Chaos, Criticality, and Strategic Thought.

摘要

A revolution of unprecedented scale is taking place that will transform strategic thought in ways yet unimagined. The bittersweet truth is that this has little to do with the 'new world order' set to follow the end of the Cold War and the success of Desert Storm. The true revolution in progress is a scientific one, and its effects will change the pattern both of warfare and of strategic thought. Yet our attention is fixed on this year's international reshuffling. Absorbed by the transitory, we ignore the epochal. Scientific advances are pushing us beyond our reductionistic Newtonian concepts and into the exotica of chaos theory and self-organized criticality. These novel lines of scientific inquiry have emerged only in the past three decades; in brief, they postulate that structure and stability lie buried within apparently random, nonlinear processes. Since past scientific revolutions have so transformed conflict, it is essential for US strategists to understand the changes in progress. One reason why this is important is technological: new principles yield new classes of weapons, just as basic quantum theory and special relativity ushered in nuclear devices. A second and more fundamental motivation for understanding scientific change is the fact that our view of reality rests on scientific paradigms. The world appears to us as an intricate, disordered place, and we search for frameworks that will make sense of it all. These frameworks derive overwhelmingly from the physical sciences.