Military science

Military science is the study of military processes, institutions, and behavior, along with the study of warfare, and the theory and application of organized coercive force. It is mainly focused on theory, method, and practice of producing military capability in a manner consistent with national defense policy. Military science serves to identify the strategic, political, economic, psychological, social, operational, technological, and tactical elements necessary to sustain relative advantage of military force; and to increase the likelihood and favorable outcomes of victory in peace or during a war. Military scientists include theorists, researchers, experimental scientists, applied scientists, designers, engineers, test technicians, and other military personnel. Military personnel obtain weapons, equipment, and training to achieve specific strategic goals. Military science is also used to establish enemy capability as part of technical intelligence. In military history, military science had been used during the period of Industrial Revolution as a general term to refer to all matters of military theory and technology application as a single academic discipline, including that of the deployment and employment of troops in peacetime or in battle. In military education, military science is often the name of the department in the education institution that administers officer candidate education. However, this education usually focuses on the officer leadership training and basic information about employment of military theories, concepts, methods and systems, and graduates are not military scientists on completion of studies, but rather junior military officers. Even until the Second World War, military science was written in English starting with capital letters, and was thought of as an academic discipline alongside Physics, Philosophy and the Medical Science. In part this was due to the general mystique that accompanied education in a World where as late as the 1880s 75% of the European population was illiterate. The ability by the officers to make complex calculations required for the equally complex 'evolutions' of the troop movements in linear warfare that increasingly dominated the Renaissance and later history, and the introduction of the gunpowder weapons into the equation of warfare only added to the veritable arcana of building fortifications as it seemed to the average individual. Until the early 19th century, one observer, a British veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, Major John Mitchell thought that it seemed nothing much had changed from the application of force on a battlefield since the days of the Greeks. He suggested that this was primarily so because as Clausewitz suggested, 'unlike in any other science or art, in war the object reacts'. Until this time, and even after the Franco-Prussian War, military science continued to be divided between the formal thinking of officers brought up in the 'shadow' of Napoleonic Wars and younger officers like Ardant du Picq who tended to view fighting performance as rooted in the individual's and group psychology and suggested detailed analysis of this. This set in motion the eventual fascination of the military organisations with application of quantitative and qualitative research to their theories of combat; the attempt to translate military thinking as philosophic concepts into concrete methods of combat. Military implements, the supply of an army, its organization, tactics, and discipline, have constituted the elements of military science in all ages; but improvement in weapons and accoutrements appears to lead and control all the rest.