Heuristics, Anecdote and Applying "Art": Why War Theorists are Kidding Themselves
Abstract
Contemporary war theorists face a bedeviling thicket of problems precluding accurate forecasting or estimation. War is a complex, multivariate, and difficult-to-define enterprise; it is a quintessentially human activity, arising from man's emotional and rational makeup, his civilization, his genetic heritage, and his environment. War theorists' personal familiarity with the planning, practice, and consequences of war drive their adoption of a philosophical -- nonscientific -- framework for understanding which ignores underlying physical phenomena in favor of broad "principles." Yet just as philosophers have been unable to divine the purpose of human existence through discourse, war theorists fail to explain the causes and outcomes of human conflict when they substitute anecdotal evidence for data, derive heuristics from small sample sizes, and eschew science as "reductionist" -- incapable of accurate prediction in a realm as complex as human behavior. We must replace empirical (observation-based) methods and artful heuristics with the rigorous tests of hypothesis-based science, building up from low-level physical and social phenomena arising in the neurophysiology of human brains, to eventually answer behavioral questions unsolved for millennia.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 17, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA500598
Entities
People
- Fred G. Kennedy Iii
Organizations
- United States Army War College