The Sociology of Military Science

Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design

Colonel (US Army Ret.) Chris Paparone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441187666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This groundbreaking work challenges modernist military science and explores how a more open design epistemology is becoming an attractive alternative to a military staff culture rooted in a monistic scientific paradigm. The author offers fresh sociological avenues to become more institutionally reflexive - to offer a variety of design frames of reference, beyond those typified by modern military doctrine. Modernist military knowledge has been institutionalized to the point that blinds militaries to alternative designs organizationally and in their interventions. This book seeks to reconstruct strategy and operations in "designing ways" and develops theories of action through multifaceted contextualizations and recontextualizations of situations, showing that Military Design does not have to rely on set rational-analytic decision-making schemes, but on seeking alternative meanings in- and on-action. The work offers an alternative philosophy of practice that embraces the unpredictability of tasks to be accomplished. Written by Colonel Paparone (U.S. Army, Ret., PhD) with a special chapter by two active duty officers, it will appeal to all in military and security studies, including professionals and policymakers.

1

The Institutionalization of Modern Military Science

Philosophy is an attitude of mind towards doctrine ignorantly entertained. . . . The philosophical attitude is a resolute attempt to enlarge understanding of the scope of application of every notion which enters our current thought.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD,Modes of Thought

. . . mathematics and physics . . . This type of thinking is applicable only under quite special circumstances, and what can be learned by analyzing it is not directly transferable to other spheres of life. Even when it is applicable, it refers to a specific dimension of existence which does not suffice for living human beings who are seeking to comprehend and to mold their world.

KARL MANNHEIM,Ideology and Utopia

The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.

GIAMBATTISTA VICO,The New Science

In this book, I treat military organizations and interventions as complex sociological phenomena; therefore, I use sociology as the principal basis of inquiry.¹ My intent, in the footsteps of Karl Mannheim (1936), is to examine the social construction of military knowledge and whether such an inquiry will lead to greater insights about designing (not to be confused with planning) militaries and military interventions.² The central argument is that modernism—as an institutionalized episteme—has served to limit frames of reference for Military Design.³ My quest here is both to disprivilege modern military science and to emancipate the designer or design team from its confines (Woolgar 1988, p. 8). As a secondary reason for inquiry, my hope is that the book will help demystify “artistry” with the hope of shaping a more flexible praxis for Military Design.

Critique of the modernist approach to military design

I argue that modern military science has been inadequate for practitioners who must deal sui generis with military organization and interventions. Modernism asserts that there is only one kind of knowledge—that which is legitimated only through an objectivist worldview and associated with the socialization of “normal science” (Kuhn 1996), where assumptions include

• Progressivism (the belief that all “problems” can be solved and that aprioristic knowledge accumulates and undesirable events and problems recur; one only acts rationally, with a substantially proven theory in mind—that planning for the future (the construction of foreknowledge) is more and more possible as theories become more valid and reliable predictors of future events and ready-made solutions are more and more viable);
• Logical positivism (a conviction that all causal relations are knowable and become more and more context-free in application—conveying the expectation of “the science of everything”);
• Reductionism (variables can undoubtedly be separated and structured in functionalized relationships with others and assessed through the “scientific” method); and
• Empiricism (an undaunted realist’s quest for physical sensory data as proof of truth, particularly tied to measurements which may serve tentatively as in-lieu-of proofs until scientific testing is complete).

In studying social phenomena, modernism would add derivative assumptions associated with the theory of evolution and microeconomic theory with correspondent derivative theories of structural functionalism and behaviorism. At its highpoint in the context of twentieth-century industrialization, modernism can be construed as a rather colorless, sterile, and drab “culture marked by both the benefits of mass production and the burden of alienation, depersonalization, excessive specialization, and bureaucratization” (Merkle 1980, p. 1). I assert that these underlying ontological beliefs continue to dominate the epistemology of modern military institutions and serve to limit Military Design as would

• ideologies in partisan politics that limit design of public policy (Schneider and Ingram 1997)
• science of engineering that would aesthetically deprive the architect who is focused exclusively on the functional design of a building (Lawson 2006)
• scientific management of efficient automobile production that deprives attention to the artful design of what is being produced (Lutz 2011) and
• computer-based instruction that focuses on knowledge comprehension and technical application while devaluing the emotional aspects of critical collaborative inquiry, limiting heuristic value, and restricting the possibility of improvisational and tacit knowledge.⁴

In contrast, postinstitutional interpretations recognize a contextual shift in shaping Military Designs governed by these “postmodern” characteristics (I compiled these from Moskos et al. 2000; Boëne 2003; Sookermany 2011)⁵:

• ambiguity over “civil-military” governance when warring with supranational militants (a.k.a. “irregular forces” who fight “irregular wars”)
• confusion that ensues when militaries attempt to operate outside the traditional modernist sociological frame of “organized violence” and reframed more broadly into “organized anarchy”⁶
• erosion of the “sovereignty” (to include citizenship identity) of the modern nation state and the inept theories of realpolitik (perhaps paradoxical to idealpolitik expressed by Boëne 2003)
• moving away from quantity toward quality and technical specialization of forces
• purposeful manipulation by modern militaries through public relations and leaning more toward institutional survival
• insufficiency of titular doctrinal concepts applied to military interventions that are too complex for a stable, positivist science to work
• epistemological displacement from expertness in knowing-in-military-practice to the skeptical awareness of the certain ambiguity of learning-in-military-practice and
• supranational warring parties that make the efficient, modern, behavioral-engineering of organizational design (e.g. mass production of materiel and replication of tasks, conditions, and standards of training and specialized military education) of military mobilization inadequate (perhaps making improvisation-in-action a more important value)

This interpretive shift demands alternative sociological paradigms for framing Military Design. Other sensemaking options, antithetical to institutionalized modernist frames, may include interpreting military interventions as

• complex social phenomena that may be alleviated or managed but never, in the mathematical sense, “solved”
• researched through exploration of social constructions of reality (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1967; Blumer 1969; Searle 1995)
• context-specific with historic resemblances⁷
• emotionally charged and spiritually motivated
• artfully crafted and aesthetically pleasing
• fraught with competing values, ethical dilemmas and paradox
• addressed through ongoing, pluralistic judgments and
• requiring endless, existential-like, searches for meaning by those who participated and by the historians who make sense of them in context.

These become the revised conditions for thinking⁸ about military action—constructed with both meaning and behavior. While modernist epistemology would focus on the latter, henceforth, I will especially emphasize linguistic structures and the deeper meanings associated with military action.⁹

A postinstitutional approach to Military Design, then, admits that experience is sui generis and that each situation requires a continuous, pluralist search for extra-institutional frames that can provide alternative meanings. The following guidelines reflect postinstitutional (more pluralistic) ethics that would support the demands of this shift toward this more eclectic, transdisciplinary practice of Military Design:

• Treat military interventions as context-dependent (not necessarily tied to a modernist view of the history of warfare which aims to progressively turn historic knowledge into positive, context-free knowledge, often labeled “lessons learned,” “best practices,” or “doctrine” and reorient on situational uniqueness);
• Remain ontologically and epistemologically flexible (doubtful of claims to “expert” knowledge, doctrinal entertainments, “operationalized” variables, and pre-engineered tasks while appreciating continua that serve interpretations oscillating between objective to subjective ontology and between atomistic and “chaoplexic”¹⁰ epistemology) (Mannheim 1936, p. 13);
• Value institutional reflexivity (always faced with novelty, refrain from turning to rational-analytic models of choice and strive to remain humble, open to “radical” methods of inquiry, pragmatic skepticism, and deviance-in-practice);
• Promote critical discourse among a multiplicity of participants in as democratic ways as possible (recognize that appeals to oligarchic and “expert” authorities are doubtful when dealing with sociological phenomena; remain vigilant that military science is sociologically relational rather than objectively conclusive); and
• Accept that Military Design may require a considerably long period of time to reflect on the merits or disappointments in- or of- militaries and their interventions that were intended to alleviate social situations and that the “side-effects” of complex interventions depend on meanings and interpretations that people attach to them (there is no objective “truth” in reflection on merits or disappointments; rather, various “truths” emerge, sociologically, over time; hence, “truth” involves retrospective judgment and never as prospective as, say, proponents of operations research and systems analysis—ORSA—would claim).

My intent, with the help of my colleagues who wrote Chapter 6, is to weave these ideas into the fabric of the book with the hope that the reader can return to explore deeper meanings that may unfold around them.

Multiple-Frame approach to military design

The first thing any ethical scholar of warfare should do is to admit his or her philosophical bases (and biases) of argument (often hinted by epigraphs such as the ones at the start of this chapter). I feel that I have already waited too long in this introduction to express them. To set this stage, my favorite description of philosophy comes from Lewis Feuer (1975), who sees the philosopher’s lofty goal as a “genuine, un-counterfeit, un-imitative expression of the person’s experience in relation to the universe. . . .” He continues:

. . . a philosophy is the fullest self-discovery of an individual and what [s/he] stands for. A philosophy is one’s own to the extent that the individual rids himself of the effects of clichés and catchwords, placards, parades, slogans, and watchwords; disengaging [her/himself] from the social counterpressures of ideological clubs, circles, peer and populist groups, professional orthodoxies and associations, thereby surmounting the laws of fashion, the individual can define for [her-/him- self, her/his] individual standpoint (p. 187).

Compare this with his description of ideology:

. . . the outcome of social circumpressures; it takes philosophy, and reduces it to the lowest common social denominator. . . . the emphasis is on the being ‘one of us,’ and the free, uncontrolled, venturing idea is suspect. An ideology is an ‘ism,’ that is, a philosophical tenet which has been affirmed as the axiom for a political group. . . . But above all, the ideology closes the door to search and doubt . . . ; the ideology claims answers that are certainties . . . ; it closes questions; it records terminal collective decisions; it is not a franchise for the individual questioner (p. 188).

From Feuer’s descriptions, one can sense that philosophy inherently calls for both a passion for wisdom and challenging social taboos—the desire to look outside the potential psychic prison of our institutionalized ideologies, struggle to suspend disbelief in alternate framings, and peer through window frames that offer relational points of view.¹¹ This ideal of wisdom, intertwined with a sense of humbleness, is so eloquently described by John A. Meacham (1990):

The essence of wisdom . . . lies not in what is known but rather in the manner in which that knowledge is held and in how that knowledge is put to use. To be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness . . . [to] both accumulate knowledge while remaining suspicious of it, and recognizing that much remains unknown, is to be wise. . . . [Thus] the essence of wisdom is in knowing that one does not know, in the appreciation that knowledge is fallible, in the balance between knowing and doubting (emphasis added, p. 187 and p. 210).

Equally compelling, and more concise, is Karl E. Weick’s version, “Wisdom is the quality of thought that is animated by a dialectic in which the more one knows, the more one realizes the extent of what one does not know” (2009, p. 19). Note in these expressions how doubt becomes a near synonym with wisdom. This view of philosophy, imbedded in my mindfulness while writing this book, is: if one appreciates the limits of explaining complex, ever-changing phenomena, one’s best hope is to find as many articulations as possible, never accepting just one. Nevertheless, one can still act while at the same time exercising disciplined speculation about one’s meanings about the action. Sociologist Peter L. Berger (1963) ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1 The Institutionalization of Modern Military Science
• 2 Frame Awareness
• 3 A Critique of “The Usual Suspects” for Military Design
• 4 Relationalism
• 5 The Reconstruction of Military PROFESSION
• 6 Un Petit Récit From the Field
• Coda: Designing Meanings In- and On- Action
• References
• Index