December 2011

About entropy of military things

about the order and disorder of all things

The organization of things must be appreciated relatively, since this assessment depend on the perspective from which we view these things.

The use of any language requires one way or another to categorize things, but men will never finish to use their languages to challenge these categories that are necessary to them. This can be a way to define what culture is.

Everyone arranges its own closet space for any thing so he can find it. This works well when his memory retains in mind an accessible representation; otherwise, we must resort to the expedient of writing to describe this way to do with the words of a language.

The Time, as an intangible entity, gets its irreversibility from the inevitable disorganization of all things. And what characterizes every instant is due to this principle of nature, that implies that the growth of the organization in a place is payed by a greater disorganization in an other one, as an inevitable necessity.

The consumption of the order of the universe is by essence the mischief of the Time, and the way by which it manifests itself.

The development all along of Time of our understanding of nature is thus a phenomenon diabolical , of separation between order and disorder, which requires destruction of organisms and heat dispersion.

The Time, intangible, has founded this other intangible thing that is the music. In our perception, everything in the Universe is a kind of music. A symphonic arrangement of waves.

About the resentments.

The order and the relative disorder of things are the sources of human motivations. Enrichment is a wished order; Here such order increase need to be paid by an impoverishment, that is necessarily a greater relative disorder. The Nature is so, with laws which generate an heterogeneous universe: self-organizing, the order draws the order, as well as disorder increases the disorder. This phenomenon affect humans with feelings of unfairness that turn to resentment.

Like any "terrorist organization" Al Qaeda is it anything other than a shared resentments federation? As an organization, is it something other than a way of categorizing these ressentments ? Seek to destroy their current organization does not affect the resentments. It amplifies them. Gardeners know that cutting the rhizomes fortifies the plants. When they affect and invade the garden, there is nothing else to do than treat each rhysome individually. Or to poison all together, doing a kind of genocide of vegetation. Otherwise, with time, they always reorganize themselves. There can be no peace while resentments subsist. The World Trade Center was treating the global commodity markets, and organized the consequent predation of supplier countries that so cannot achieve their development.

The military thing must be seen as the development of ever higher degrees of organization for itself, in order to be able of the greatest disorganization for another. The greater is the gap, the more efficient the system.

From this highest peak possible of sophisticated weapons systems to the potential abyss that is destined to potential ennemies, military entropy suffers no break in slope. And the higher is this potential, the more effective it is.

The entropy potential difference is similar to the thermodynamic potential difference, whose operation of a thermal engine depends; The higher it is, the greater the yield.

Between the so named military-industrial complex who design today the most sophisticated weapons systems and the simple soldier who is sent to the front line, the entropy must only increase. It takes less entropy for an Engineer of armament than for the General of the Army, for himself less than for a General of a Division, and so increasing for the Colonel, Captain and so on, according to the descending hierarchy, Lieutenant, Sergeant, soldier.

If Leonardo da Vinci and Archimedes are symbols of the most inventive military genius, at the other end Forrest Gump illustrates the archetype of the perfect soldier, as are the recruits of Full Metal Jacket. Between them are interposed Hannibal, Napoleon, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Below the great generals, the military echelons are hardly exemplary models, with only a few exceptions; Strangely it is those who have transgressed the rule of obedience to the principle of increasing entropy on which is founded of any military system. The behavior of Captain Dreyfus, the absence of revolt which disappointed Emile Zola, not do they show how much he had internalized the entropy level assigned to his grade?

No one imagines that in this unchanging hierarchy, anyone can be allowed without disadvantage to more intelligence than his leader. Below the soldier, there is only the enemy, once destroyed, for more entropy.

At the other end, nothing seems to limit the imagination of men to increase their potential of entropy, trying to get more than what his opponents do. If Archimedes, with its mirrors designed to burn the fleet of vessels from attack Syracuse is a mythical first example, some documents of Leonardo da Vinci attest how the military art and the development of weapons systems has always been the source greatest inventions.

Most technologies of which we enjoy the civilian uses would not have been possible without some initial destructive intent.

From experience, military budgets are barely limited, if not for some time. So is naturally developed the interest of companies in charge of the research for the development of armed conflict, even to give weapons to one or other of the warring parties, and test well, full-scale effectiveness of their inventions. The Falklands War is an illustration of the strange practices that led to the sinking of the HMS Scheffield destroyed by Franco-British Exocet missiles fired by fighter bombers Etandard issued from French workshops.

But locally, the entropy differences can reach heights that no military system can achieve.

Although on the Earth there are lot of highest peaks and deep valleys, others exist that are steepest, which are far from being the highest or deepest. Halfway up, these are impassable territories with tangles of narrow crevices and rocky points. your life would be in danger in such places, in which any move is impossible. Locally. That is a metaphor of the new assymetric wars.

In the "Java of the atomic bomb", Boris Vian evokes its engineer uncle who invented a kind of atomic bomb whose action has only a radius of three meters fifty, that seems to be a crippling defect, until he had the idea of gathering within that radius all the Heads of State that it seemed him useful to rid the earth.

Some unknown people, with limited means, are capable of entropy potential higher than the most sophisticated military system, and with a dynamic that is unattainable to it. They simply accept losing their lives in order to fulfill their intentions.

There is no higher entropy potential than that of the sacrifice of his own life.

The sacrifice of the Japanese pilots at the end of the Second World War is not an exemplary reference of this, since their implementation required huge resources at the end of a hopeless struggle. It was one of the first applications of the rocket-powered aircrafts. This initiative relies on the traditional approaches of a military-industrial complex, not on individual initiatives.

The Okha rockets were developed by engineers, that made them available to military units. These units assigned them to fanatical pilots, after mind preparation needed to develop as much as possible their mental entropy, The Okha rockets came too late, too few, with an entropy capacity too local. by several orders of magnitude smaller than the entropy capacity of the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that United States were still alone ones to own.

Our century experienced succession of suicide bombings. They do not reach the potential of entropy that a suicidal individual action provides to the defense of a cause. Improperly named "Kamikases" Islamists are recruited by an organization and mentally prepared for its misdeed in order to sacrifice them to his cause. Often, to make them less expensive they are chosen for their already high level of mental entropy. If the work to be done to make them accept their death sentences remains difficult, they can be prepared more quickly. The big suicide attacks al Qaeda needed fanaticism of people from cultures and skills far higher than those who perpetrated the massacres of recent times. In asymmetrical wars also, resources end up missing on all sides.

Under the pretext of a religion of which their authors have a very brief knowledge, the recent suicide attacks in our Western societies are more a matter of civil revolts than of military actions. In a civil war society is its own adversary. These phenomena are the violent symptoms of desperation amplified by the deepening of social inequalities deliberately not regulated by the rules of the market. They are only the manifestation of entropy engendered by this other form of warfare which is economic warfare. As apparently effective as they are, their repression by the police is as liberticide as it is vain, whereas only economic peace can treat them.

It is quite different when suicide for defense of a cause is a personal initiative, without a murderous desire manifested as a paroxysmal oxymoron of a nonviolent violence.

When on June 11th 1963 Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in Saigon, he initiates the failure of the American policy of supporting the dictatorship of the Catholic President Ngo Din Diem against communist forces. Then, for the first time in history, inexorably United States were to lose the war, against a population whose resentment towards them increases as increases their abuses. Military forces use the term "pacify" to express the fragile situation of the order that they obtain by force. In hostile environments, bad conditions of living always end up by defeat.

When on 19 January 1969 Jan Palach, a student of History Czechoslovak set himself on fire on the Vanceslas Square in Prague, he initiates the defeat of the communist regime that Alexander Dubcek had been unable to reform, imposed by the USSR after the Prague Spring. Even if it took twenty years of patience to his reference to achieve its end, it was the origin of the inexorable fall of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in autumn 1989.

When on December 17, 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, greengrocer in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia set himself on fire, he initiates the defeat of the dictatorial regime of Ben Ali government. This time, social tension is such that it took less than a month for the regime to fall down, after the flight of Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia.

These three non-violent acts, which in fact are the most violent, have overcome powers that appeared to be infinitely powerfull. At each time, this awaked the population resentment potential, that proved to be insurmountable, slowly or quickly, always inexorably, whatever the means of power and corruption in place to prevent it.

Faced with the feelings of a people, the potential of entropy of the military forces is exceeded, when the power of the desperation of a people is proving able to develop itself locally, paid by the price of the voluntary sacrifice of lives, that have a potential of entropy for them unsurpassable.

Yet military capabilities of entropy have never been higher in countries which have nuclear weapons. But, since the end of second world war, due to their insufficient actual entropy potential they remained unused, when the Soviet Union and Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, by acquiring these potentials mutually neutralized themselves.

The harmonious development of a society requires the reduction of any resentment.

But is there any example of a human society that is developed harmoniously ?

If the means of the wars remained conventional, unable to use "weapons of mass destruction" because they provoke retaliation equivalent, they both greatly benefited and suffered heavily from the highly neguentropic development of information technologies.

The invention of the Internet was a Pandora's box of the American army. Designed to protect against a Soviet attack, the network of networks has become the way of emergence from all subversions. And it made unbearable the exactions that every army uses for its domination. He also paid unbearable casualties immediately reported, visible and reproved worldwide.

So the soldier's entropy potential has greatly declined, when the equipment has become increasingly expensive and sophisticated, and when his death affects the opinion of his own country. In contrast, the civilian population of the enemy has acquired its own entropy potential, whenever it is reached, even if a few dozen dead foreign civilians are struggling to create the same emotion as the loss of one of his soldiers in a people's opinion .

Facing the devastating suicide of he calls "Terrorism" when his ennemy calls him "resistance", the infantryman is mentally helpless. The entropic training that all armies have always given to their troops is not actually a preparation to any philosophical reflection on the meaning of life. Coming back from a conflict, men do not return psychologically free from what they have seen, what they have done. Their reintegration into civilian life inevitably leads to intractable social problems: in this new century, parades triumphant troops are no longer usual practices, since the legitimacy of any conflict is increasingly denounced. Woe to veterans of modern wars, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq ...

To avoid this, the armies prefer to stick themselves to airstrikes. More sophisticated, more expensive actions, which have the advantage of maintaining a large distance between the shooter and target. With greater potential entropy, by the destruction capacity of its missiles, the shooter has also a higher education; its entropy is therefore smaller than that of the infantryman. His loss is a much more unbearable trouble. So we spend large efforts to recover him when he is parachuted in the enemy's territory. From experience, he, who has enjoyed an intellectual investment therefore able to conduct its complex tasks, often returns even less free from what he saw and that the ordinary soldier. As he can rarely plead any self-defense situation, each time he kill, his personal entropy increases accordingly.

Cruise missiles have been devised to provide a solution to this problem. Concrete weapons, their implementation is the result of an abstract work. Their path is pre-programmed, they have multiple sensors to know their position, their path, their target, they just destroy the target indiscriminately.
Blindly became a problem, as for the shooter the target is just a set of spatial coordinates, it is actually an unattainable reality : nobody knows if he will do civilian casualties, who might fortuitously be there. Despite the wish of gunners ? The media will quickly show pictures, issues and published instantly from mobile phones and smart enough to become the source is authenticated. They will throw opprobrium on what will be shown as a war crime.

Drones come to replace previous weapons. the shot is no longer as blind. The problem is transferred to the pilots, who from Langley or from elsewhere, remotely destroy their opponents. They are specialists in their expensive weapons system, having so a reduced entropy level in proportion to the intelligence that their job requires. Although protected by their anonymity and the distance between their office and the theater of battle, they come out even less unscathed.

After they coldly sent their missiles on what they have no proof of nature, fighter or civilian, they go home by car, like any office workers, and find there their spouses and children.
"Daddy what did you do today?"
They fear to learn from the newspapers the next day, that they made dozens of deaths, women and children. This happen to him. his entourage may learn it, which haunts him. This will be known. Everything is known and spread the urge with information technology. And the damage is irreparable in the opinion.

Conversely, the native fighter who is "resistant", has no such worries. It embodies the resentment that his enemies were aroused among his fellow citizens. He is a hero when he sacrifices his life for his cause in an attack. Humam Khalil Abu was well-Mulal Al-Balawi, who on 30 December 2009,, belted with explosives, killed the main agents of the American CIA that were in charge of tracking down the leaders of the international jihad and decapitating the secret services of forces of occupation .

But now we must expect other phenomena, since it is now easy to develop deadly drones at very low prices, without the need of a fragile human organization, with a few objects widely distributed on procurement . Local, lightweight, implemented with a better knowledge of the field, their potential entropy would be devastating for any expeditionary force. Because of its lightness, its low inertia, it will always have the advantage of a dynamic reaction usually unattainable by a conventional military system.

"Quelle connerie la guerre", said Jacques Prévert

à suivre, "Référence Monétaire"

Démocritique