The Art of War in the Network Age

5Understanding (2): Fluidifying the Solid?

The quest to lift the fog of war is closely connected to the theorization of the art of war itself, the production of strategic thought considered in connection with friendly action but also – by the very fact of the dialectic nature of war – as it pertains to enemy action. The prevailing rationality to reduce uncertainty imparts a central place to both the art and the practitioner, but it also recognizes a permanent anxiety towards a rationalizing use of science and a predictive power. The temptation is not new in the history of strategic thinking: the geometric concepts of Von Bulöw, and even the attempts to define the principles of war (see next chapter), relate to this directly [GAT 91]. However, these ideas give way to the art and strategy that preserve a true freedom to manoeuver. A first major turn appeared with the mobilization of mathematics in World War I, and a series of methods which would be refined until the 1970s and encounter along the way the development of informatics capacities. The techniques of Operational Analysis, Operational Research and System Analysis appeared successively. As of 1914, Operational Analysis could mathematically determine the main models of combat conduct, giving rise to the “Lanchester laws” (1916), a series of equations never truly demonstrated, which could specify the quantitative parameters of combat that allowed for almost certain victory [BRO 73, LEP 87].

Operational Research was developed ...