Analysis

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

The U.S. military paradigm is rooted in two dangerously outmoded assumptions about 21st-century reality. First is the military’s assumption of proportionality, or that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This leads to a corollary that causal relationships of the future are generally knowable. The second is the assumption of additivity: that the behaviors of a whole are a scaled reflection of that whole’s disaggregated parts. With this assumption, knowing the parts provides full knowledge of the whole, creating the belief that all wholes are knowable through aggregating the knowledge of their parts.