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

Novelty enters strategy when Boyd concludes that winning and losing revolves around thecapability to deal with uncertainty and to exploit this feature of novelty in the contest withopponents:Since survival and growth are directly connected with the uncertain, ever-changing,unpredictable world of winning and losing we will exploit this whirling (conceptual) spiral oforientation, mismatches, analysis/synthesis, reorientation, mismatches, analysis/synthesis 89 .It seems then that in Conceptual Spiral of 1992 Boyd comes full circle when we compare thisstatement with the following of Piaget:Dialectic over and over again substitute ‘spirals’ for the linear or ‘tree’ models with which westart, and these famous spirals or non-vicious circles are very much like the genetic circles orinteractions characteristic of growth 90 .Science obviously influenced the content of his slides, the themes of his thinking, as hasbeen amply illustrated. Boyd’s work is clearly rooted in a fundamental philosophical debate,and Boyd derived specific insights from this debate on the nature of knowledge and theprocess of knowing. Both revolve the pervasive presence of uncertainty. This theme wouldbecome the starting point, and the foundation, of his work. The cognitive process, whichthrough various strategies constantly exerts itself to minimize the effects of uncertainty, inboth individuals and organizations would become the second point of gravitation of hiswork. The third, and closely related process Boyd was constantly focusing concerned thedynamics of open systems, and more precisely, the myriad processes of adaptation at thevarious levels of a system and its subsystems. The question of course is whether hisapplication of these insights to the military environment was, and is, warranted.Early expectationsChaos everywhereBoyd formulated his ideas in a period which was marked by an emerging recognition in awide variety of phenomena of the existence of dissipative structures, entropy, non-linearity,far-from-equilibrium, self-organization, and evolution. It was a period which saw the movefrom equilibrium seeking systems, to open systems, and then to complex adaptive systems.And as Prigogine and Stengers noted already in 1984,This development clearly reflects both the internal logic of science and the cultural and socialcontext of our time 91 .Indeed, the studies revealed that these phenomena were not confined to the world of smallparticles or inorganic chemical substances. There was already an abundance of suggestions inthe literature Boyd was reading while developing his strategic theory that indeed humanconflict could show symptoms of chaotic and complex behavior. Boyd certainly was not thefirst one to apply the emerging insights from chemistry, biology, neurophysiology and89 Ibid, p.38.90 Ibid, p.125.91 Prigogine and Stengers, p.309.145