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The scientific way of warfare : order and chaos on the battlefields of modernity

The thesis of the present work is that throughout the modern 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 of 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 modern 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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:645656
Date January 2007
CreatorsBousquet, Antoine James Aime
PublisherLondon School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2703/

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