Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

advances in knowledge, adaptation, i.e., evolution. Neo-Darwinist perspective dominated thepopular scientific literature from the late seventies onward. And the processes of cognitionplayed an increasing role in these fields. As Jeremy Rifkin noted in 1987,the old Darwinian view of “survival of the fittest” is now being cast aside in some quarters infavor of a new view of “survival of the best informed”.According to standard Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, each species up the evolutionary line isbetter able to utilize scarce resources more efficiently. The emergent theory characterizeseach species up the evolutionary chain as better adept at processing greater stores ofinformation in shorter time spans 2 . Already Boyd’s first presentation carries the marks of thisperspective. Boyd’s ideas about war and strategy are pregnant with Darwinian notions. Thisstarts with the opening remarks in the essay Destruction and Creation, where he notes thatstudies of human behavior reveal that the actions we undertake as individuals areclosely related to survival.Hence Boyd’s statement that the goal of an individual is:to improve our capacity for independent action.In the opening slides of Patterns of Conflict this surfaces again when he discusses humannature. The goal, again, is to survive, and to survive on one’s own terms, or improve one’scapacity for independent action. Due to forced competition for limited resources to satisfythese desires, one is probably compelled todiminish adversary’s capacity for independent action, or deny him the opportunity to surviveon his own terms, or make it impossible to survive at all.Life is conflict, survival and conquest.And he actually notes explicitly that in studying war:one is naturally led to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and The Conduct ofWar.Also in Organic Design for Command and Control, again he refers to Darwin stating thatwe observe from Darwin that the environment selects [and] the ability or inability to interactand adapt to exigencies of environment select in or out 3 .This was not a coincidence. Various works discussed in the previous chapters had referred tothis theme. Now this perspective was gaining profile among popular scientific books. Majorworks Boyd had read on “complex systems” dealt with evolution of chemical, biological andsocial systems. And it was this concentration on the dynamics of complex systems, whichshow emergent properties and operate not, as in cybernetics, in equilibrium, but in stead far from2 Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars, The Primary Conflict in Human History, (Henry Holt & Co, New York, 1987)p.185.3 Organic Design for Command and Control, p.20.122