The scientific way of warfare

Antoine Bousquet's 'The Scientific Way of Warfare' traces how successive scientific paradigms and technologies—like the clock, the engine, the computer, and the network—reconfigured military thought and practice from the early modern era to today.

The book argues that each technological-scientific regime produced distinct models for ordering, controlling, and fighting wars, and that these regimes create persistent tensions between centralization and adaptation.

Bousquet uses systems thinking to show how militaries try to manage order and entropy, and how shifts in scientific understanding reshape how armed forces imagine the battlefield.

He combines intellectual history with analysis of military doctrine and technology to explain contemporary debates about networked warfare and resilience.

The work is influential in military studies for linking the history of science to the evolving morphology of conflict.