Nonlinear Science And Warfare

This book examines the United States military’s use of concepts from non-linear science, such as chaos and complexity theory, in its efforts to theorise information-age warfare. Over the past three decades, the US defence community has shown an increasing interest in learning lessons from the non-linear sciences. Theories, strategies, and doctrines of warfare that have guided the conduct of US forces in recent conflicts have been substantially influenced by ideas borrowed from non-linear science, including manoeuvre warfare, network-centric warfare, and counterinsurgency. This book accounts for the uses that the US military has made of non-linear science by examining the long-standing historical relationship between the natural sciences and Western militaries. It identifies concepts and metaphors borrowed from natural science as a key formative factor behind the development of military theory, strategy, and doctrine. In doing so, Nonlinear Science and Warfare not only improves our understanding of the relationship between military professional identity, professional military education, and changes in technology, but also provides important insights into the evolving nature of conflict in the Information Age. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, military science, US foreign policy, technology and war, and security studies.

The aim of this book is to develop a unified approach to nonlinear science, which does justice to its multiple facets and to the diversity and richness of the concepts and tools developed in this field over the years. Nonlinear science emerged in its present form following a series of closely related and decisive analytic, numerical and experimental developments that took place over the past three decades. It appeals to an extremely large variety of subject areas, but, at the same time, introduces into science a new way of thinking based on a subtle interplay between qualitative and quantitative techniques, topological and metric considerations and deterministic and statistical views. Special effort has been made throughout the book to illustrate both the development of the subject and the mathematical techniques, by reference to simple models. Each chapter concludes with a set of problems. This book will be of great value to graduate students in physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, engineering and biology taking courses in nonlinear science and its applications.

Bousquet's landmark book examines the impact of key technologies and scientific ideas on the theory and practice of warfare and the handling of the perennial tension between order and chaos on the battlefield. Spanning the entire modern era, from the Scientific Revolution to the present, it offers a systematic account of modern warfare as the constitution of increasingly complex assemblages of bodies and machines whose integration rests upon a military assimilation of scientific thought. Reflecting the pervasive influence of scientific conceptual frameworks upon warfare, modern armies have been successively organised by reference to the paradigmatic technologies of the clock, engine, computer, and network. Conversely, major scientific developments and technological breakthroughs have become intertwined with the experience of war, especially since the Second World War's unprecedented mobilisation of scientific rationality and technical expertise. This increasingly tight symbiosis between science, technology, and war is at the heart of both the tremendous powers and enduring pathologies displayed by the contemporary military machine. In this new and revised edition, Bousquet extends the analysis to encompass the latest developments in the scientific way of warfare in the midst of renewed great power competition and a wave of technological innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics.

This book investigates cultural influences of competitive sports on U.S. and Chinese strategic thinking and tactical behavior. Most competitive sports owe their origins to human fighting. Although they are “ritualized contests,” competitive sports have retained many aspects of human warfare, especially the use of strategy and tactics that moves human contest beyond military clashes to the subjugation of opponents without bloodshed. Cultural influences usually go unnoticed. Indeed, Washington often conducts foreign affairs like football games without knowing that is the case. Likewise, Beijing moves in Weiqi style subconsciously. This book uncovers these influences.

Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess the characteristics of complex adaptive systems: combat forces are composed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts and are organized in a dynamic command-and-control network; local action, which often appears disordered, self-organizes into long-range order; military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium; military forces adapt to a changing combat environment; and there is no master ?voice? that dictates the actions of every soldier (i.e., battlefield action is decentralized). Nonetheless, most modern ?state of the art? military simulations ignore the self-organizing properties of combat.This book summarizes the results of a multiyear research effort aimed at exploring the applicability of complex adaptive systems theory to the study of warfare, and introduces a sophisticated multiagent-based simulation of combat called EINSTein. EINSTein, whose bottom-up, generative approach to modeling combat stands in stark contrast to the top-down or reductionist philosophy that still underlies most conventional military models, is designed to illustrate how many aspects of land combat may be understood as self-organized, emergent phenomena. Used worldwide by the military operations research community, EINSTein has pioneered the simulation of combat on a small to medium scale by using autonomous agents to model individual behaviors and personalities rather than hardware.