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

Several of these ideas surface in Boyd’s vision on command and control, which here-conceptualizes as the process of appreciation and leadership, and which hinges on trust,implicit communication, open flow of information, and a shared view on the organizationalpurpose. Boyd argues for a relaxed approach on command, allowing units and commanderssufficient latitude to respond to and shape their rapidly changing environment. He advocateslateral relations among subordinate units which will encourage self organization. Boyd allowsuncertainty to exist and he want commanders not to impose a certain course of action but toset the boundaries of behavior, the overall direction and to develop relevant organizationalorientation patterns (schemata).In Boyd’s work there is also evidence of emergent properties, another character ofcomplex adaptive systems. Several small systems combine to form a higher level system withnew properties. The survival of this system depends on the survival of the smaller lower levelunits and the coherence of their behavior within the overall goal oriented behavior of thewhole system. Boyd’s theory expressly addresses attacking the cohesion of the enemy’ssystems and their behavior, and thereby paralyzing the entire system. He wants to disable theemergence of coherent behavior. Others too have examined the applicability of the newscientific worldview for understanding war.The non-linearity of the social worldNon-linearity, chaos, and warNon-linearity and Chaos Theory have also been applied to inter-organizational dynamics,such as war (which can be considered a clash of organizations). While the application of thenew sciences to organizations seems quite straightforward, it is still a conceptual leap fromchaos theory to the study of war and the formulation of military strategy, this leap hasnevertheless distinctly been made in the past decade. Lagging the exact sciences for sometime, Chaos and Complexity Theory were applied in rigorous fashion in the social sciences,including History and International Relations, to see the value of this emerging paradigm ofthe “hard sciences”.We live in a highly non-linear world, one social scientist asserted in 1987 120 . Chaostheory offers a reuniting of the so-called physical sciences with the so-called social sciences,concluded a critical author 121 . Two editors of a compendium of studies relating chaos andcomplexity theory to the social sciences agree, noting that ‘the social realm is clearly nonlinear,where instability and unpredictability are inherent, and where cause and effect areoften a puzzling maze. The obvious fact that social systems are historical and temporalsystems also stresses the potential value of chaos theory to the social sciences. Social systemsare typified by changing relationships between variables’ 122 . Three other editors of studies onchaos theory and sociology conclude very boldly that:120 Jay Forrester in L.Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott (ed), Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences, Foundationsand Applications (The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1996), p.2. See for other examples ofinvestigations on the relevance of chaos/complexity theory and social sciences for instance DavidByrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences, An Introduction (Routledge, London, 1998) and PaulCilliers, Complexity and Postmodernity (Routledge, London, 1998).121 Raymond Eve, et al (ed), Chaos, Complexity and Sociology, Myths, Models and Theories (Sage Publications,Thousand Oaks, Ca, 1997), p.279.122 L.Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott (ed), p.2.154