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Cognitive Dynamics on Clausewitz Landscapes

The Control and Directed Evolution of Organized Conflict

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rodrick Wallace

    1. The New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, USA

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  • Applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to classic institutional dilemmas
  • Expands the description of John Boyd's OODA loop in terms of the data rate theorem
  • Proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
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  2. Contrasting Tactical and Strategic Dynamics

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 1-22

  3. Doctrine and the Fog-of-War

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 23-36

  4. On Asymmetric Conflict

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 37-50

  5. The Albigensian Ground State

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 51-56

  6. Can There Be “Third Stream” Doctrines?

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 57-70

  7. Reconsidering Doctrine and Its Discontents

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 71-76

  8. Challenges to the US Security Doctrine of “Resilience”

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 77-90

  9. Culture and the Induction of Emotional Dysfunction on a Clausewitz Landscape

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 91-98

  10. Expected Unexpecteds: Cambrian Explosions in Lamarckian Systems

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 99-111

  11. Reconsidering Clausewitz Landscape Dynamics

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 113-119

  12. Failure of a Paramilitary System: A Case History of Catastrophe

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 121-131

  13. An Emerging Catastrophe: The Weaponization of Emotional Sentience in AI

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 133-149

  14. Final Remarks

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 151-155

  15. Mathematical Appendix

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 157-165
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Keywords

About this book

This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collection of formal essays and a mathematical appendix, the book explores different aspects of cognitive and evolutionary process as conducted under the direction of doctrine that acts as a kind of genome for retention of what is learned through Lamarckian evolutionary selection pressures: armies and corporate entities learn from conflict, and incorporate that learning into their ongoing procedures. The book proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence. 

A central feature of the book is a formal description of the famous OODA loop of the US military theorist John Boyd in terms of the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories. That description is expanded to cover more fully the impact of stochastic fog-of-war effects on tactical and operational scales of conflict. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the role of doctrine, and the particular effect of embedding culture on cognitive and Lamarckian evolutionary processes associated with conflict on tactical, operational, and strategic scales and levels of organization. A scientifically sophisticated exercise in applied mathematics, history, evolutionary theory, and ecosystem theory, this book will be appropriate for researchers and students interested in defense, security, and international relations, as well as non-academic career professionals in government and industry.

Authors and Affiliations

  • The New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, USA

    Rodrick Wallace

About the author

Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics from Columbia, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers. He has worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to numerous works on public health and public policy, he has published a dozen peer reviewed papers and chapters modeling evolutionary process, and many formal studies of human, institutional, and machine cognition.

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