A number of things struck me.

One was how very anglospheric this debate seems to be. There are others who have pondered the interactions of technology and military affairs, not least Paul Virilio. This might be forgiven on the ground that only the US really matters; but the burden of the argument is that this may not remain true for long unless they abandon their attempts to harness decentralization, networked warfare, etc. to an all-powerful and all-seeing high command.

Secondly, Antoine shows historical sensitivity as he lays out the basic taxonomy: clock, engine, etc. This is also evident in his reading of Clausewitz. Yet to be reminded of the pendulum between three magnets is to be made aware that the essence of the problem addressed here has long been intuited, and I’m not sure that those using analogies and terminology drawn from those working with chaos and complexity in the natural world gets us very much further. None of us can do the maths. In any case Antoine makes it very clear that he is not interested in the direct applications of complexity (e.g. to weapons systems) but to the absorption of these ideas – imperfectly as it turns out – into US doctrine. This reaction is, of course, that of a historian, mouthing one of the historians’ mantras: nothing new under the sun. And I accept that Antoine does make the case that there is something new here, namely the temptation to combine increased channels of information and information-processing capacity with operational (or do I mean tactical) decentralization (p. 233).

Still, here’s another historian’s gripe. Antoine’s main worry is that US military folk think they are learning the lessons of the chaoplexic era but are in fact holding tight to the Cold War desire for total oversight (topsight!). I suspect he’s right. But a tactic that might have been used to good effect here is to have exposed the extremely brief time during which centralized control was ever thought possible and to associate it more firmly with modernity in general (not only with technology). Here part of the story of the inception of control-fantasy is to be sought in the later nineteenth century, in the expectations aroused by telegraphy and the ensuing disappointments. Corelli Barnett (1970, 330) thought that the telegraph put an end to the operational autonomy of field commanders but von Moltke (after the 1866 campaign) realized that the telegraph was not much use for controlling commanders, but could be used effectively to monitor developments, press home advantages or compensate for weaknesses that resulted from unprecedentedly independent tactical initiatives (Van Creveld 1985, 145-6). It was only later that the German Chief of Staff were seduced by the mirage of total control and surveillance into a disastrous attempt to direct operations from Luxembourg, far to the rear of their lines (Van Creveld 1985, 153-5). In short, the German army had form on this one before the US army was much more than embryonic.

More down-to-earth and present-day: there is a fixation here with land power to the neglect of naval and air warfare. Is that the pattern of US military thinking, Antoine’s selectivity, or my misreading, I wonder?

Another thing: where does all this leave those responsible for procurement. I’m told the Eurofighter will have to last into the forties of the present century. Hm! And isn’t the whole argument too concerned, perhaps, with battlefield tactics rather than grand strategy?

Stray thoughts, all.

If the next meeting is shorter than I fear, I’ll be back to read the traffic that’s built up over the weekend. If not, further apologies and congratulations on a stimulating text and an interesting way of launching it.

Charles Jones is Reader in International Relations at the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University, and the author of several books, including The Logic of Anarchy (1993, with Barry Buzan and Richard Little), E.H Carr and International Relations (1998), and American Civilization (2007).

In this forum the contemporary city has been described as ‘feral’. I have no doubt that this is how it is seen in the warfighting laboratories of the advanced industrial world. This is a figuration of the city as a wild entity that poses the problem of domestication. The city thus becomes figured as a dangerous place that must be ordered by military force. This is, of course, not a new trope in the city’s relation with war: Haussmann’s boulevards exemplify this logic; Hitler hesitated at the edge of Stalingrad; even siege warfare treated entering the city with extreme caution.

The problem I see here is the way that the city is seen as a zone of plurality hostile to the ordering regimes that would try and control its multiplicity. This is a common trope in the history of the city. If you forgive me quoting my recent book, Urbicide (shameless, I know):

In Being Singular Plural Jean-Luc Nancy notes that ‘as long as philosophy is an appeal to the origin, the city, far from being philosophy’s subject or space, is its problem’ (Nancy 2000, 23). Nancy’s comment elegantly captures the stakes of urbicide. The ‘philosophy’ that Nancy is referring to – that philosophy that seeks to ground ontology on an essential foundation – is shorthand for the conceptual imaginary that underlies exclusionary political forces such as ethnic nationalism. According to such conceptual imaginaries, Being is founded on a particular principle and thus predicated on a notion of homogeneity and purity. All that cannot be attributed to such a foundational principle cannot be seen as proper Being and, hence, must be excluded [and, I would add destroyed].

The issue here is the way that regimes of reason treat the multiplicity of the city as a problem that is amenable to their regimes of order. In treating the problem of the city as one of order advanced industrial militaries will repeat this cycle.

Moreover, it seems to me that his will miss the real issue at stake in the metropolitanisation characteristic of contemporary urbanisation: namely the way that it is networked and thus contains within itself the potentialities of precisely the same violence as the warfare that regards it (from outside the city limits) as an object for potential ‘ordering’. That is to say, just as the US Army or IDF look at the city with chaoplexic vision in the hope that techniques of swarming might order its unruly spaces, the networked city is already providing the technological and discursive resources for the swarms of insurgents that course through (and frequently attack) its infrastructure pathways. The figuring of the city and war as separate zones/forces is thus comprehensively problematised.

We may thus see militaries eschewing metaphors of ordering. It strikes me that this is what the IDF are doing when they look to notions from Deleuze and Guattari for inspiration. Is the next phase of Antoine’s story thus one in which the metaphor of the rhizome and its cellular recombination becomes the guiding trope for military organisation. If so, what kinds of technologies and strategies will it entail (apologies for asking another futurology question)?

Martin Coward is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. His research focuses on post-structuralist theory and political violence. He is author of Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (Routledge, 2008).

First, my sense of the US officer corps is that it has a deliberately inculcated duality that mirrors some of the dualities in this discussion. It is, on the one hand, a cultivated self-image as "warriors." It has been an evolution beyond self-identification as "soldiers," and on the handful of occasions where I have asked what the difference is supposed to be, what I've been told is that - to the extent it signals a difference - soldier identifies an important set of virtues and duties, based around honor and obedience and discipline within an ordered structure. The concept of warrior is intended to include those, but to go beyond them to suggest a broader sense of "self-starting," entrepreneurial - very much the sense that is associated with the "captains' war" in Iraq - a great deal of responsibility and initiative devolved upon the junior officers and below. There was a sense that the sole virtue of being a soldier was simply standing around waiting for orders, rather than figuring out what needed to be done and doing it.

I don't know how extensive that understanding is but that's how I've had it explained to me. Obviously there is a certain amount of tension between that entrepreneurial understanding of being a warrior and conforming to the discipline that comes from the top down - and, interestingly, and possibly simply because I'm a lawyer, I've had it suggested to me that the thing resolving the tension between those is an overall obligation of everyone top down, bottom up, to conform to a set of legal rules and obligations that override everything else. The idea being that the tension is resolved in a sort of universal law that, regardless of one's place in the hierarchy, oone must conform to and obey. That special notion of law – not simply a command backed by a threat, but something legitimately accepted by all the 'warriors' - in turn ties warriors to law, and law to honor, and honor to a professional and personal identity. This was one lunchtime conversation; how widely shared any of that is, I don't know. Although clearly someone has thought hard about why to use so extensively the language of warrior rather than merely soldier.

On the other hand, the warrior-soldiers also have enormous faith in the power of technology. They believe deeply in capital intensive war, even while thinking of themselves as warriors. It feels in spirit less like the idea of the soldier as technician tending to the infernal machines in a kind of neutral way, and much, much more like the sense of gamers whose gaming technologies have been made real – they can act as individuals with great powers in their hands. So when I say faith in technology, I mean technology as a way of magnifying personal projection of power as much as anything else. Obviously that is not especially so when one considers air power, sea power, all of these standoff technologies in which one really is a technician tending the machines. But even the development of robotics that Charli Carpenter and I have discussed some at CTLab - even the Predator - involves a sense of individual projection of power, a hand at the controls even if one is not present. Or the battlefield robotic vehicle guided by the hand with the joystick, who is a soldier directly in the field, on that same battlefield. It is a sense much closer to that of the gamer for whom technology is very personal rather than the impersonal machines of high modernism. Much of it, in other words, is technology in the service of the warrior, not technology that merely converts soldier to minder of machines.

In conversations I've had with, as it happens, wounded soldiers, their descriptions of what combat should be like is that it should be upclose, because that is how, at least in today's environment, you make it discriminating. There is no desire for or sympathy with the soldiers of the Great War or the Second World War, cannon fodder in the true sense. Their self-sense is that of commandos, never a mass as such. And fighting in the urban setting, as one recuperating (he was going to be fine) junior officer told me, requires that one fight house to house because otherwise you could never root out the enemy while sparing the innocent. He thought of it as a bit like police work, which I thought was a big stretch, but I did understand his sense that it had to be close in to make it discriminating. At some point, technology will reverse that, I imagine - robotics might well alter the way in which urban fighting is made discriminating, by detection technologies that allow much more standoff fighting with greater precision.

Second, however, in speaking with US officers at a more senior level, as well as civilian and military planners, I would say that the movement intellectually is not especially toward the "scientific" world view - that feels actually a little passe. Of course it is scientific, in the sense of applied science to bring on better technology. What is newer and more cutting edge is the growth of world view of cost-benefit analysis. This might seem odd to say - after all, when has war fighting not been about cost benefit analysis at some level? But I mean by this the application - and more profoundly the intellectual mind set - of opportunity cost, discounted probability theory, the whole array of tools taken from contemporary risk analysis in finance and the social sciences. The approach reminds me more than anything of Cass Sunstein, in something like Worst Case Scenarios, applied to military thinking. The language of present value, discounting and a whole range of metaphors drawn from modern financial theory.

In one sense, it has always been there. How could military thinking not be about cost benefit analysis - when it has always been built around military necessity? But there are differences and, peculiarly, one of the differences seems to me something that drops out - something that has always been better articulated in military ways of thought than anywhere else, but which tends to drop out in the new social-sciencey thinking. That is - don't look so surprised, please! – the distinction between strategy and tactics. But you can see the problem. If you are adopting wholesale the language, analytics, metaphors of game theory, especially - well, game theory doesn't really have a distinction as such between strategy and tactics. It is not a feature of games as such; it is a way of playing certain games. Philip Bobbitt discusses this somewhat in his Terror and Consent; I discuss it in passing in a TLS review of that book. The difficulty of letting go of the strategy-tactics distinction is that you are reduced to discounted probability analysis and opportunity cost analysis of what quickly - not necessarily inevitably, but certainly a tendency - reduces to dealing with risks on a seriatim basis, "event-specific catastrophism," I think I called it in my Bobbitt review. That's essentially what happens in Worst Case Scenarios, and it forms the basis for much of the "sophisticated" critique of the war on terror; proper discounting of risk, it says, will tell you that we are overinvested in trying to prevent terrorism.

But if you try that as a general case, you won't have much of a basis for strategy in that or any other instance, because strategy seeks to move above the "seriatim risk" analysis. Especially there will be no room to consider gambits. Gambits, after all, by definition go outside the serial risk scenarios; that is the point. In that sense - not intended this way, but it arguably has emerged this way – the Iraq war turned out post hoc to be a strategic gambit that invited a loose affiliation of Islamist jihadists to make their stand in Iraq. They took the (unintended) gambit, thinking they would win, which they might have, but it does not seem to be playing out that way. Whether you think that analysis correct or not is not actually my point. It is, rather, that it is a whole way of thinking that doesn't have purchase within the new social science of risk and game theory, any more than particular strategies in chess are foundational to general game theory. And yet the actual fighting of wars is far more like playing a game of chess (or any other particular game) than it is thinking through the abstract categories common to all games. And the general theory of risk analysis, precisely because it applies to, well, everything - discount the probabilities and compare courses of action – is of far more limited assistance in actually playing an actual game of war than it might appear.

So I find it puzzling, and a little alarming, that there seems to be a fashion these days within the US military, at least among some of the intellectuals and planners who keep a finger on the pulse of larger intellectual movements, to adopt forms of thinking that seem to me to give up, without good reason, some of the most original contributions of military thinking to general intellectual thought.

Kenneth Anderson is Professor of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. He has published extensively, and writes at Opinio Juris.

Some years ago, I studied street gangs. Street gangs emerge among disaffected youth in impoverished neighborhoods, often those of immigrant communities, or racially subordinated minorities. Males hanging out on street corner create their own groups of disaffected youth, who become oppositional groups associated with assaults, fighting, drug use, stealing, and occasionally murder. Fights occur, often with lethal weapons, and crimes are committed. And as a measure of status, such groups often take on the names of other street gangs with whom they want to identify. Thus in the 1990s, in a number of cities there emerged gangs calling themselves Crips or Bloods who created a lot of trouble for their neighborhoods and the police. Such gangs often created an ideology of "in for life" and identified a charismatic leader whose influence could occasionally glow brightly, but also often faded. Researchers like Malcolm Klein who studied the street gangs found that this was nothing more than an ideology, and that in fact gang members who were not killed or arrested often eventually "aged out." Klein argued that such street gangs were not "franchises" seeking to expand like McDonald’s (as some law enforcement argued), but were in fact organizations that "proliferate" in particular socio-ecological conditions. He noted that the leadership was often ephemeral, and was not in fact in a strong position to command and control members of the street gangs as in an army, or even a McDonald’s. Street gangs could be extraordinarily dangerous, but this was a product of the chaos they created as much as a master plan.

The police who were called on to oppose the proliferation of street gangs are of course a classic command and control bureaucracy. In my view, this created a problem. One result was that they began to frame the gang problem as being one of "ring-leaders," "franchisees" and "shot-callers." Individual members became "soldiers." John DiIulio predicted in 1995 that gangs "will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips...look tame by comparison..." This rhetoric in turn coincided with the militarization of police forces in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, as they sought to challenge a foe rationalized as being an opposing army (i.e. a term they could recognize easily), rather than the disaffected, violent, and chaotic youth that they often were. The former policies resulted in the militarization of the Los Angeles Police Department and an emphasis on solving big crimes, and arresting big criminals, often at the expense of "the little stuff." A number of scandals emphasizing the excessive use of force emerged. A new police chief was eventually hired who in turn implemented "Broken Windows" policies emphasizing the importance of neighborhood cohesion, and responding to “small crimes” which damaged that cohesion. This resulted in police officers engaging more with the community—or in affect becoming social workers (ok, that is an exaggeration, but it makes my point). Crime rates declined in the early 2000s, and the army of super-predatory Crips franchises somehow never emerged.

It has always seemed to me that the enemy that the United States is opposing in the "War on Terror" whether it is framed as Al Qaeda, radical Islam, or terrorism in general is more like the diffuse chaotic gangs that Klein described, and not the "army of super-predators" for whom policing policies were developed in the late 1990s, and current military doctrine seems focused. Certainly, some groups with a command and control capability like Al Qaeda have occasionally emerged. But, it seems to me that adapting the military to a more "chaoplexic" approach focused on radical Islam as a "networked social movement" rather than a conventional army is an admission similar to that which the LAPD made when they shifted to the Broken Windows policy. Radical Islam seems to be as much the consequence of "proliferation" of an ideology of religion and violence, as "franchising" of Al Qaeda, or other jihadists groups. Developing a chaoplexic response seems to be an implicit acknowledgment of this change.

But this leads to another question, because developing a chaoplexic capability sounds much more like shifting the overall purpose of the military into something that does not involve the primary mission of the military, but more towards the type of police and social work which emphasizes the importance of social cohesion. My question would then be, if this is the case, at what point does the "fight" against Al Qaeda and other similar products of the proliferation of radical Islam be a policing or social work problem, rather than a military one?

Since the symposium is also explicitly concerned with cities, I think we should bring the urban question back to the fore. In my answer to Martin Coward, I somewhat shied away from the topic but would now like to offer some tentative thoughts that I hope might provide a springboard for further discussion. Martin rightly noted that the nature of the urban battlespace is itself playing a role in shaping contemporary forms of warfare. What I would like to add to that is that chaoplexity is also increasingly manifest in the development of architectural theory and practice as well as the way in which we think of urban spaces and dynamics in general. The totalising modernist conceptions of architecture of a Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe have given way to more organic and localised projects concerned with the various feedback dynamics with the existing human or natural environment. Geographers and urban planners are increasingly focusing on the self-organising dynamics of cities (such as in this recent book by Stephen Marshall) rather than advocating utopian top-down reorganisation of urban environments. This recently posted item on CTlab is further evidence of this evolution. Simultaneously (and perhaps not coincidentally) we seem to be seeing major cities gaining growing autonomy from the states which have dominated them in the past few centuries - notably in the way some cities conduct forms of direct diplomacy with other cities, and more generally the increasing density and intensity of links between world cities that bypass the state. I would be curious to hear the views of participants on this and more broadly the relevance of the urban environment to the direction armed conflict is taking.

The legal aspect of the emerging modalities of war is one that I have not really considered but which in all likelihood will be of great importance in shaping them, all the more in the case of a particularly legalistic culture such as that of the United States. Typically law is that of states and yet we are talking about a growing involvement of non-state actors that, furthermore, frequently don’t adhere to the existing conventions. What does this mean for the future of laws of war that I understand have been to a large extent founded on notions of reciprocity? I would also be interested in hearing about whether the decentralisation of the chain of command which chaoplexic warfare advocates poses any problems for the present laws of war and the procedures for their enforcement - and if so, how these might be resolved.

Finally a point prompted by Craig Hayden’s thoughtful contribution and that I raise as a potential objection against my own thesis. How seriously should we take the rhetoric of complexity or of science more generally, at least within the military? While there is no doubt that a core of military theoreticians believe quite sincerely in the application of scientific ideas to war, does any of their substantive content survive the politics and doublespeak of the military bureaucracy? In my chapter on cybernetic warfare, I do note that the language of systems analysis was often used to merely validate decisions that had been taken on other grounds (internal politics, industrial interests), thus potentially reducing it to a mere scientific veneer. The way in which network-centric warfare has half-heartedly adopted chaoplexity in such a way that it remains compatible with the habit for large procurement budgets and many existing entrenched interests is more grist to that particular mill. While conceding some genuine validity to this point, I would still argue that these practices nonetheless testify to the very prestige accorded to scientific method and discourse, a prestige and dominance over other discourses that could not be such if these did not have some real past and present effects on perceived military effectiveness (all the more with their close association to technology). Nevertheless I think it is a point worth raising and which others may want to run with.

In general the thing I am most interested in is the way that you treat the adoption of scientific metaphors by military planners as the adoption of models of reason intended to dispel chaos. This is what I meant when I said that you seem to privilege reason. You seem to imply therefore, that both chaos and order exist as empirical states of affairs and the route from latter to former is via reason. But there may be another way to see this:

1. As David Campbell has noted in Writing Security, security discourses arise out of a profound anxiety generated by ambiguity and lack of certainty. He shows how first religion and then medical science provide schemas for reducing the anxiety by imposing schemas of interpretation that allow us to domesticate the seemingly wild and unpredictable world. Might we not also see the adoption of scientific metaphors by the military in this light?

2. Moreover, if we have regard to the problem of the disenchantment of warfare we also see that war needs rationalising in the modern world. War is a brutal and animal event. It relies on people doing terrible things to each other. It might be seen as no surprise then that scientific metaphor is adopted in order to represent (literally re-present) this activity. Science has the veneer of distance and respectability. It gives the impression that killing is merely an organisational problem. The same can be seen in the scientific discourses of the death camps and in the various debates concerning humane forms of execution (where the veneer of science has been employed to give the impression of legitimacy).

Thus my question becomes this: in addition to the use of scientific metaphor by military planners as if they offer rational insight into technical problems, is there also an affective reason for the emergence of such discursive tropes? That is to say are not the scientific metaphors adopted not because they speak to technical problems, but rather because they satisfy a need to obscure our anxieties and potential revulsion? If this is the case, might we not need an ontology that does not simply treat the assemblage as the connection of regimes of science, technology and force, but also understands the manner in which reason is always supplemented by affect?

Martin Coward is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. His research focuses on post-structuralist theory and political violence. He is author of Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (Routledge, 2008).