Chaos in War: Is It Present and What Does It Mean?
Abstract
Chaos theory has been applied to numerous areas in the physical and social sciences. Research into areas such as strategic decision making and arms control indicate that chaos theory may apply to conflict and warfare. Other research projects have examined arms control war games for chaotic behavior and used chaos theory to describe Clauswitzian friction in warfare. However, none of this research has examined data associated with past wars to see if chaos is actually present. The objective of this research was to apply several techniques to warfare that have been used to determine the presence of chaos in other fields and to explore the implications of the presence of chaos to warfare. The data used for this research included aircraft loss data for the entire Vietnam War, Allied casualty data for their advance through western Europe during World War II, and historical US defense spending. These data were selected because they represent several levels of war and include interaction with an enemy. In addition, they reflect an output of the process of war. Because of their importance, they are reliable and documented parameters. The specific tests used in this work were the autocorrelation function, the power spectrum, the fractal dimension, and the Poincare map. The results of this work indicated that chaos is, in fact, present in warfare. The implications of this result include determinism in warfare, the applicability of computer simulation, dynamism of warfare, nonlinearity in warfare, the applicability of fractal geometries, and the possibility of multiple attractors. These implications are explored for their meaning in the context of warfare.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA640735
Entities
People
- David P. Nicholls
- Michael Dolgov
- Peter Axup
- Randal C. Franklin
- Todor Tagarev
Organizations
- Air Command and Staff College