Academic Gamesmanship and the Realities of War

Among all the spurious “sciences” that have grown up around the notion that to abstract one’s propositions from reality is to be truly “scientific,” most pernicious has been the new “science” of strategy. Armed by their supposed knowledge of game theory, social psychology, economics, and operations research-and occasionally (but only occasionally) military operations, a new breed of “scientist” has arisen, who declaim on their subject with all the authority of a professional Frothist lecturing on the Science of Frothism.

One of the immediate reasons for the proliferation of this sort of thing has been the feeling that it is hard to criticize even spuriously authoritative pronou...