Paradigm Shifts and Revolutions in Military Affairs

Thoughts below are extracted from the Maneuver Warfare list on Yahoo. I guess it is okay if I plagiarize myself to get this blog up and going.

Military science is, especially in American hands, "tempted to pragmatism". Kuehn's insights on the history of science are undeniably interesting. But I would suggest that we are overly embellishing the argument by assailing all systematic thought in the arena of military affairs with mumbo jumbo about "paradigm shifts". One of the critiques of Kuehn's work cited 21 distinct variations in his use of the term "paradigm"; the author of this critique was one Margaret Masterman, a student of Wittgenstein and a pioneer in the area of computational linguistics. I would be very grateful to anyone who could actually find an open source digital copy of this paper, which was written IIRC, in 1965. From long association with the US military, it is my view that what Charles Peirce conceived as "abductive reasoning" or "inference to the best explanation" is the underlying means by which hypotheses are formed in what we may refer to as military science. See the following Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference_to_the_Best_Explanation

When one considers the milieu of military theory, it readily apparent why abductive reasoning, which is formally flawed logic, the specific fallacy being that of "affirming the consequent", is a primary means by which soldiers evolve new methods, what we lovingly refer to as "tactics, techniques, and procedures". When sample sizes are large and mathematically tractable, induction is indeed possibly. But these conditions do not hold on an emerging battlefield, nor are they, to my great sadness, often achievable in battle labs, either. One is left, therefore, with a set of experiences, however gathered, from which one forms hunches. Once these hunches have become formalized into authoritative doctrine promulgated by the official magisterium of the Armed Forces, they now become the subject matter of "military science". Now, this probably sounds harsher than I truly intend...in this case, even bad science is better than no science at all. Under Soviet rule, the Russians strove mightily to make their military doctrine "scientific", as good Marxists and positivist intellectuals ought to, always and everywhere. The results, while quite elegant in many respects, were also meager in distinguishably superior results. The Soviets should have realized that abduction is the more democratic way of thinking, but the advantage of methodological rigor is that one can baseline one's military doctrine, and subject it to only incremental change, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, go back to the whiteboard, and do it all from scratch based on the most recent lessons learned, as the pragmatic Americans do, what with their paradigm shifts, and never-ceasing dogma mills. If nothing else, Americans will never be bested in getting product out the door.Interestingly, not only does Peirce claim that the ability to reason abductively is a result of human evolution,

http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~wirth/inferenc.htm

http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/idm/personen/mhoffman/papers/abduction-logic.html

it may also be said that the Darwinian theory of evolution itself is an example of abduction at work.

http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/abductionstrategies.htmlhttp://orange.eserver.org/issues/6-1/graham.html