The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity Antoine James Aime Bousquet Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the PhD London School of Economics and Political Science l UMI Number: U615652 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U615652 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I, Antoine James Aime Bousquet, declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. _____________ 4#_________________________ 2 Irrtish Library of Political III °\ * °\ T- Abstract The thesis of the present work is that throughout the modem era the dominant corpus of scientific ideas, as articulated around key machine technologies, has been reflected in the contemporary theories and practices of warfare in the Western world. Over the period covered by this thesis — from the ascendancy of the scientific worldview in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to present day — an ever more intimate symbiosis between science and warfare has established itself with the increasing reliance on the development and integration of technology within complex social assemblages of war. This extensive deployment of scientific ideas and methodologies in the military realm allows us to speak of the constitution and perpetuation of a scientific way o f warfare. There are however within the scientific way of warfare significant variations in the theories and practices of warfare according to the prevalence of certain scientific ideas and technological apparatuses in given periods of the modem era. The four distinctive regimes I thereupon distinguish are those of mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and chaoplexic warfare. Each of these regimes is characterised by a differing approach to the central question of order and chaos in war, on which hinge the related issues of centralisation and decentralisation, predictability and control. 3 Table of Contents Table of Figures..............................................................................................................................6 Acknowledgements......................................................... 7 Chapter 1: Introduction................................................................................................................. 9 Locating the Thesis within the Historical Literature on W ar ..................................................10 Thesis Outline ............................................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2: Technoscientific Regimes of Order in Warfare — A Theoretical and Methodological Framework............................................................ ............22 Civilisation and the Will to O rder ..............................................................................................22 The Technoscientific Regime of Order ..................................................................................... 26 O f Discourse and Polymorphous Correlations: Science and Culture ................................... 31 The Power of Metaphors.............................................................................................................36 A Brief Review of the Relevant Core Texts .............................................................................. 39 The Four Regimes of the Scientific Way of Warfare............................................................... 43 Chapter 3: Mechanistic Warfare and the Clockwork Universe........................................... 49 From Mechanical Clocks and Automata to Clockwork Metaphor ........................................ 49 The Clockwork Universe: the Ascendancy of the Mechanistic Worldview ......................... 52 The Clockwork Heavens: Newtonian Mechanics and the Clockmaker G od ............. 54 The Clockwork Body and Soul: Descartes, La Mettrie and Mechanistic Physiology 58 The Clockwork State: Enlightened Absolutism ....................................................................... 60 Mechanistic Warfare: Frederick the Great’s Clockwork Army .............................................. 63 Chapter 4: Thermodynamic Warfare and the Science of Energy.......................................72 The Engine: the Industrialisation and Motorisation of Society ............................................. 73 Thermodynamics: the Universe as a Heat Engine ................................................................... 75 The Human Engine: Thermodynamic Bodies and Minds ...................................................... 79 Thermodynamic Warfare .............................................................................................................82 Clausewit2 ‘Translates’ Thermodynamics ................................................................................. 90 Chapter 5: Cybernetics and the Genesis of the Computer................................................... 96 Electromagnetic Telecommunications and W ar ...................................................................... 96 The Computer — Genesis and Embodiment of the Abstract Machine ................................. 99 Bits and Negentropy: Information Becomes Physical ........................................................... 105 Cybernetics: the Science of Control and Communications .................................................. 109 Cybernetic Organisms: From Computerised Brains to Biological Computers .................. 113 Social Cybernetics .......................................................................................................................117 Chapter 6: Cybernetic Warfare: Computers at War...............................................................121 The ‘Closed World’ of Cybernetic Warfare ............................................................................. 122 From Command to Command-and-Control ..........................:...............................................128 Operations Research and Systems Analysis: Solving the War Equation ............................ 136 Vietnam and the Failure of Cybernetic Warfare.................................................... 150 4 Chapter 7: A New Informational Paradigm: Chaos Theory and Complexity Science.................................................................................................................... 159 The Rediscovery of Non-Linearity: Chaos Theory and Positive Feedback ....................... 160 Complexity and Networks of Life at the Edge-of-Chaos ..................................................... 169 Chapter 8: Towards Chaoplexic Warfare? Network-Centric Warfare and the Non-Linear Sciences................................................................................................... 179 John Boyd and the OODA loop ..............................................................................................180 Uncertainty in War: the Non-Linear Clausewitz and the Future of Military Organisation .................................................................................................................................189 The Age of the Network............................................................................................................195 Swarming: Of Ants and M en ................................................................................................ 201 Complexity Goes To War? The Rise of Network-Centric Warfare....................................206 Chapter 9: Conclusions..............................................................................................................225 A Genealogy of Control .......................... 225 Some Final Thoughts....................................................... 230 Bibliography................................................................................................................................ 235 5 Table of Figures Figure 1: Christopher Coker's metaphors of war................................................................................. 40 Figure 2: Geometric warfare................................................................................................................... 65 Figure 3: The geometry of fortification................................................................................................. 66 Figure 4: Diagram of the von Neumann architecture ....................................................................... 102 Figure 5: Schematic diagram of an abstract communication machine ............................................ 107 Figure 6: Information feedback loop in a cybernetic system ............................................................I l l Figure 7: SAGE operator and his console (circa 1959) .....................................................................131 Figure 8: SAGE man-machine cybernetic lo o p ..................................................................................132 Figure 9: WWMCCS architecture........................................................................................................