ABSTRACT
Throughout the modern era, Western militaries have repeatedly drawn upon scientific understandings of reality to inform the organisation of their forces and outline the horizon of their future development. At the close of the last century, a new scientific regime catalysed by the discoveries of chaos theory and complexity science became ascendant. Organised around the cardinal figure of the network, chaoplexic warfare promotes distributed information processing, emergent self-organisation and decentralised operations. Brought to prominence with the doctrine of network-centric warfare, chaoplexic principles outlived NCW’s debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan. They continued to irrigate the subsequent theories and practices of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, albeit without yielding any more decisive outcomes against non-state adversaries characterised by their own networked forms. With the rekindling of great power competition and a new technological wave of artificial intelligence and robotics, chaoplexic conceptions remain the conceptual fount upon which the latest doctrinal proposals of mosaic warfare, decision-centric warfare and hyperwar draw. This chapter reviews the enduring influence of chaoplexity upon military thought, examining the persistence of its appeal as a future vision of war despite its inconclusive results to date, and analyses the tensions and dangers attendant on the incipient realisation of a s(war)m machine.
