City Research Online

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between living systems theory (LST) and the army's military doctrine in the 1980s. General Donn Starry, Colonel Mike Malone, and Major James Cary worked with James G. Miller, the founder of LST, to make the army more efficient at fighting a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. LST conceptualized that living organisms organized matter and energy and that its components could function because they worked as a part of the whole to adapt to their environment. The article reveals how these officers employed LST as a framework to model a reciprocal relationship between individual agency and collective unity in the army's hierarchical organization. Situating this doctrinal reform in the years after the end of the draft and the mainstreaming of neoclassical economics in the 1980s, it finds that the army officers were using LST to replace Robert McNamara's mechanical strategic paradigm used in the Vietnam War.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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