategic behavior are a search for meaning and a desire for prestige (Maslow 1968; Frankl 2011). The search for meaning, a distinctively human trait, reflects humans’ ultrasociability and draws on our conscious capacity for abstract expression, communication, and self-reflection. If we don’t understand what others intend or grasp how we fit into our larger social universe, we are disadvantaged. Moreover, this search for meaning fits well with the view of consciousness as rationalizer. We are motivated to construct a plausible and satisfying account of our own behavior. But satisfying in what ways? There are a number of possibilities. Leading contenders are the narratives that paint us in a favorable light: as being in control (an agency illusion); as likely to succeed (an optimism bias); and as rationalizing away failures and setbacks (Sharot 2012).

There is an important emotional dimension to meaning, for humans. On one dimension, meaning is relational—about categories and how they relate to one another. Intelligent machines are able to grasp this sort of categorical meaning and are getting better at it every day. But the emotional dimension of meaning is distinctively biological—an embodied response to a living organism’s interaction with its environment. This is true of “basic” emotions that we likely share with many other animals, such as fear or rage, and is also true of the rich palate of social emotions that we derive from our interactions with other humans.

On prestige as a core human motivation, it’s useful to distinguish between a dominance hierarchy that is common to primates and other social species, and a prestige hierarchy that is a distinctively human trait (though perhaps not exclusively so). Pronounced variations in the social lives of the great apes, species that are often compared with humans, have been observed. Chimpanzees and gorillas, for example, have distinctive social organization and reproductive strategies. They also have clear dominance hierarchies in which males compete to gain primacy, in part for access to food and in part for access to fertile females. Becoming the alpha male in a community of chimpanzees is a goal worth fighting for and sometimes even risking survival. Humans also compete for dominance—with physical attributes and displays contributing to establishing status. Napoleon Chagnon famously found that Yanomamö men who had killed were far more likely to be married and have children than those who had not (Chagnon 1988). Physical dominance persists as a factor even in modern, liberal, and ostensibly meritocratic settings. Business leaders are taller than average, and studies have found that women prefer men with deep voices or men whose dancing indicates higher testosterone levels.

Status can evidently still be earned from physical dominance. Yet humans also afford prestige to themselves and others that is not solely based on a capacity to inflict great violence. Jane Goodall noted how Mike, one of the chimpanzees she was following, attained alpha status by grabbing some gasoline cans and making a tremendous racket with them—that is, using tools to enhance his display (Goodall 1991). Here can be seen the rudiments of prestige: the use of tools or skill in a way that gains status. Our human prestige hierarchies are elevated to greater levels of abstraction, and the connection with dominance is often negligible. But prestige is a signal of cooperative value; we emulate successful behavior, as all advertising executives know, and we seek to gain the trust of prestigious individuals.

Social psychologists often ascribe human behavior in groups to the desire for status or esteem because, from an evolutionary perspective, being valued by the group brings rewards. In our rich and diverse human culture, exactly what will earn prestige is open to a degree of local interpretation, as anyone boasting of skill in alchemy in modern-day academia might attest. More broadly, however, prestige rests on the possession of skills that are valued, scarce, and difficult to acquire—or at least the appearance of possessing such.

Culture gives us a bewildering variety of possible ends, both individually and on behalf of the group. These concrete ends (to get the job, learn a musical instrument, see the world) are pursued in the interest of intermediate objectives (meaning and prestige) that in themselves are evolutionarily important. No wonder human strategy is so complex! And no wonder that there is an enduring debate about the causes of conflict. Conceiving of strategy as resting on evolve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I The Evolution of Strategists
• Part II Culture Meets Evolved Strategy
• Part III Artificial Intelligence and Strategy
• Conclusion: Strategy Evolves beyond AI
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index
• About the Author