Science, Technology and War
Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity
Antoine Bousquet(Author)
Routledge (Publisher)
1st Edition
Published in April 2008
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-415-46055-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-415-46055-2 (9780415460552)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Content
1 Introduction 2 Technoscientific Regimes of Order in Warfare - A Theoretical and Methodological Framework 3 Mechanistic Warfare and the Clockwork Universe 4 Thermodynamic Warfare and the Science of Energy 5 Cybernetics and the Genesis of the Computer 6 Cybernetic Warfare: Computers at War 7 A New Informational Paradigm: Chaos Theory and Complexity Science 8 Towards Chaoplexic Warfare? Network-Centric Warfare and the Non-Linear Sciences 9 Conclusions Select Bibliography