Land Warfare and Complexity, Part II: An Assessment of the Applicability of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems Theory to the Study of Land Warfare

Abstract

Abstract : The Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) asked the Center for Naval Analyses to assess the general applicability of the new science to land warfare. New Sciences is a catch-all phrase that refers to the tools and methodologies used in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems theory to study physical dynamical systems exhibiting a complicated dynamics. This report concludes that the concepts, ideas, theories, tools and general methodologies of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems theory show enormous, almost unlimited, potential for not just providing better solutions for certain existing problems of land combat, but for fundamentally altering our general understanding of the basic processes of war, at all levels. Indeed, the new sciences' greatest legacy may, in the end, prove to be not just a set of creative answers to old questions but and entirely new set of questions to be asked of what really happens on the battlefield The central thesis of this paper is that land combat is a complex adaptive system. That is to say, that land combat is essentially a nonlinear dynamical system composed of many interacting semi-autonomous and hierarchically organized agents continuously adapting to a changing environment.