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

From a military perspective this sounds like the doctrine development process in whichprevious experience, established practices and organizational traditions and structures notonly shape a military response but also compete with new conceptual insights, more recentexperiences, opportunities for improving organizational fitness.At the heart of this theory is the individual as conscious strategic actor, makingdecisions on experience and knowledge. And what makes this theory relevant for Boyd’swork is that knowing – or mental schema through which people perceive action 43 - is at theheart also of Giddens conception of post-modernity 44 . Uncertainty is dominant, nothing canbe known for certain as no pre-existing foundations of epistemology have been shown to bereliable. We are living in a world of multiple authorities 45 . During pre-modernity andmodernity, scientist were considered authorities, part of the scientific tradition. Expertsdisagreed not just because they are defending different pre-established positions but in thevery service of overcoming those differences. They disagreed in the interest of auniversalism. The post-modern condition lies in the awareness of the paradox that whileexpert knowledge, and the general accumulation of expertise, are supposed to provideincreasing certainty about how the world is, precisely the very condition of such certainty isdoubt.Experts today are highly specialized of necessity in order to be recognized asexperts. There are however no experts who cover the broad canvas of knowledge andwisdom accorded to authorities in traditional societies and now there are various abstractexpert systems or fields. The meaning of expert knowledge therefore has changed.Subsequently the layman much choose which expert to trust and he must trust the smoothfunctioning of abstract systems (such as accountants, lawyers, financial experts, medicalspecialists).Moreover The 20 th Century proved that all claims to knowledge are corrigible(including metastatements made about them) and this has become the existential conditionin modern societies. To be sure, many forms of scientific knowledge are relatively secure.However, all must be in principle regarded as open to question and at every juncture apuzzling diversity of rival theoretical and practical claims are to be found in the ‘moving’areas of knowledge 46 .Furthermore, knowledge is a factor for change. We live today in a world which theleading figures of the Enlightenment did not anticipate. Such thinkers believed that the morewe get to know about the world, as collective humanity, the more we can control and directit to our own purposes. Increasing knowledge produced about the social and natural worldwould lead to greater certainty about the conditions under which we lead our lives; andwould thereby subject to human dominance what was once the domain of other influences.However, the connections between the development of human knowledge and human selfunderstandinghave proved more complex than such a view suggests 47 . Giddens labels thisconnection ‘the reflexive appropriation of knowledge’, and this is another element that marksthe transition from modernity to post (or high) modernity. Mirroring Boyd’s views onmilitary innovation Giddens states that:43 Ibid,p.1744 Giddens employs the terms reflexive modernization, radical-modernity, high-modernity and posttraditionalsociety.45 Anthony Giddens, 'Living in a Post-Traditional Society', in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, ScottLash, Reflexive Modernization, Stanford, 1994, p.87.46 Ibid, pp.86-88.47 Ibid, p.184.293