Coping with the Bounds: Speculations on Nonlinearity in Military Affairs
Abstract
This book is about the implications of the new nonlinear sciences for national security and military affairs. Uncertainty abounds, and chaos theory rooted in physics and chemistry tells one why it is inevitable, pervasive, and won't go away. Fortunately, there is the "companion" new science of complexity, rooted in biology, that provides insights into what one can do about that. The author has adopted the term nonlinearity as a convenient umbrella for all of the various terminology and concepts that have proliferated in the field -- deterministic chaos, fractals, complexity and complex adaptive systems, self-organizing criticality, cellular automata, solitons -- because they all globally share this property. Nonlinearity reflects the science of the Information Age, rather than its technology. Currently, the awareness level about that science is low in comparison to the omnipresent technology. This book is intended to help correct this dangerous imbalance. The Information Age and its technology are largely considered to be synonymous in both the public and the military mind. The Revolution in Military Affairs debate to date has largely been shaped by that technology, including the pervasive rush of chip advances, computer utilities, and an increasingly Internetted world. The science is in its infancy, and is more about biology than about physics. It is some 20 years old, and required the computer to be invented before it could itself be discovered. This science has its own jargon: phase states, bifurcations, strange attractors, emergence, criticality and path-dependence. However, its message is post-Newtonian. Post-Newtonian means that the arrangement of nature -- life and its complications, such as warfare -- are nonlinear, where inputs and outputs are not proportional; where phenomena are unpredictable, but within bounds are self-organizing; where unpredictability frustrates conventional planning; and where a premium is placed on nonlinear reductionism.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA457916
Entities
People
- Thomas J. Czerwinski
Organizations
- National Defense University