Order and Chaos in Society

Recently, I’ve found myself enveloped within some of the vast literature on conflicts – ranging from a history of genocidal acts, to a genealogy of military theory, to a reconstruction of counterinsurgency tactics within Baghdad, and an analysis of the emerging responsibility to protect (R2P) norm. Given the prevalence of conflict throughout the modern world, and throughout history, it’s somewhat surprising that most political philosophy has avoided any in-depth analysis of what conflict entails in an empirical way – in all its numerous variations. This surprise is compounded by the quality and detail with which much modern conflict is understood, suggesting that it’s certainly worthy of being taken seriously. The obvious rejoinder to this surprise would be that, as good leftists, we oppose conflict in all its forms. But this relies on two presuppositions – one, that all conflict is bad conflict (a somewhat ironic stance for modern philosophies of difference), and two, that the only solution to being mired in a conflict is to end the conflict. While not denying that these presuppositions have their moments, it also seems clear that they don’t hold universally. Moreover, even if both reasons for avoiding studying conflict were true, one would be led to ignore one of the most significant aspects of conflict studies: namely, their intricate balancing act between the complexities of the political world and the abstractions of theory. In distinction from nearly all contemporary continental politics, conflict theories are forced to prove their validity on the battlefields. The abstractions, and groundless and ineffective work of much of what passes for 'radical' continental politics (with the notable exception of some Marxism, some anarchism, and actor-network theory) leaves them content to air their grievances in academic forums without ever taking the effort to explain how a revolution would occur, or even what it would mean. By contrast, conflict theories can’t be content with hand-waving and empty structural analysis. An ineffectual theory is an ineffectual theory, and one that becomes painfully clear on the battlefield.

In this regards, Antoine Bousquet’s analysis of how military order is imposed upon the chaos of the battlefield is a significant step forward. His book, The Scientific Way of Warfare, reads like - at last! - someone went beyond a merely parasitical use of Foucault's historical works, and actually applied Foucault's methodology and historical acumen to an entirely new realm. (A symposium on Bousquet's book can be found here.) In this case, Bousquet analyzes military theory, statements from military officials, and official military doctrines, in order to uncover the different regimes of establishing order. Thus, rather than an endless discussion of biopolitics, sovereignty and disciplinary societies, Bousquet undertakes a novel historical analysis of four different regimes of warfare - the mechanical, the thermodynamic, the cybernetic, and the chaoplexic. Therefore, much like how Foucault uncovers various epistemes within his historical studies, or how Deleuze uncovers abstract machines guiding assemblages of matter and language, so too does Bousquet uncover the metaphors underlying the various regimes of scientific warfare - the clock, the engine, the computer, and the network.

Each of these technological artefacts presents one of the guiding forces for how military planners understood imposing order on a chaotic battlefield. As Bousquet writes at the very beginnings of his book, "Throughout the ages, military leaders have sought to organise and direct their armies so that they can best preserve their order and coherence when faced with the centrifugal forces of chaos unleashed on the battlefield."

The first regime approaches this problem through the mechanistic metaphor of the clock. Such a metaphor led military planners to believe in a world ruled by simple cause and effect relations, and capable of being modelled by universal laws (formulated in mathematical terms). Thus, the geometrical formation of armies was of key concern, as was the disciplinary training necessary to restrain individuals within the group formations. Technological advancements played a key role as well, contributing to the socio-technical assemblage constituted by science, politics, and society. As Bousquet notes, the science of ballistics and projectiles became central to fortification planning – with planners seeking the perfect set of angles and distances to both attack the enemy and defend against them. But crucial to all of this was the sense that conflict was totally manageable in principle. With the right set of mathematical and disciplinary tools, one could outperform any enemy.

With the advent of the second regime, this certainty faltered, as ‘forces’ became a predominant scientific, social and military metaphor. As thermodynamics came under analysis within science (with its focus on entropy and dissipation), so too did the belief in an absolute science of conflict come under scrutiny. The mechanistic universe was disappearing in all aspects of society. Warfare, in this time, increasingly became a matter of increasing the energy involved. Beyond the mercenary and temporary armies of the past, the military now became a matter of mobilizing the entirety of society’s forces in order to throw one’s entire weight against the enemy. Such a new shape of war was only possible with industrialization, as the new transportation systems allowed an entire country to be welded together into the war effort – weapons and ammunition built in one part of the country could be easily and quickly sent to the frontlines in order to sustain the army for months and years at a time. As such, war became ever grander in scale, reaching its culmination in the development of nuclear weapons. New tactics of warfare became available with the creation of mobilized units and aerial attacks. Rather than the rigidity and mathematical planning of the past regime, new value was given to speed and surprise. The past regime’s work co-existed with the new regime, but it now became important as well to allow for individual initiative and a newfound flexibility with regards to tactics. War, in other words, was no longer solely about perfecting the right equations.

The third regime, of cybernetics and the computer, again gave new impetus to the goal of controlling chaos within conflict. The creation of computers, and their abstract representation as Turing machines – basic informational processing systems – led to the idea of cybernetics. These informational systems could respond to their environment, thus allowing a new sort of flexibility to the units of war. The feedback loop between input, processing and output allowed military planners to conceive of all the military units as systems that could control chaos by reacting to their environment in an appropriate manner. These cybernetic systems became theorized as nested – from individual soldiers to battalions and brigades up to entire armies – with each unit acting as a system that responded to its environment and reacted accordingly, with the highest systems constraining the lower ones. These new ideas play themselves out in a number of ways. One of the most important was a result of the inability to use empirical evidence to predict how a nuclear war would proceed. Since any actual nuclear war would risk the total destruction of the USSR and USA, military planners were forced to use computer simulations to determine the best defensive mechanisms and the likely outcomes of any particular offensive action. Such simulations are only possible, of course, with a theoretical model of what each actor’s interests and means of action are. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, these types of simulations led to the policies of mutually assured destruction, with the belief that the most stable balance of power between these two superpowers was one where neither had an interest in initiating a hot war. Such simulations, and the ability to run them thousands of times with different variables and different outcomes, let planners again believe in the possibility of omniscience on the battlefield, banishing chaos and uncertainty to the past. While this removal of chaos was unattained in practice, the principle served as a guiding force for the development of cybernetic warfare.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the proliferation of both non-state actors and internal conflicts, the traditional analysis of war as a war between states became increasingly less relevant. In the face of internal conflict, insurgencies, international crime, and dispersed terrorist networks, the typical, highly hierarchical version of the military organization has become slow and irresponsive to its new enemies. As a result, military doctrine has once again taken up the theme of irreducible (ontological) chaos - this time in the form of 'network-centric warfare'. Building upon the findings of complexity and chaos theory, military theory has come to recognize the powerful self-organizing and fluid aspects of decentralized systems. In conjunction with modern communication technologies, this has allowed for an increasing distribution of power and independence to all aspects of the military. Such an organizational network has also given rise to new tactics, such as swarming (modelled after the biological phenomenon) where individual actors can self-organize into a single attack, then disperse in order to once again return later to attack. (The 9/11 attacks are a prime example of this.) This form offers resiliency and redundancy above and beyond any of the previous military forms analyzed, since any single actor is unnecessary (i.e. there are no irreplaceable leaders), and since each actor operates relatively independently.

The current versions of network-centric warfare, however, oscillate between two poles. On the one hand is the true decentralized vision of warfare, with each unit capable of acting on its own inside of generalized strategic goals. On the other hand is the more centralized version which uses the combined inputs of all the local units to construct a vision, for centralized command, of the entire battlefield. The latter again leads to the false dreams of omniscience, as well as micro-managing, that have always been a part of military theory. But the former is the mode of operation best suited to responding to current conflicts - with assymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics becoming a mainstay of contemporary fighting.

Colonel Peter Mansoor provides a perfect (non-conflict related) example of the power of truly decentralized control in Baghdad in 2003. In his account of his time commanding there, Baghdad at Sunrise, Mansoor points out how most funding for reconstruction went to large, centrally-determined and internationally-run projects. While these were useful, it would have been far more useful if more funding had been delegated instead to the commanders in the field. He notes that in trying to establish governance within the city, funding for small, local projects could have provided the new local governing councils with the legitimacy, respect and means to solve real problems that were crucial for establishing governance and accountability. Small local projects such as water treatment plants, generators, or repairing bridges to reduce traffic congestion would all have gone a long ways towards having the Iraqi people believe in their own government. Yet upper command refused to delegate enough money, leaving the broken infrastructure as a prime source for insurgency resentment.

The question of imposing order on chaos, however, goes beyond solely conflict issues - as the current Afghanistan-Pakistan situation makes clear. As the military extends its mandate into counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrines focused on "winning hearts and minds," the question of order also extends beyond the standard military focus. Order now becomes a social, cultural, political and economic imperative - with each subject to its own logic. The question of order is also a fundamental social question – whether it be counterinsurgency, nation-building, imperialism, humanitarian intervention, or a post-revolutionary situation. Establishing order and eliminating or adapting to chaos are perpetual social problems. While references to absolute deterritorialization are intriguing, they're ultimately unsustainable, and so order and chaos need to be intimately balanced.

In particular, the significance of instilling order points to some of the major hurdles of R2P situations. The ‘responsibility to protect’ is an emerging international norm which refuses to see state sovereignty as inviolable. In the past – most notably in the Rwandan genocide – external intervention against states’ internal conflicts was deemed a violation of the state’s inalienable right to determine what occurs within their own borders. (This is particularly significant in postcolonial societies which fought dearly for their independent sovereignty.) But with the massive destruction carried out in Rwanda, and the international unwillingness to make any real efforts to stop it, it became clear that the principle of sovereignty needed to be changed. As a result, in 2001 the ad hoc International Commission for Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) constructed the R2P norm which basically stated that sovereignty logically entailed that a state is responsible for protecting its own population. And in cases where a state was either unwilling or unable to carry out that responsibility, the international community had a legal and moral right to intervene to protect the population. Here’s the crucial part overlooked by every single critic of R2P, however: R2P works hard to avoid military intervention as a solution to problems. (That being said, Richard Seymour, aka Lenin's Tomb, has been an excellent analyst of the hypocrisies of humanitarian intervention - it just doesn't apply to R2P is all.) Military intervention has to be held for only the most extreme cases (such as Rwanda), and has to meet an array of criteria, including Security Council authorization, in order for it to occur. In other words, military intervention is an unlikely and rarely used aspect of R2P – not its sole raison d’etre. (See Gareth Evan’s The Responsibility to Protect for the single best work on what R2P actually entails.) Confusing R2P with military or humanitarian intervention is to miss the whole point of it. R2P is rather the institutional creation of a system for preventative action, as well as post-conflict reconstruction – action which can span the entire range from providing aid and training, establishing early-warning systems, restoring governance, imposing sanctions, providing security assistance and eventually military intervention in highly restricted cases. (We can think here of how the USA has blocked an IMF loan to Sri Lanka as a result of the recent fighting there – this is one non-violent way to try and compel a state to protect its own citizens.) So it is possible for one to consistently believe in the power of R2P while also rallying against the use of force in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Precisely because the use of force in those situations is or would be counter-productive, they don’t fit within the R2P criteria for the use of force.

Returning to the discussion of order and chaos, however, we can see that counterinsurgency theories provide, despite their militaristic leanings, important insights for the application of R2P. The basic point here, which I believe is incontrovertible, is that in many of the cases handled by R2P, the question is always one of either preventing conflict from erupting, or managing it so that it doesn’t become another Holocaust or Rwanda. In that case, any knowledge we can discover about how best to do this is useful for that project - particularly knowledge established on the ground from those actively involved in these issues. If COIN has an in-depth knowledge of how to manage conflict and how to reconstruct societies so that they can become functional once again, then it would be naive of us to not look there. More extreme commentators will see this as revealing R2P’s hidden agenda of militaristic or imperialistic domination, but the question here is simply one of doing the best possible job of minimizing the frequency and length of extreme cases of conflict. Moreover, as COIN has moved beyond simply militaristic imposition of order, it also reveals the social, cultural, religious and political conditions for stable societies - bringing it even closer with the aims of R2P to use every means possible to prevent mass atrocities. In other words, what COIN has studied is the actual evidence for how best to manage conflict – something which is crucial for understanding both (1) what situations aren’t amenable to what actions, and (2) how best to use the whole array of R2P options. An example of the former is the drone attacks in Pakistan, which are recognized even by many COIN theorists (David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, for example) as being counterproductive to the larger strategic aims of the war. Thus this action is unsuited for the Af-Pak war and should be stopped.

In the end, then, what is needed is to move beyond stale ideological arguments about imperialism and military intervention, and to recognize that good knowledge is good knowledge no matter what the source. Philosophy and humanitarian work and the responsibility to protect all have important insights to learn from military analysis (and vice versa).