“Life
is warfare and a journey far from home.”
-
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations
It
is assumed that man, by his very nature, attempts to impose his will
upon his environment and meets a resistance at some point leading to
a conflict of interests. This is where he strategises to meet his
goals, negotiates his interests, compromises his advances, or tries
to neutralize
the
opposition altogether. The modern nation-states
too
are like
the man, and therefore Cebrowski and Garstka have rightly remarked
that they
make
war the same way they make wealth.
In
18th
century, Pierre-Joseph Bourcet had conceptualized the war machine as
something which flows. This fluidity, he had remarked, was essential
and directly proportional to this machine’s maneuverability.
Discussions
on
warfare
must begin with the minds that conduct the conflict. Though
there are many aspects of the mind, the
psychological property which concerns us most is Intelligence,
for that alone primarily
concerns
displaying advantageous behavior over competition. Wars are won by
superior decisions, and better intelligence breeds better decisions.
It
is said that intelligence evolved in the ocean when a tiny bag of
saltwater known today as a neuron, sparked of electric current upon
facing danger. This meta-primitive event gives a very thorough
insight into the phenomenon of war for
it
marks the beginning of the precarious relationship between hunting,
warfare and survival, also
producing
an insight into the perpetuity of war.
Man
fought with
and alongside
horses and elephants, and now he
fights
alongside machines. Hobbes had
said,
it is every man against every man. That
is his
nature
after
all,
that of a competitive animal - from which arises the need to
cooperate, giving him his social nature. This self-competing
attribute also leads
to the
adaptive
and evolutionary
nature of his
intelligence.
Assuming
that war is the engine which makes the state, the
state deploys
a
system
using
which it can
execute
this “formlessness” -
or rather a system of systems that allows reconnaissance,
manipulation,
denial
and
retaliation.
Very
much how any self-preserving and self-interested entity would
function.
War
making
is
an
existential enterprise and utterly devastating to say the least, but
even man’s search for meaning goes a lot into why having
meaning
is important, he does
not simply
stop
himself at the threat of destruction.
The
ruminations of military philosophers have taught us that
the more destructive a military action the less strategic it is, to
the extent that it
is
safely
hypothesized that the art-and-craft of war lies in pursuing
victory while causing minimum harm.