Ecological Stable Climaxes Parallels in Human Social Systems: Implications for Military Operations.

• Date: 01 December 2024
• Published date: 01 December 2024

Fighting wars in foreign lands is difficult. This is true of "simple" wars of attrition when only considering conventional combat operations. However, operations and efforts to remold society and rewrite cultural norms to assimilate "Western" practices and values has proven close to impossible. Efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq all met with failure, due in part to a misunderstanding of culture and the general population's ability and willingness to acculturate to newly imposed social norms. Human social systems function similarly to environmental ecological systems. Various components, systems within systems, cooperate (e.g. evolve together) to maintain balance, a stable climax. Disruption to one sub-system or component can result in ecological disaster. This is true of human social systems as well. Failing to understand how all the components and sub-systems function together to achieve social stability, while inserting new norms or expectations, often results in opposition, both armed and unarmed, and mission failure. Understanding how external forces and ideas influence social stability is imperative to any successful foreign policy or combat operation.

Ecosystem Parallel

The Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle originating in Asia, arrived in the United States in early 2002. Since its arrival, this invasive species has damaged or killed over seventeen million ash trees across twenty-five states. It is estimated that repairing or replacing the damaged trees would cost over ten billion dollars. The Ash Borer has also caused close to another billion dollars of household and property damage. The many species of ash trees throughout the United States play a vital ecosystem role as they provide shade for understory plant species, sustenance for deer, beavers, porcupines, and rabbits and have historically been important to the culture of various North American Indigenous peoples. (1)

In 1953, the United States backed a coup in Iran which solidified the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. To maintain power, the Shah allowed the Iranian secret police to suppress dissent through means which led to backlash against the regime. Furthermore, the Shah's western inclinations and reforms led to religious opposition. Underprivileged people's dissatisfaction with corruption in the Shah's regime and religious condemnation of the Shah's western ideals led to the 1979 revolution which brought Ruhollah Khomeini to power and created the theocratic regime which still rules today. (2)

In 1926, the United States Department of the Interior, in coordination with government representatives and local ranchers, killed off the last pack of wolves living in Yellowstone National Park. While there were reports of single wolves, Yellowstone National Park existed without a real wolf population for almost seventy years until they were reintroduced in the 1990s. Human expansion into the West had severely reduced the populations of key wolf prey. Consequently, wolves began to prey on domesticated ranch animals. Ranchers complained and the Department of the Interior sanctioned the eradication of wolves from the park. However, once wolves were gone, elk populations exploded. The elk overgrazed the land leading to the death of willow and aspen forests. Without the trees, songbirds left, and beavers could not build dams. Without dams, streams eroded tradition forests lands and without shade, water temperatures rose and cold-water fish died-off. Ecosystem degradation followed. (3)

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and removed President Saddam Hussein, who had held power since 1979 and banned his Ba'ath Political Party. The Ba'ath party, to include Saddam Hussein, consisted primarily of minority Iraqi Sunni Muslims. The Shia, long repressed under Hussein, rose to power following the U.S. invasion. This shift in power ultimately led to the bloody Sunni Uprising and the emergence of the Islamic State whose influence, although diminished, has spread, fostering radicalism globally. (4) Additionally, the Iraqi government strengthened ties with its Shia compatriots in Iran further destabilizing the balance of power in the Middle East.

For the past seventy years the United States' ideologically motivated foreign policy and military operations have been largely unsuccessful. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States fought the spread of communism in Korea and Vietnam. While South Korea has evolved into a successful democratic nation, North Korea has only become more dangerous, with advancements in missile and nuclear technology and more destabilizing as it has supported U.S. competitors, such as Russia in its recent invasion of Ukraine. (5) The outcome in Vietnam was even more drastic as the whole country was subsumed into a singular communist nation. Ideologically driven operations in Guatemala led to a forty-year civil war. (6) Political intervention in Iran, although not the sole cause, led to a repressive adversarial regime which has fostered violence and hung like a shadow over all U.S. efforts in the Middle East for the past forty-five years.

Arguable, the United States has been unduly influenced by the successes of two twentieth century world wars: particularly the Second World War. Winning that war against a clear enemy through the mobilization and weaponization of a large industrial base blinded the United States to the complexities of conflicts which it has faced since. Although there is extensive literature addressing the nuances of "small wars," (7) the U.S. military still acts as if determination and mass are sufficient to win any conflict. The United States has continually failed to grasp that each nation, or more specifically each unique group of people, is a unique ecosystem that has achieved balance through cultural and social evolution. Removing social structures or introducing novel ideas often leads to ecosystem (i.e., socio-cultural) imbalance and collapse. U.S. foreign policy and military operations are often akin to an invasive species.

A Stable Climax

One constant within the natural environment is change. Even rocks and mountains eventually erode under the pressures exerted by wind and water. This constant change is a driving force in evolutionary adaptation. Within biological evolution, random mutations result in the survival and persistence of species, both animal and plant, suited to the current environmental state. Species do not survive because they are stronger or better. They survive because they achieve balance with the environment in which they exist.

The balance of biological species to the environment is the basis of an ecological system. The success, or survival, of an ecosystem is dependent on the concurrent adaptation of all species to the pace of change. The previously given examples illustrate that the exclusion of a primary ecosystem component, such as a predator, or the inclusion of a foreign element, such as an invasive species, can result in serious ecological degradation or eventual collapse. Within ecological studies, this concept of balance is referred to as a stable climax. (8) If all species in an ecosystem evolve at sustainable rates, stability is achieved. The evolutionary climax is consistently changing, but if all ecosystem components adapt together, the climax remains stable, thus a stable climax.

Culture and Society as a System

Anthropologists and ethnographers spend their careers dissecting the minutia of culture. While there is scientific validity and value in these pursuits, for the purposes of this discussion it is appropriate to define culture with a perhaps overly simplistic mnemonic device. Actions plus beliefs equal culture (Fig 1). This may be a simple device, but upon consideration, it is evident that all aspects of culture can be properly categorized within these two broad bins: action or belief.

Within the context of systems theory, it is helpful to think of culture as a chaotic open loop system. It is an open loop because culture feeds on itself. Actions create beliefs. And beliefs create action. However, culture is also a chaotic system because there are various unquantifiable or unidentified inputs which influence the system.

However, similarly to the ecosystems already discussed, the components of culture also must achieve balance for a society to survive and achieve stability. The components of culture are polyvariant but include language, religion, ethnicity, interpersonal relationships, social strata, and leadership hierarchies. (9) This list is not exhaustive, but it exemplifies the complexity of human culture. Additionally, as with an ecosystem, human society must exist and find balance within its natural environment. Aridity, access to water, and weather all influence social evolution. Mayan and Puebloan societies evolved within a particular phase of environmental change and either adapted to changes in weather patterns or moved on to different locales to survive. (10) Balance is always precarious, and human social structures must also continuously adapt to these changes.

Additionally, it is important to be cognizant that the two primary components of culture, beliefs, and actions, can exist independently from each other and that the antecedent cause may have been forgotten by the practicing people. Consider for example the common western practice of saying "bless you" to someone who has sneezed. Very few practitioners likely know the history behind this phrase and even less would espouse the belief behind the practice. The full phrase is of course "god bless you" and it originated out of a belief that a person could sneeze out part of their soul. (11)...