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

Science and Strategic TheoryDominant scientific currents can, as part of a Zeitgeist, have a significant impact on theformulation of military theory. Strategic theory is the result of a dialectic process, as AzarGat explains:New and significant intellectual constructions usually emerge at times of historicalchallenges, fundamental change or paradigmatic shifts, when prevailing ways of interpretingand coping with reality no longer seem adequate. They express human efforts to come togrips with new developments and integrate them within meaningful frameworks. Rather thenbeing alone in their views, the thinkers who generate them usually make their names by earlysensing, conceptualizing, and turning into philosophical and political programmes thefeelings and notions which are then beginning to emerge, more or less hazily, around them.The edifices thus created then dominate until they themselves are rendered inadequate bynew paradigmatic changes 127 .Although Gat, together with Kober, in line with Stillman, point at the cultural andintellectual climate that acts as a source of ideas, viewpoints and methods, it is nevertheless agenerally understudied and ill-appreciated influence on military theory, in contrast to theones discussed in the previous chapter. That warrants a proper introduction on thisformative factor, especially in light of the fact that that Boyd’s work is strongly influenced byscientific insights, as he himself admits in the Abstract of A Discourse. Another motivation fora detailed introduction of the relation between science and strategy lies in the argument thatnot a small part of Boyd contribution to strategic theory may lie in exactly his introduction ofthe language of (then) novel scientific concepts into the study of strategy and formulation ofdoctrine.Both Gat and Kober agree that nineteenth century military thought was ‘dominatedby two contending conceptions of the nature of military theory, formulated during the age ofEnlightenment and the Romantic period, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuryrespectively. Broadly defined, they represent the two fundamental positions towards thestudy of man and human institutions which emerged in the wake of the scientific revolutionof the seventeenth century. One of these looked to the exact and natural sciences as a modelto be adopted and applied. The other, by contrast, maintained that the humanities weredifferent in nature from the sciences and could never be studied by the same methods’ 128 .Modern views on the nature of military theory originated from the most intenselyphilosophical period in European history. They were formed in response to the all-pervasive,epoch-making, and bitterly conflicting intellectual climates of the Enlightenment on the onehand, and Counter-Enlightenment or Romanticism on the other. The very idea thatsomething called military theory existed was the product of the intellectual gospel of theEnlightenment. Stimulated by the spectacular successes of the natural sciences, the men ofthe Enlightenment sought to bring everything under the domination of reason by creatingorderly sciences and disciplines in all spheres of human endeavor. Dominating Europe fromthe middle of the eighteenth century, the military school of the Enlightenment was burningwith an overriding sense of vocation to form a universal theory of war, based on immutablerules and principles, systematically taught, and applied to changing circumstances by thegeneral’s creative genius.127 Gat (1998), p.306.128 Ibid, pp. vii, viii.34