Military scientism and its discontents

Abstract

The asymptotic limit theorems of control and information theories allow the examination of systemic failures afflicting “scientific” approaches to armed conflict such as reflexive control, the OODA loop, and East Asian alternatives. Large-scale combat, like other major human enterprise, is a form of dialog between cognitive institutional entities only loosely following shifting “laws” that most often express a path-dependent historical trajectory constrained by powerful cultural riverbanks. Such “conversations,” while having their own grammar and syntax, can involve matters of science, engineering, and technology, but they are not, of themselves, scientific in the Western sense. They may, however, be studied using the methodologies of historiography, social science, human ecology, and the like. Moving much beyond this is to invoke an alternate reality.