![]() Russia successfully invaded Crimea in 2014 using information techniques and technologies that never rose to a level of “war” sufficient to justify a kinetic US or NATO response. There is also the question of what “war” actually means today. Technologies, not science, are where the rubber meets the battlefield. Technology helped Europeans, faced with this stunning power of mobile cannon, to redesign their fortresses to be resistant to them in a matter of a few decades. Earlier, technological advances in metallurgy and cannon manufacture, along with gunpowder innovations that made it more stable and transportable, enabled French artillery in 1495 to breach the previously impregnable Italian fortress of Monte San Giovanni and march down the spine of Italy. There was certainly deep science behind the Manhattan Project, for example, but it was technology that was tested in the desert in New Mexico in July 1945 and it was technology that was subsequently dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, no science of war.įurther confusing the titular question, science isn’t deployed on the battlefield, technology is. Any internally coherent and rational perspective on war, useful as it may be, must therefore also be partial, arbitrary, and inadequate in the event. Thus current thinkers such as John Boyd, who have been called “post-modern military strategists”-a great term, that-and who integrate a lot of modern science into their thinking, don’t make war out to be either “scientific” or “rational.” That doesn’t mean that a good general can’t fight a war more successfully than a bad one or that officers can’t be taught how to think about conflict productively, but it does mean that war is a complex adaptive system. Even Antoine-Henri Jomini, the contemporary of Clausewitz considered by many to have made the most rigorous effort to capture war in a rational, rule-based theory, never pretended war was predictable indeed, he explicitly noted that war was not a science, but an art.Īlthough warfighting strategies, not surprisingly, reflect the knowledge and zeitgeist of their times, there is no “scientific” theory of war, even in periods like today, when the scientific discourse dominates all others. War, as writers from Sun Tzu and Machiavelli onward have pointed out, is not a process that can be explained or managed through the use of applied rationality: there is no “science of war.” At the height of the Enlightenment, theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz and practitioners such as Helmuth von Moltke emphasized the “fog of war” and the interplay among politics, personality, and armed forces. To begin with, “science” is not really the relevant domain if one wants to explore war, because science is, as Dolman points out, a “way of knowing”-as well as, occasionally, an ideology that raises applied rationality to theological levels. It serves those who use its methods.” At which point the reader observes that the book has barely begun, and can’t help but wonder what the rest of the pages are for.īut before exploring that question, consider the publisher’s choice of title for a moment. To his credit and without unnecessary prevarication, Dolman provides the answer on page six of the book: “The bottom line is that science cannot end war, for science is less an ideology than a tool. Imagine the scene: you’re Everett Dolman, a faculty member at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies with significant security and military experience, and an eager publisher suggests the book title of Can Science End War? What do you do with such a naïve suggestion? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016, 200 pp.
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