War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is a book by Manuel DeLanda, in which he traces the history of warfare and the history of technology.
It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1978) and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuze and Guattari appreciated Foucault's definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. They prepared the field for a re-appropriation of their concepts, for use in another context of the "same" concept, which they called "actualization". DeLanda drew on the concepts these authors put forth, to investigate the history of warfare and technology.
A social history of technology and of warfare
DeLanda describes how social and economic formations influence war machines, i.e. the form of armies, in each historical period. He draws on chaos theory to show how the biosphere reaches singularities (or bifurcations) which mark self-organization thresholds where emergent properties are displayed and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities. He argues for example how a certain level of population growth may induce invasions and others may provoke wars.
As a historian, DeLanda is indebted to the Annales School and the study of long-time historical phenomena, as opposed to human-scale phenomena. The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to DeLanda, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming a war machine and when that war machine is crossed by the machinic phylum. It may result in erratic war machines that become nomads, because of a lack of political control. DeLanda writes:
I defined the machinic phylum as the set of all the singularities at the onset of processes of self-organization — the critical points in the flow of matter and energy, points at which these flows spontaneously acquire a new form or pattern. All these processes, involving elements as different as molecules, cells or termites, may be represented by a few mathematical models. Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-organizing effects, the singularity is said to be 'mechanism independent'
Centralization and decentralization
According to DeLanda, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to centralize command and control of each event on the battlefield and get "human will out of the decision-making loop" or they delegate responsibility to individual soldiers (e.g., platoons or the German mission-type tactics) to avoid "friction". "Friction", according to DeLanda, is like "noise" — too much friction blocks the war machine, which destroys itself. Thus, rather than waiting for friction to accumulate at the head of the control, command and communication center (C3), which is the case in centralized armies, decentralized war machines allow it to disperse at each level of the machine.
The 1805 Jacquard loom, used holes punched in pasteboard punched cards to control the weaving of patterns in fabric and is the first example of a "migration" of human control to machine control and marks the invention of software according to DeLanda. Command and control techniques adapted by the Germans were then introduced in army arsenals by Frederick Taylor and extended to civilian society: "the imposition of military production methods into the civilian society was accompanied by the transfer of a whole command and control grid." (p. 153) The system of Numerical control — and then the CNC — which was developed by funds from the US Air Force, "withdraws all control from workers in the area of weapons production and centralizes it at the top. But if the NC (and related methods) effectively shortened the chain of command be getting humans out of the decision-making loop, it also weakened the civilian sector of the economy by its adverse effects on workers' productivity," (p. 154) argues Manuel DeLanda. He thus underlines that the US has become a net importer of machine tools for the first time since the 19th century, and points out that while in 1975 all major manufacturers of integrated chips were American, in 1986 only two were not Japanese. In 1982, the Japanese MITI had launched the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) initiative to create computers supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallelism.