Surfing on the edge of chaos: Nonlinear science and the emergence of a doctrine of preventive war in the US

Abstract

This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies.