Organizing for Insecurity and Chaos: Resilience and Modern Military Theory

Abstract

This chapter addresses the remarkable disconnect between resilience literature and military theory. War puts high demands on the resilience of military organizations. Western militaries have adopted organizational and operational concepts to cope with the myriad challenges of violence, turbulence, uncertainty and an adaptive opponent that, when studied against the background of resilience literature, are quite sound. The maneuvrist approach and the idea of strategic paralysis both target the multiple nodes across various layers of an opponent’s organization that allow it to display coherent and purposeful behaviour. Both aim to disrupt the resilience of the opponent. In turn, the concept of mission command and recent operational concepts such as network centric warfare and swarming are fully congruent with the literature about complex systems, adaptability and current insights on what produces organizational resilience in highly threatening and fluid environments: decentralization, formal and informal networks, solid feedback mechanisms, self-organization, mutual trust, and semi-autonomous units. This chapter suggests that, where resilience studies are still in the exploratory stage, without clear definition and coherent theory, there is benefit in studying military theory and military organizations, which are increasingly informed by the same literatures as resilience studies.