Hi 120mm,

This is a really good question - so good, in fact, that I snipped it out to create a new thread.

Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
Marc, all, is it time for the invention of another field to supplant Anthropology in the field of military matters? My MA is in International Relations, which was "invented" to supplant political science in the field of post-WWII nation-state relations.
Anthropology, in many ways, started as a Science of Humanity (Anthropos - Mankind; logos - "authoritative word" or science) for some (e.g. Wilson) and as a Science of Culture for others. Both of these projects were, for all intents and purposes, highly "inter-disciplinary" and neither, to my mind, has ever been completed despite several really promising lines of research.

While I am not really an historian of the discipline, I leave that to such greats as Regna Darnell, I *think* that one of the main reasons why Anthropology has not developed these lines of research is the limits of the languages we use. For example, much of what we study is "patterns": patterns of action, patterns of thinking, etc., and the relationships between these patterns and certain other factors (e.g. environment, livelihood, technology, etc.). But we use natural languages to describe almost all of this, rather than mathematics.

We have used mathematics in some instances, e.g. some of the early work by E.B. Tylor (e.g. On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions - 1888), most of the material on physical Anthropology, and some statistics in cultural Anthropology (mainly descriptive). Most of our work, however, doesn't use mathematics and this is, to my mind, a real handicap. I think that we will have to get over the disciplinary neuroses about math before we can move forward .

Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
I see so many interdisciplinary PhDs these days that you'd think some ambitious fellows could find a school interested in producing some PhDs who saw war as a "normal" state of human existence and would be interested in studying what makes people fight and what makes them decide to stop fighting.

It seems to me that COIN is the art/science of determining how to make a person/culture lay down arms, or decide not to pick them up in the first place.
Personally, I would hold that we should treat conflict, including both sublimated conflict such as business and sports and over conflict from politics to open warfare as a natural continuum. The differing "states", probably "quasi-stable equilibria" to use an old functionalist term, would have specific perceptually (i.e. cultural) defined boundary conditions and would probably operate under different inter-culturally defined "natural laws".

As such, COIN would be one particular engineering application of these "natural laws" in one particular state (an unstable state of "insurgency") whose counterpart would be insurgency theory (e.g. the old Maoist stuff). Each of these engineering applications could, then, profitably be examined in terms of their vector states or attempts to produce change in a particular dimension that defines the boundaries of the state (e.g. security, basic needs, social organization, etc.). If we took this line of thought forward, then the Islamist irhabi are practicing a rather different form of insurgency "engineering".

You'd need to call it something, though.....[/quote]

How about "Applied Interdisciplinarity" ? Actually, that's the term we are using for a new journal I'm involved in starting, and it certainly seems to capture the basic idea.

Marc