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

A Discourse and the scientific ZeitgeistScience, strategic theory and thinking strategicallyThe survey of the scientific Zeitgeist thus far has not only offered a window into the literatureBoyd studied, it also introduced ideas, themes and insights that Boyd thought relevant formilitary strategy and strategic thinking. Some observations about the impact of the scientificZeitgeist on Boyd’s work and on the interpretation of it will conclude the examination of thisformative factor.The first observation is that Boyd’s contribution to strategic theory lies in part in hisuse of the insights of the new sciences. Boyd deliberately made science an essential elementin his work. The panorama of the scientific Zeitgeist of the past decades, incorporatingvarious references to Boyd’s work and based on part on the works Boyd read during theperiod he developed his ideas, strongly indicate the extent and ways science permeatedBoyd’s essay and his subsequent briefings.It starts with an essay, which is firmly grounded in the epistemological debates of thesixties. The influence of science increased over the years. Even Patterns of Conflict, which is atheart a survey of military history and for which he studied works on military history andstrategy, the list of sources he consulted includes several books from other scientificdisciplines. Interestingly, an 1981 version of Patterns of Conflict lists Dawkins, E.O. Wilson andGregory Bateson as the few notable studies not directly related to military history andstrategy. In the final 1986 edition he expanded the number of slides, and the number of nonmilitaryworks in the bibliography grows to 30. Not surprisingly Burton describes Patterns ofConflict as the product of Boyd’s analysis of historical patterns of conflict and his synthesis ofscientific theories for succesful operations 173 . In briefings developed after Patterns of Conflictthe number of references to scientific insights, the number of scientific works included in thebibliography, and use of scientific illustrations increases significantly, while the number ofreferences to, and illustrations from military history decrease markedly. The briefing StrategicGame of ? & ? is almost devoid of references to military history. In The Conceptual Spiral thereis no military history at all but science and engineering dominate the slides, showing howboth grow and shape our lives.On a somewhat different level science played a different role too. The effort itself ofreading, studying, analyzing, taking ideas apart, making connections by analogy with otherbooks and articles he had analyzed, and creating a new synthesis would become as much anintegral part of his ideas on strategy as the content. It represents the didactic approach Boydtook toward analysis and synthesis. His research on cognition, on learning, on creativity alsoinspired his idea that making strategy, devising military plans works like these mentalprocesses. Strategic theory development is like the scientific enterprise which is like the wayorganisms develop, modify or discard schemata. And as the literature he read manifested athorough interdisciplinary approach, strategic theory, like cognitive sciences, systems-theory,complexity and chaos theory, should incorporate and follow from a thoroughlyinterdisciplinary and even creative approach. Innovation in ideas came not from onlythinking inductively, but the real advances are the breakouts of creative thinking beyond thelimits of the then known. Boyd finds fault with the separation of inductive and deductiveapproaches. One needs both and must mix and match analysis and synthesis. It is not amatter of choosing between cumulative inductive processes; rather, their combination173 Burton, pp.46-47.166