Hybrid Warfare (merged thread)

[Mike Innes]

Hi All. I just picked up on the release of Frank Hoffman's report today, and I'm on UK time right now, at 00:57, so won't be reading it until tomorrow. I noticed some of the discussion here got to the usual frustration with definitionalism, the utility of labeling, the utility of the label "hybrid", and so on.

Well, here's another to chew on: at a recent British International Studies Association (BISA) meeting, Antoine Bousquet, a new PhD graduate from the London School of Economics, presented what I thought was a pretty interesting paper on scientific metaphor in military thought.

More specifically, he gets into how the metaphors of four broad era in scientific developments/thought in the West have, in parallel, shaped military understanding of and approaches to war. The first three are fairly straightforward: clockwork/mechanical (ordered), thermodynamic (energetic), and cybernetic (think information and information loops). For the fourth era (now), he adapted a hybrid (!) term, chaoplexity, drawn from chaos and complexity theory and coined a little over a decade ago in a book entitled The End of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age.

Personally, I'm skeptical not of the uses of new labels and reconceptualization in general, but of overlabeling and relabeling the issues of now. A lot of the confusion and debate on what is and what isn't "new", I think, is gobbledygook longhand for "what we don't yet understand" and "insufficient historical hindsight to get a grip". In this case, though, I think Hoffman's work is worth considering; so's Bousquet's.

Here's the link to Bousquet's paper: www.bisa.ac.uk/2007/pps/bousquet.pdf

Thoughts?

Mike