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

ehavior, demonstrating the value of examining the formative factors of strategic theories.An awareness of the scientific Zeitgeist which Boyd deliberately followed, providedmetaphors and concepts that helped explain and understand Boyd’s arguments, anddemonstrated that the scientific Zeitgeist, which has since then been labelled as thepostmodernism era, offered Boyd new modes of conceptualizing strategy and war.The name of Boyd’s ZeitgeistBoyd as the first post-modern strategist?Boyd can be considered the first post-modern strategist both in content and in his approachto making strategy and strategic theory, in light of the similarities of his work with moderatepost-modern social theorists, with developments in post-modern security and strategicstudies, and because of the economic or technologist interpretation of post-modernism,which has spawned correlating views of post-modern war and post-modern warfare. In linewith previous attention for the formative factors of strategic thought, it is certainly warrantedto address the broader cultural and academic Zeitgeist in which Boyd operated whendeveloping A Discourse. It will furthermore indicate that the influence and thereforeusefulness of Boyd’s work did not end with the doctrinal innovations in the eighties.Boyd’s particular concern with, and take on epistemology, and the centrality in Boyd’swork of the factor of uncertainty, as well as the need for a multitude ideas and perspectivesfor understanding and shaping action (multispectrality), and his deconstructive method ofpulling perspectives apart and look for new possible connections and meaning, is shared withpost-modern theorists of the social sciences such as constructivism, deconstructionism andstructuration theory. Moreover, Boyd advocates a pluralist methodology for thinking aboutstrategy, for analyzing change in history, and for deriving insight from military history, whichis consistent with post-modern analysis.This connection should not be surprising as many works Boyd had studied alsofeature in studies on postmodernism, and key figures of postmodernism found inspiration inthe same works, findings and developments Boyd paid close attention to. Indeed, as a recenthistory of postmodernism asserts, in the 1970s and 1980s, after a long and complexmovement through various aesthetic and theoretical discourses, the “postmodern turn”emerged on the scene of science and social theory as a break from the mechanistic,reductionist, naive realist, and determinist worldview of Newtonian physics. Advocates ofpostmodern science claim that the modern scientific paradigm is giving way in the 20 thcentury to a new mode of scientific thinking based on concepts such as entropy, evolution,organism, indeterminacy, probability, relativity, complementarity, interpretation, chaos,complexity and self-organization. Five major sources of influence are listed, all of whichappear on Boyd’s reading list and in his work: evolutionary biology and ecology, quantummechanics and relativity theory, cybernetics and information theory, and chaos andcomplexity theory 7 .Developments in security and strategic studies mirror Boydian notions too about therole of theory, of frames of reference, of ideas and language as systems of meaning. Hisadoption of chaos and complexity theory to understand and express ideas concerning social7 Best and Kellner, pp.195-196. Interestingly, they find the historical foundation for post-modernideas in Kierkegaard, Marx, and in particular Nietsche. The fact that Boyd read Marx was alreadystated, the fact that Nietsche’s works Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Twilight of the Idolsare listed in his bibliography was not.286