Emerging Doctrine and the Ethics of Warfare by Dr. Tim Challans.

... Of the two general approaches to explore human activity, the scientific approach has had as its project the goals of explanation and prediction while the philosophical approach has worked toward understanding. One general strategy is the scientific one, maintaining that reason explanations could also be causal explanations. Adopting this first strategy, of which the effects-based approach remains a part, are the disciplines of social science that want to render human action under scientific regularities, such as empirical political science, economics, and so on. The other general strategy moves away from a scientific view of human activity remains philosophical. An alternative to the effects-based approach is emerging in some circles. That alternative is called systemic operational design (SOD). SOD is very much more philosophically sophisticated than EBA, and has its roots in modern science and philosophy. EBA remains medieval—pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical.

EBA is an unsuccessful attempt at being scientific while SOD is philosophical. The former is an attempt at gaining a level of certainty and control through a decision procedure, while the latter is a critical method. Decision procedures are closed, complete, decidable, while critical methods remain open, incomplete, and acknowledge uncertainty. The first is pseudo-scientific because one of the features that differentiates between science and pseudo-science is the concept of falsifiability. No matter how much contrary evidence appears in front of EBA advocates, they can deny that the evidence falsifies their pursuits. The model can be completely backwards from ground truth, yet the model can persist—this is how we have failed to recognize or acknowledge something as significant as the current insurgency (as of a year ago at JSCOPE the military was denying one). The former doctrine begins with assumptions and the latter approach begins with questions, thereby revealing their relative stances on knowledge. Even though SOD is philosophically interpretive—not pretending to be scientific—it remains consistent with modern scientific practice and understanding.

Some are skeptical of SOD because they think it is rooted in Israeli history and culture and practice. While these states of affairs may have influenced and motivated the primary theorists, nobody, not even the Israeli theorists, see SOD as being a uniquely Israeli artifact without application outside of the Middle East. They like the theory because it is more reliable as a theory, and they recognize that because of their philosophical frame of mind. Many also resist this alternative because of practical problems facing the implementation of the idea: the vocabulary is different; U.S. military culture obviates dialogue, and so on. This paper is more about the theory than about the practice. We should get the theory right first. The medical community did not give up on germ theory because of the difficulties associated with operating in a clean environment. The practical matters will emerge naturally, and the military will adapt after the theory is right.

SOD has to do with capitalizing on emergences rather than teleologies, recognizing the way humans act in an open system in the real world rather than misrepresenting human behavior through a flawed representation, as EBA does. Force is not ruled out in the SOD concept, but force is not the first resort either, so SOD opens the door for considerations within the moral domain as a necessary feature of the system. Understanding SOD is difficult, though, for it requires one to be able to understand scientific evolution, the way systems change naturally forward through time rather than systems (particularly systems of systems) being made to change artificially backwards through time based on some preconceived plan. Advocates of SOD understand the power of the theory of evolution as a scientific theory, and many EBA advocates do not. It is no accident that many EBA advocates prefer intelligent design over the theory of evolution and that many of them live in Kansas.