Science, Technology and War

This book examines the relationship of science and technology to warfare, covering the modern era from the Scientific Revolution to the present day.

The constitution and perpetuation of the scientific way of warfare, marked by an increasingly tight symbiosis between technology, science, and war, must be understood in the context of the state's attempts to make war into a rational instrument of policy. Indeed, the formulation of strategy and of an assessment of the role of military force within it requires that states develop an understanding of the likely effects any course of action is likely to result in. The control and predictability which science appears to grant over the natural world has naturally been attractive to all those seeking an equivalent mastery over military events. The development of a scientific way of warfare has therefore to be understood in terms of in the quest for order, control, and predictability over a human activity so often characterised by chaos and chance. This book charts successive regimes of the scientific way of warfare in which different scientific paradigms, in association with the key technologies that marked those respective paradigms, have characterised the contemporaneous approaches to the conduct of war: mechanistic warfare, thermodynamic warfare, cybernetic warfare, and chaoplexic warfare.

This book will be of much interest to students of War Studies, military history and strategic studies.