House of War

Antoine Bousquet, a lecturer in international relations at Birkbeck with a germane set of research interests, recently wrote a paper that seems to be a preview of his forthcoming book, The Scientific Way of Warfare,: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. The paper — The Scientific Way of Warfare: Science and the Management of Techno-social Systems of Warfare — is at once a philosophical thesis on the role of technology in systems of social organisation (in the best sci-fi / theoretical traditions of CCRU), and a taxonomy of historical iterations of warfare and its understanding (in the best aeonic traditions of 4GW).

4GW is now seemingly somewhat passé, but Bousquet’s model is both pleasingly abstract and playfully eclectic (and perhaps more importantly, rather useless). In short, he describes four regimes of warfare based around four techno-scientific discourses. These discourses are embodied in the metaphors used to describe them and which, in some sense, the whole techno-scientific social apparatus is organised around. What Bousquet means is that techno-scientific advancements are to be understood primarily as social phenomena before they are to be understood as technological or scientific artefacts. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s famous example, the spur enabled or brought into play a whole social order (feudalism) that would have been unimaginable without the technology that allowed the charges of mounted knights.

There is some overlap with the four modes of war in the Generational Theory of War, but it does not map completely. Like the Generations of War, the four techno-scientific regimes develop chronologically, but previous regimes are often present; for instance, the clock-like discipline of marching is still practised to this day.

The first way of warfare is mechanistic, and the technological machine ascribed to mechanistic warfare is the clock. The clock is a metaphor for the Newtonian vision of the universe as inherently rational and deterministic, with God, the “divine watch maker”, regulating and ordering all things. The chaos of war is exorcised by the invocation of the clock in the form of drills and rehearsed, synchronised movements. Battle is fought by generals affecting centralised control through predetermined routine. Mechanistic warfare is embodied in the army of Frederick the Great.

The second scientific way of warfare is thermodynamic, and is embodied in the metaphor of the nineteenth century engine. Thermodynamics charts “the convertibility of all forms of energy and its inevitable dissipation into randomness through entropy.” After the optimism of the Enlightenment, time’s arrow suddenly pointed straight to heat death and the stability and rationality of Newton’s clock-work universe was superseded by a revolutionary fervour and mass upheaval. Ideologies of various hues proclaimed that “from the chaos of the age, a final and immutable order would emerge”. Thermodynamic warfare focused the power and drive of industrialisation into ever more destructive forms of violence, bringing the total mobilisation of populations and industry into the domain of war. Even as political systems and regimes were achieving unprecedented levels of control over their subjects, the battle field was collapsing into chaos, as embodied in the German army’s Auftragstaktik and the writings of the legendary strategist Carl von Clausewitz.

The third techno-scientific way of warfare is cybernetic warfare its machinic metaphor is the computer. Bousquet describes how the complexity of war increased in the thermodynamic age, the need for efficient logistical systems and communication technologies grew. In response, telegraphs and telephones were frequently deployed in wars and “stimulated growing scientific interest in the concept of information.” From this milieu emerged cybernetics, the study of complex systems, focusing on the study of information as a form of negative entropy, or “negentropy“. Thus cybernetics held aloft the promise of controlling chaos through information, specifically, through the operations of computers, a machine which also emerged from the painful heat death of war. Cybernetic warfare returned man to the dream of the mechanised and centralised ordering of warfare, as demonstrated by the Cold War’s use of system’s analysis and one-button-till-Armageddon hierarchical decision makers.

The fourth way of warfare is chaoplexic warfare and it’s dominant machinc artefact is the network. Chaoplexity is shorthand for the twinned (or at least, related) disciplines of chaos theory and complexity. Bousquet notes how under this new scientific regime,

Information remains the central concept, and in this sense chaoplexity is an outgrowth of cybernetics and information theory, but the focus on change, evolution, and positive feedback breaks with the concern for stability of the cybernetic pioneers. While some of the certainties and predictability of the existing scientific theories and methodology are terminally undermined, a hidden order is discovered behind chaos which itself becomes no longer an evil to avert but the very condition of possibility of order.

Cybernetic warfare failed in the messy jungles of Vietnam, and the simple dualism of the Cold War has been replaced with a confusing and granular-ised mass of conflicting forces. Chaoplexic warfare is described as being embodied in the doctrine of network-centric warfare, with its sci-fi imaginings of wired techno-soldiers and swarming, self-organised drones.

But as we know, chaoplexic NCW has not been without problems. We await the next phase.