{"id":3083,"date":"2009-04-20T17:35:16","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T17:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3083"},"modified":"2009-04-21T02:47:42","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T02:47:42","slug":"richards-review-of-the-scientific-way-of-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3083","title":{"rendered":"Chet Richards: Review of The Scientific Way of Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Dr. Chet Richards<\/strong><\/a> has a methodical review up at DNI<\/strong><\/a> on Antoine Bousquet’s<\/strong> new book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Scientific Way of Warfare<\/a><\/h2>\n

….Bousquet opens with and ultimately answers the question of \u201cdoes network-centric warfare (NCW) work?\u201d To reach his conclusion, he proposes four \u201cregimes\u201d in the application of science to modern warfare:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mechanism<\/strong>, whose \u201ckey technology\u201d was the clock, whose scientific framework was Newtonian, and whose military format was what we\u2019d call first generation warfare \u2014 line, column, conformance, regularity<\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. Thermodynamics<\/strong>, characterized by engines, whose framework included entropy, energy, and probability, and whose military paradigm was 2GW (Bousquet does not use the generations of war model)<\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. Cybernetics<\/strong> \u2014 computers \u2014 whose scientific concepts included \u201cnegentropy,\u201d negative feedback, homeostasis and whose military model would be modern 2GW, with heavy top-down, real time command and control<\/strong><\/li>\n
  4. Chaoplexity<\/strong>, where networks reign, whose framework is built upon the new sciences of non-linearity, complexity, chaos, and self-organization, and where warfare is conducted by decentralized cells, teams, or swarms \u2014 what we would call both 3GW and 4GW (p. 30)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Subsequent chapters take the reader on a tour of these ideas in turn, exploring their evolution as scientific patterns and their influence on the warfare of their, and subsequent, eras. So the chapter on mechanistic warfare introduces Vauban, close-order drill, and culminates in Frederick the Great\u2019s Clockwork Army. The next chapter, Thermodynamic Warfare, concludes with Clausewitz, which is a stretch, of course, since the great Prussian died in 1831, some 20 years before the first publications in that discipline. But with liberal interpretation of the massive text of On War<\/em>, passages can be found that seem like precursors of the Second Law. Bousquet does point out that these interpretations were not made in Clausewitz\u2019s day but were retrofitted by later analysts and generals, including as he also notes, John Boyd.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Read the rest here<\/a>. Good stuff!<\/p>\n

    <\/ahref=\"http:><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Dr. Chet Richards has a methodical review up at DNI on Antoine Bousquet’s new book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity: The Scientific Way of Warfare ….Bousquet opens with and ultimately answers the question of \u201cdoes network-centric warfare (NCW) work?\u201d To reach his conclusion, he proposes four \u201cregimes\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,420,133,337,60,78,336,39,32,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-authors","category-book","category-chet-richards","category-dni","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-military","category-science","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}