First 10 pages of my new book, Reconceptualizing War's Fourth Chapter

Below is an excerpt from my upcoming book, 'Reconceptualizing War', coming out in April 2025 through Helion & Company Ltd. While the final edits and typeset work will continue, here are the first ten pages out of my FOURTH chapter. The introduction, first, second, and third chapters' first ten pages were posted in LinkedIn articles over the last month, located starting here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/reconceptualizing-war-first-10-pages-ben-zweibelson-phd-hpxxc/?trackingId=ZGukGtCpT%2Ba9gWslmJiTdA%3D%3D

Register interest in this book by clicking the link here for the publisher website and their newsletter that provides information on upcoming releases: https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/reconceptualizing-war-.php

Chapter Title: Functionalism (Part 2): Technology, Change, and Existential Violence Beyond Previous Manifestations

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Chapter Abstract:? This second of two chapters deepens the study of functionalism beyond the formative period of the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. War changed in dynamic, existential ways with the arrival of the Nuclear Age and new political and international tensions. Scientific management, technological shifts, and new disciplines for thinking about complexity would stimulate changes within this war paradigm. Clausewitzians, adhering to the Prussian’s original teachings would after the Second World War be reborn in a Neo-Clausewitzian adaptation for new social realities. They did this adjacent to Jominians in new technological clothing that continued the objective positivist orientation toward war. The rise of fascism in the early twentieth century requires explanation as it is positioned within the functionalist war paradigm, presenting yet another way functionalism in the twentieth century would diversify beyond earlier Napoleonic origins. Two world wars became central to how functionalism would morph into new variations, while also preserving certain original beliefs in new wrappings. In the Cold War, small conflicts would be waged with new, often strategically restrictive considerations to deter existential fears of a nuclear Armageddon. Rapoport’s concept of ‘civilian defense’ would take on new pathways beyond the original Second World War manifestation, leading to new positions for conflict within a functionalist framing. The functionalist paradigm remains dominant today despite sharing an increasingly diverse stage with alternative war paradigms.

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Keywords:? functionalism, complexity, positivism, rationalism, scientific management, fascism

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

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??????????? The last chapter provided the foundations for modernity as understood across the western, industrialized world. In the last several centuries, functionalism became the social paradigm of choice for nation states competing politically and through organized violence in a system of competitive societies. Functionalism emerged first and today remains the dominant paradigm for interpreting social reality and largely defining all major societal endeavors for most of the world, including what conflict and war are and are not. While the functionalist paradigm was largely alone and unchallenged for the first two centuries it dominated European along with colonial and imperial possessions, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it gained company. Other war paradigms developed, often in contradiction or confrontation to this dominant way to understand and act in reality. War itself would become reconceptualized.

The next several chapters introduce these alternative social paradigms such as radical structuralism, radical humanism, and interpretivism, and how they came into existence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These other social paradigms emerged largely as a reaction to functionalism and the various ideologies and social developments that are associated with the functionalist dominance. War is also a powerful influence upon social reality, and twentieth century wars in particular are inevitably major contributing factors on how alternative social paradigms rose up to counter the functionalist narrative on what social reality was or was not. As the preeminent social paradigm throughout modernity, functionalism has morphed through different variations and developments since the nineteenth century. This chapter frames the challenges of how and why original war theories set against the Napoleonic Era, the Age of European Enlightenment, and the German Romanticism response require additional explanation beyond the intent of the designers. In particular, the repercussions of two World Wars would force functionalism toward different pathways previously inaccessible and unimaginable to those that first formed this war paradigm.

??????????? The core tension offered in this chapter is one of social and technological change between an earlier single-paradigm (functionalist) world to that of a multi-polar, multi-paradigmatic, and technologically advanced reality. Functionalism originally relied exclusively on Newtonian-styled, classical problem-solving techniques in contexts where reductionism could be assumed, and where environments changed slowly. Such situations had fewer (or marginalized) social groups and stakeholders with different perspectives about social reality, and there usually was some centralized, hierarchical form of authority that operated reasonably well.[1] Although conflicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were violent, destructive, and chaotic, they nonetheless did feature many of these traditional characteristics indicative of a Newtonian-styled, ordered, rule-based environment.? Eric Dent explains: “problems also arise when people assume that [the traditional, Newtonian worldview] is accurate in all settings. Although it is inappropriate, and potentially inaccurate, researchers frequently use linear regression on non-linear phenomena.” Organizations assume linear causality in most instances, even when such phenomenon are not present. If Newtonian-styled processes work on individual, linear components in isolation, there is an institutional assumption that these same processes should work in the aggregate, for any and all problems in reality.

??????????? The pull of classical science would extend deep into the twentieth century, influencing societies, industry, governments, and their military instruments of power accordingly. This traditional worldview carried institutionalized assumptions that social reality could be best appreciated and manipulated through reductionism, objective observation, linear causation, and that all entities observable in any system are themselves a unit of quantitative analysis or measurement.[2] The twentieth century brought forth profound changes both for societies, the scientific knowledge available to them, technological developments that provide novel and previously unimaginable abilities, and the need for new social paradigms that are better equipped to address these expansions of reality. The tension within the functionalist paradigm presented here is one of multiple, competing camps on what the correct functionalist war paradigm should be, and whether that alignment proved successful or not in actual conflicts. This is an unfolding and still emergent story about objective positivists seeking precise, analytically optimized control of the future battlefields including the very minds of the combatants,[3] versus that of Neo-Clausewitzians desiring reform and refinement of Napoleonic Era constructs designed by the Prussian theorist to explain every and all war, always. Both co-exist in functionalism today, despite these tensions and frequently, beyond the immediate awareness of most practitioners.

They grind against one another, yet together formally present the majority orientation of the functionalist war paradigm. The twentieth and now twenty-first centuries have not, however, been particularly cooperative in enabling functionalism to interpret social reality without major blemishes and paradoxes. There have been so many errors and faulty outcomes for functionalist foreign policies and military strategies that much of the postmodern philosophical movement make a living illuminating these problems. Postmodernists go so far to argue that war itself has changed so that any modernist attempt to explain it is bankrupt. George Lucas, summarizing postmodernist Umberto Eco’s premise at the beginning of the First Gulf War in 1991, explains this critique of modernism:

After two world wars and the Cold War, by contrast, Umberto Eco believed war could no longer be characterized in this modernist, Clausewitzian fashion, in terms of the straightforward linear vectors of force operating between clearly defined rival centers of power (any more [sic], we might add, than can classical physics handle the anomalies of relativity or quantum mechanics). In his interesting essay, he quoted his fellow postmodernist, Michel Foucault, to the effect that ‘power is no longer monolithic and monocephalous: it is diffused, packeted, made of the continuous agglomeration and breaking down of consensus.’ War, Eco went on to observe, pits a multiplicity of competing powers against one another: no longer simply ‘two opposing states,’ but the controlling governments of states versus their own internal, rival political parties and religious factions; the media, embedded and reporting from behind ‘enemy lines;’ Wall Street and the financial sector, heavily invested in hope of profit, but with no clear strategic goal or financial objective, just (especially in the case of the stock market) ‘oscillations in the play of powers.’[4]

??????????? Defenders of original Clausewitzian and Jominian war theories offer several counterpoints that will be examined in this chapter. Except for the most hardened conservatives of original functionalism, many do acknowledge that the scientific, technological, political, and social changes of the twentieth century suggest some refinement, reform, or transformation of the original functionalist frame for state systems and conflict. How much flexibility is considered becomes the spectrum between conservative reformers of modernity and the most extreme, radicalized postmodernists. Postmodernists, explained in subsequent chapters for radical humanism and interpretivism, provide a critical, disruptive assessment of the functionalist war paradigm than from those inside the paradigm. For example, the game of chess, as the original simulation for war,[5] would be adapted in principle or through metaphoric devices by many of the original war theorists of the Napoleonic Era through the twentieth century. Postmodernists deconstruct functionalism using the same game construct, offering that: “[war] is now… more like a chess game in which every antagonist takes pieces of the same color, and no one can any longer clearly state just what the strategic goal is, or precisely who the real enemies are.”[6] How willing various camps might agree to this depends often on their association within the functionalist paradigm, or their perspective from an alternative war paradigm looking in.

This chapter provides readers with the twentieth century developments and emerging tensions within the functionalist paradigm, along with several critical themes and challenges about conflict and war that operate inside of functionalism and sustain it today as the dominant social paradigm of choice. The technological and scientific progresses of the twentieth century are also inexorably linked to conflict, societal differences, and war. The first quantum revolution where humanity unlocked the secrets of the fundamental particles of the universe led to military applications in radar, the atomic bomb, lasers and later the first computers. [7] Humanity, once able to wage near-absolute war upon adversaries with traditional means of destruction now had a weapon that would change the rules and rational of war itself- the Atomic Age of conflict. [8] ?Nuclear Armageddon would from the 1950s onward force nations to recalibrate how they understood conflict in that ‘absolute war’ was now realized in an existential sense that exceeded original notions of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat.’ One tension within functionalism within contemporary settings is whether humanity is still in modernity or if it has shifted into postmodernity, where “we have left the modern age behind, and supplanted modernity’s confidence in social progress through science and rationality with postmodern relativism.”[9]

Although portions of civilization may entertain that the world is now in postmodernity and has departed modernity sometime in the last several decades, contemporary military forces and their political overseers are best described by Booth et al. with the following: “[It] is clear that many contemporary militaries can be counted among the staunchest defenders of totalizing discourse… the sworn defense of the nation-state and its ideological symbols remains the formal raison d’ être of post-Cold War armed forces, these militaries continue in the tradition of modernity.”[10]? Perhaps it is better to explore how certain majority groups in this military community of practice attempt to modify the functionalist war paradigm without violating core ontological tenets, while minority groups appear to be pushing paradigmatic boundaries or in some cases, departing the paradigm entirely. This fragmentation of the traditional functionalist paradigm is ongoing and has been developing since the Second World War. Additionally, the functionalist paradigm faces other daunting challenges in how social reality operates, and the manner in which conflict must be considered in new ways beyond earlier considerations. Conflict, or the perceived threat of future war, would in this same transformative period advance industry, scientific progress, and domain expansion into new areas such as space, cyberspace, and most recently into artificial intelligence. These emerging contexts for conflict present significant disruption and challenge to several ontological and epistemological assumptions that previously operated smoothly in the functionalist depiction of social reality. Complex social reality in transformation demands paradigmatic adaptation. ?

??????????? Nuclear weapons are but one of several challenges facing functionalists since the 1940s. Although extremist groups date back as far as civilization existed, modernity produces several significant patterns on conflict and variations within functionalism where radical ideologies and worldviews require deeper explanation. Many extremist groups are explored in future chapters where they hold to ontological and epistemological positions best paired with a Marxist, Social Marxist, anarchist, or other belief system that is paradoxical with the functionalist paradigm for war.[11] Within functionalism, plentiful extremist groups and doomsday cults do operate where similar ontologies share common ground. Rapoport’s theorization on divine, messianic, and eschatological war philosophies are readily applied here for a host of violent groups that still fall within the functionalist tent, yet cannot be lumped into some overarching term of ‘extremism’ with those other groups explained in the chapters on radical structuralism, radical humanism, or interpretivism. Nor should groups operating under other social paradigms be confused with functionalist extremists on matters of race, gender, ethnic and other social constructs. Anti-nuclear advocates within functionalism oppose such weapons for clear existential concerns. However, outside the functionalist paradigm, other anti-nuclear activists will also declare “the bomb itself is the most extreme expression of violence and control of the patriarchal, racist and capitalist world order.”[12]

??????????? Throughout the twentieth century, functionalism remained the dominant paradigm for conflict and war held by western societies, particularly Europe and across non-western societies that extended similar ideas on politics, economic, and organized violence over the last few centuries. As addressed in the previous chapter, the modern nation state existed because it gained sovereignty via its own existence within a system of fellow self-sovereign states, if it could organize and defend itself against these similar state rivals. The European state system would first be explained by Machiavelli,[13] and later reinforced in how state entities would continuously struggle, compete, take risks, and encounter friction and chaos as they shifted through politics and organized violence in what Clausewitz explained in On War.[14] Prior to World War II and the arrival of the Nuclear Age, this struggle of independent states had a certain political equilibrium that Clausewitz best described as “war is the continuation of politics by other means,”[15] when considered within the functionalist lens. ??

??????????? This political equilibrium rested upon the paradox that the majority of independent states shared a common interest in maintaining their independence by preventing any one state or coalition from threatening all states and forming some hegemony or empire, yet survival of such a balanced system implied that any individual state might be destroyed in conflict that nonetheless sustains the system for all surviving nations.[16] There is no guarantee that any particular nation would survive in this system, as in war a nation might experience some near absolute form of destruction that Clausewitz addressed. The political consequences would be the total erasure of that state, or some assimilation into the victorious nation, yet an enduring state-system condition with established natural rights and norms of behavior for them. However, the aggregate of states maintaining this political equilibrium meant that if any particular state suddenly rose in power or offensive threat to others, the weaker or threatened nations would resolve this difference through diplomacy or organized violence. This endless cycle is a durable system for social reality and assumed as part of the functionalist ontology to be a natural, regular sort of affair. War and conflict are how the state system regulates itself, where disagreements unresolved by other means can be settled on the battlefield through organized violence that itself reflects the sovereign rights of the state system.

??????????? ?Technological change in the twentieth century ushered in a new phase in human existence, one where previously, the military means to political ends were understood to be subordinate. The military instrument of power was wielded by the state entity, and it employed technological and logistical means along with human capital to inflict organized violence against an enemy state’s instrument of military power along with that state’s ability to resource that instrument. Suddenly, with the creation of atomic weapons, the military means exceeded the political ends.[17]? Mutually assured destruction would prevent any single nation or coalition from declaring victory over another, as the adversary could annihilate them whether in a first strike surprise, or a second-strike retaliation even upon realization that they would never witness the war’s conclusion.[18] One could no longer ‘win’ in the sense of Napoleonic Era warfare, or in any previous understanding of organized violence, unless ‘victory’ now reflected some deterrent stalemate preventing major conflict. Technological advancements in creating progressively more devastating weapons would, in the unlocking of atomic power, overshoot the goal envisioned by nearly every strategist seeking the ‘silver bullet’ of any battlefield.

The Nuclear Age creates a contradiction in the functionalist ontology for what war exists for. Nation states seeking to resolve differences through organized violence require a world to remain after the conflict where they are able to return to some non-violent status quo, which becomes impossible in a nuclear apocalypse. The act of war thereby violates the purpose of war, in that there remains no society for victors to impose their will. This is a unique and unprecedented development for humanity in that earlier near-absolute acts of war in periods of inferior technological and scientific achievement could result in a particular city, population, region, or even an empire to be destroyed. The broader system of cities, empires, and a social reality would remain for survivors and those outside the effects of such a conflict. Mythological and religious ‘super weapon’ concepts such as the Ark of the Covenant, an ancient object with devastating power, was supposedly used by the Israelites in battles against enemies and for religious purposes. The wooden chest filled with the Ten Commandments could knock down entire city defensive walls, blind or kill thousands, and when captured by the Philistines, cause plagues and curses upon the enemy’s people. ‘God-like’ destructive military power was a mythical dream (or nightmare) until scientific progress eventually created a way to achieve it.

The notion of an ultimate weapon for war has long been contemplated by our species, yet only in the twentieth century could something with existential destructive force be designed and implemented. ?Although temporary domain destruction could delay occupancy or prosperity for the targeted society, war prior to the 1940s never reached the tipping point to that of complete domain annihilation where nothing was left after weapon employment of an adversary.[19] Nuclear war, once sufficient adversarial capability to strike or counterstrike was achieved, broke this otherwise unaltered rule of civilization. Total war now could be accomplished, but afterward humanity might not remain for any population to claim victory or enjoy the spoils of war.[20] ??

This forced a shift in Clausewitzian logic, and also created new existential political forces that transformed the earlier political equilibrium of multiple nation states cycling through periods of peace and war. Wars would become limited in ways not previously considered, and new coalitions and hegemonies formed between rival superpower nations and their collective alliances.[21]? A new political equilibrium formed from the 1950s onward. This featured a dynamic, escalatory form of armament races, formal war economies, the total integration of industry and state security apparatuses into a ‘military industrial complex’, and the overarching fear of total societal annihilation from both sides. ?Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, nation states and their military instruments of power, complete with an expanding defense industry, now represent a fully integrated entity that separates modern state systems from all earlier forms.[22] This new system uses complexity theory, general systems theory, quantum theory, advanced mathematics, and entirely new sociological and other constructs that simply did not exist previously and have expanded our understanding of reality far beyond earlier configurations. Yet the functionalist paradigm still maintains a Newtonian styled orientation to war, one that integrates readily with the physical, tangible aspects of battle, but often skews wildly astray in the social, intangible properties of human conflict.[23] Military historian James Gibson explains this tension between the functionalist preferred outlook on war and its incommensurability with alternative, non-functionalist rationalizations of human conflict:

This new fetishism is thus a kind of social physics, a metaphorical transposition of Sir Isaac Newton’s world of physical forces and mechanical interactions onto the social world. War-production systems become the units of this social physics. To appropriate [Karl] Marx’s phrasing in this new fetishism definite social relationships among men assume the fantastic form of relationships among high-technology production systems for producing warfare. And when relationships appear as warfare systems, then social relationships disappear from view just as they do with the system of simple commodity production.? For example, how can complex social revolutions be understood by war-managers, when for them the highest form of political power is an atomic bomb that could literally vaporize the revolution? At best, war-managers can only translate social revolution into their own fetishized, technical categories of control and production. How many weapons does the revolution have? What is its structure of command, control, and communication? How do enemy war-managers instrumentally manipulate their people? In this way, Kissinger’s claim that the West in general and the United States in particular have an epistemological monopoly on “the notion that the real world is external to the observer” turns back on itself. The question must be asked, who is the foreign Other for whom “the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer?”[24]

??????????? Modern societies, particularly in the industrialized western world, sustain a functionalist war paradigm where conflict is rationalized via these mechanistic assumptions, where the state entity is itself a construct that is a complete unit. People are within the state, but it is the state that might be destabilized, collapsing, or even a ‘failed state’ where reformation and restoration again hold to these engineering metaphors. ?Newtonian styled models and methodologies, with arrangements in time and space are considered external to the human observer; the war managers mentioned above by Gibson need only target state apparatuses to defeat the nation.[25] Cybernetic theorists would rely on scientific methods “and on steady, cumulative, quantitative research” that was ontologically assumed to be superior to “relying on the sporadic insights of the rare military genius.”[26] This put cybernetic theorists in direct tension with Neo-Clausewitzians, for whom genius in war could not be isolated, bottled, and mass-produced nor fully understood.

In contrast, the objective positivists held a scientific view of management that “disdained individualistic notions of leadership… [in that] isolated individuals could only see limited perspectives.”[27] The ontological position that reality might be frozen in time and place, isolated into manageable chunks, studied through the imposition of a natural order and regularity akin to the physical sciences, and reassembled so that organizations can go about achieving goals through engineered, formulaic processes[28] is the scientific manager’s response to Clausewitzian calls for military genius and artistry to slice through the fog and friction of chaotic, passionate, brutal war. Scientists and academics would in the Cold War assume a position of superiority, one that rejected any individual or stylized judgements, habits, and wisdom accumulated over decades of military service.

Combat experience and any unscientific ‘institutional wisdom and tenets’ were essentially devalued as little more than cultural idioms and idiosyncrasies that helped with military unit identities and sense of purpose, but were inferior to the “cool rational calculations of the defence intellectual.”[29] Antoine Bousquet points out that, “for an organization dominated by mathematicians, systems analysis appeared to be the way to get the scientific- the right answer.”[30] For cybernetic war theorists, any strategic processes or activities that involved no systems analysis “were looked down upon, considered interesting in a speculative way at best.” [31] This largely ignores or marginalizes anything done outside a purely objective, quantitative, and linear-causal framework for understanding war. Clausewitz’s emphasis on military genius, social irrationality in war, and the chaotic friction in how humans addressed conflict would be largely denied by the modern scientific managers seeking to eliminate the fog and friction through cold, objective, and clear analysis. Cybernetics provided new clothing for objective positivists reborn; Jominian 2.0 would counter the rise of Neo-Clausewitzians.

From the national and international levels of policy and diplomacy, down into the application of military instruments of power focused on accomplishing reverse-engineered goals through linear-casual linkages of activities where presumed problems are paired with known solutions, and a systematic logic arranges tactical events to correspond with operations and larger campaigns, all nested hierarchically into overarching war strategies using entirely Newtonian constructs.[32] Gibson critiques such mechanistic thinking with: “ “Falling dominoes,” “cork in the bottle,” “chain reaction”- these terms find their theoretical reference not in the social world of history where men live and die, but in the lifeless world of Newtonian mechanics.”[33] Also termed ‘neo-positivism’, this reflects the belief that all useful knowledge can be generated directly from the abstract rules of scientific theory. The best solutions are tested, evaluated, and subsequently exploited to sustain techno-rational processes valued by the industrialized world.[34] If something cannot be articulated, analyzed, and then positioned in a series of planned activities in an ‘ends-ways-means’ construct, it likely was devoid of any serious meaning or usefulness. Such things either required redoubled efforts to scientifically unlock their secrets, or they should be cast aside as anecdotal and inconsequential.

The arrival of weapons of mass destruction would require significant re-tooling of the original or classical Clausewitzian war theory used by functionalists.? Many concepts retained their original value, such as the significance of subjective, socially constructed aspects of war such as passion and hatred that could not be analytically optimized through objective positivism.? However, Rapoport raises the point that “it is not necessary to hate anyone in order to kill everyone” in the Nuclear Age for humanity.[35] The Clausewitzian foundation of passion within societies as part of his war trinity becomes marginalized. In a cold, rational conclusion of nuclear calculus, one nation’s leadership might take the advice of scientists, academics, and military managers to strike first and eliminate an adversary completely if the perfect assumed window were present. The destruction of an adversary nation along with the supposedly objective, logical decision-making process to engage in war would no longer include Clausewitz’s “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” as modeled within his trinity where the people, the military commander and army, and the government interact.[36] Hatred, even passion is removed in such a proposed engagement, and twentieth century nuclear war strategic documents are written accordingly in objective, mathematically rationalized, logical rhetoric. The terrifying scale of existential weaponry would demand a reconceptualizing of Clausewitz and associated war theorists of the Napoleonic Era to rationalize a new, relevant political war philosophy within the functionalist paradigm.

The term ‘Neo-Clausewitzian’ is used here to explain the shift from earlier, classical war thinking adherent to the original Prussian understanding of Napoleonic warfare to that of the twentieth century conflict. Part of this transformation comes from the changes in social reality such as the development of Marxism and alternative war philosophies as explained by Rapoport and other critics of On War. Some transformation occurred due to radical changes in technology and what war could be in the Nuclear Age, as explored in the next section. Yet a major reason for Neo-Clausewitzian development came from within the functionalist paradigm, where new thinking in management and decision-making created a reactionary movement within the military toward scientists and mathematicians.? As new consultants and advisors began infiltrating military affairs, particularly in the Interwar Period and throughout World War II, “military commanders were often suspicious of the methods and recommendations of ivory-tower scientists.”[37] Neo-Clausewitzians opposed the sterile, laboratory-like rendering of war by the cybernetic war theorists as it divorced the social and metaphysical from the physical and tangible. Those same scientists viewed military generals as barbaric laymen, simpletons, or worse. This leads to a gap between experts within the same war paradigm, and for the practitioners employing either stance, frequently an unwitting compliance that need not introspectively ponder why one or the other is championed...

That was the first ten (and a half) pages from Chapter 4. There are another 76 plus pages in that chapter, and this book will roughly be around 550-600 pages when published in hardcover around 01 APR 2025. Stay tuned for more chapter excerpts, share and link for interested parties, and follow me on social media for more. Endnotes below will likely be footnotes in the final book version. Register interest in this book by clicking the link here for the publisher website and their newsletter that provides information on upcoming releases: https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/reconceptualizing-war-.php

[1] Eric Dent, “Complexity Science: A Worldview Shift,” Emergence 1, no. 4 (1999): 9–10.

[2] Dent, 5.

[3] Antoine Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” Cold War History 8, no. 1 (February 2008): 81–82. Bousquet explains how Norbert Weiner, as the father of cybernetics, sought to use an engineering approach to render social complexity into manageable, scientifically rationalized components and linkages that would flow in a logically coherent order. Bousquet remarks, “It is also quite obvious no social machine treats individuals as ‘cogs and levers and rods’ more completely than the military.”?

[4] George Lucas Jr., “Postmodern War,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010): 290.

[5] Kelly Clancy, “The Original War Game,” The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2024, Saturday/Sunday edition, sec. Review.

[6] Lucas Jr., “Postmodern War,” 290.

[7] Michal Krelina, “Quantum Warfare: Definitions, Overview and Challenges,” EPJ Quantum Technology 8, no. 24 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-021-00113-y.

[8] Henry C. Eccles, Military Concepts and Philosophy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 115.

[9] Bradford Booth, Meyer Kestnbaum, and David Segal, “Are Post-Cold War Militaries Postmodern?,” Armed Forces & Society 27, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 323.

[10] Booth, Kestnbaum, and Segal, 324.

[11] See chapters five, six, and seven for how different extremist groups are understood that draw from beyond the functionalist paradigm for conflict. Extremist groups within this chapter adhere to the ontological and epistemological stances of functionalism, although often they differ greatly on purpose, identity, form, and function in war.

[12] Ray Acheson, “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons,” in Feminist Solutions for Ending War, ed. Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2021), 105.

[13] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, reprint of original 1947 Oxford University Press edition (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2013), 41.

[14] Many other noted military theorists contributed to the functionalist war paradigm as introduced in the previous chapter. Most form some allegiance to Clausewitzian and/or Jominian arguments or are otherwise inspired by their work.

[15] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Indexed Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 81.

[16] W.B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy, First Edition (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 64.

[17] This was achieved once the United States, allies, and the Soviet Union with their allies had mutually assured destruction through feasible nuclear escalation. Although untested and theoretical, a state could employ a limited, tactical nuclear weapon in a conflict that does not create this escalation. Nuclear detonations in the space domain represent another possible variation that is untested and theoretical, yet plausible. ?

[18] The Soviet ‘Dead Hand’ concept, a Cold War relic still operational in Russia today, uses seismic and other sensors to automatically launch nuclear missiles in the assumption a first strike against Russia succeeded, and this ‘dead hand’ retaliatory effort attempts to return the favor. That Russia would no longer exist as a state nor many Russians live to see this strike illuminates the disruption the Nuclear Age presents to original Clausewitzian concepts.

[19] The first atomic weapons used could not achieve this in the 1940s, but their first ‘proof of concept’ utilization on Japan demonstrated the theoretical future of nuclear warfare.

[20] Advocates of limited nuclear exchanges might debate the nuances of this statement. However, if left unchecked, the escalation of any conflict toward Clausewitz’s realization of ‘absolute’ involving nuclear weaponry cannot avoid this real consequence of total species extermination and rendering much of the planet uninhabitable for human life.

[21] Anatol Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transactions Publishers, 1995), xvii. Rapoport defines a ‘superpower’ as a nation able to destroy civilization at their own discretion within a matter of hours. Nothing like this has occurred in history until the Nuclear Age of war.

[22] Sini?a Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 126–27.

[23] Ben Zweibelson, “Breaking the Newtonian Fetish: Conceptualizing War Differently for a Changing World,” Journal of Advanced Military Studies 15, no. 1 (May 2024): 153–201.

[24] James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, First Edition (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 20.

[25] Gibson, 15. External forces within functionalism align with the natural sciences and forces of nature. In the next chapter, readers will experience a shift in how Marx’s ontology realigns these to historical and economic processes in radical structuralism.

[26] Stephen Waring, “Management by the Numbers: Operations Research and Management Science,” in Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory since 1945 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 22; Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” 78.

[27] Waring, “Management by the Numbers: Operations Research and Management Science,” 22.

[28] Robert Chia, “Reflections: In Praise of Silent Transformation- Allowing Change Through ‘Letting Happen,’” Journal of Change Management 14, no. 1 (2013): 11.

[29] Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” 93.

[30] Bousquet, 90.

[31] Bousquet, 90.

[32] Ben Zweibelson, “One Piece at a Time:? Why Linear Planning and Institutionalisms Promote Military Campaign Failures,” Defence Studies Journal 15, no. 4 (December 14, 2015): 360–75; Christopher Paparone, “Beyond Ends-Based Rationality: A Quad-Conceptual View of Strategic Reasoning for Professional Military Education,” Research Gate, May 16, 2016, 309–47.

[33] Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, 26.

[34] Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 84–85.

[35] Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, 74.

[36] Clausewitz, On War, 89.

[37] Waring, “Management by the Numbers: Operations Research and Management Science,” 22.