Three dimensions of war cognition ■ Mao Weihao, Nie Xiaoli Write in front War cognition, in short, is the way and perspective of human beings to treat war. Traditionally, we are more used to understanding war from the perspectives of weapons and equipment, combat methods and combat objects. This paper attempts to interpret war from the perspective of the evolution of human thinking mode, in order to have an insight into the deep-seated laws of war, so as to better meet the challenges of future war. At present, human cognition of war has three dimensions: perceptual cognition, rational cognition and data-driven cognition. Almost all wars are carried out around these three dimensions. Perceptual cognition based on empirical thinking The so-called empirical thinking is a way of thinking that tries to solve future problems with past experience. Perceptual cognition based on empirical thinking is a cognitive way for human beings to sort out, summarize and summarize experience, so as to establish a preliminary understanding of the laws of things. Its advantages are vivid, specific, efficient and fast. When facing problems, it can quickly form solutions in a short time; Its shortcomings are also obvious. Because everything is changing, it is often easy to "acclimatize" to solve new problems with old methods. Although perceptual cognition is the primary stage of understanding things, it does not mean that it is not important. In fact, perceptual cognition is the premise and foundation of rational cognition, and it is the main cognitive way used by human beings in the long history of evolution. For war, whether the result of perceptual cognition is correct or not mainly depends on the depth of thinking. The deeper you think, the closer you get to the essence of war. For example, many of the famous works of strategists such as Sun Tzu's art of war and on war are the viewpoint system obtained by predecessors after combing and summarizing countless war experiences. These discussions are based on perceptual cognition and derived from war experience, but after the in-depth thinking of military experts, they have strong rationality and adaptability. Today, they still have strong war guiding significance. However, perceptual cognition can easily lead to failure if it gives up deep thinking, completely copies past experience, only summarizes appearances and does not explore principles. For example, in March 1944, in order to get rid of the dilemma, the Japanese army in the strategic defense situation on the battlefield in Southeast Asia, taking advantage of the unfinished preparation of the Allied counter offensive, preempted with nearly 100000 troops to attack the rear base of the Allied Southeast Asian theater in three ways, and carried out the famous battle of inpar. In order to solve the problem of logistics support for the long journey, the Japanese commander Mou Tiankou Lianyi is also ready to follow the example of the Mongolian cavalry and put forward the so-called "Genghis Khan battle" plan. He plundered 30000 cattle and sheep from Myanmar. During the March, they can be used not only to carry goods, but also as rations to solve the problems of transportation and supply. However, Mou Tiankou also ignored the important difference between the two: the Mongolian cavalry fought on the grassland in the era of cold weapons, while the Japanese army fought in the jungle in the era of hot weapons. The 30000 cattle and sheep trekked in the jungle, which not only slowed down the attack speed, but also made the Japanese army the target of Allied air strikes. As a result, the light raid envisaged by the Japanese army turned into a protracted war of attrition. In addition, with the advent of the rainy season, a large number of Japanese troops died of hunger and plague. At the end of the war, the Japanese army lost nearly 80000 people, including more than 40000 non combat casualties. The battle of enpal was also called "an unprotected war ignoring logistics" by later generations. In fact, to be more precise, this is a "schemless war of copying experience". Rational cognition based on mechanical thinking The so-called mechanical thinking is not rigid and dogmatic thinking. Its core idea is certainty (or predictability) and causality, that is, the operation of all things in the world follows the basic laws of certainty, and these laws can be recognized. Its formation can be traced back to the speculative thought of ancient Greece. After continuous improvement, it was established from the 17th century to the early 18th century. Based on the rational cognition of mechanical thinking, a magnificent building of natural science has been gradually built. Its typical representatives include the theories put forward by scientific giants such as Euclid, Ptolemy and Newton. For example, Euclid put forward axiomatic geometry: he first summarized five axioms that are simple to the extreme and independent of each other, that is, no axiom can be deduced from the other four, and then all theorems of geometry are deduced directly or indirectly from these five axioms; Then came the "geocentric theory" put forward by Ptolemy: he regarded circles as "meta models", which clearly described the known laws of celestial bodies at that time by nesting with each other and using mechanical motion models; Then came Newton's "universal gravitation" and "three laws of motion": he founded the theoretical system of classical mechanics and expanded the methodology of mechanical thinking from mathematics and astrology to the whole field of natural science. The greatest contribution of these scientists lies not only in their achievements, but also in their continuous transformation of European thinking. This prompted the emergence of countless scientists and inventors in the modern West, and directly opened the door of the industrial revolution. Rational cognition also has a profound impact on the field of war, mainly in three aspects: First, continue to promote the progress of military technology. Rational cognition has accelerated mankind's exploration of natural science, thus promoting the continuous progress of military technology and the continuous upgrading of weapons and equipment: strike weapons have developed from knives, spears, swords, halberds and crossbows to shotguns, rifles, machine guns, artillery and even missiles and cruise missiles; Carrying weapons have developed from horses, horse drawn chariots and sailboats to infantry chariots, aircraft, submarines and even aircraft carriers; Reconnaissance and communication equipment has developed from beacon tower, carrier pigeon and signal flag to radio walkie talkie, radar, satellite and even "star chain"... The progress of military technology has led to continuous changes in tactics, and cavalry tactics, line tactics, column tactics, scattered line tactics, contract tactics, joint tactics, manned / unmanned cooperative tactics have emerged successively. Tactics are constantly changing around technology, and the form of war is also evolving. Second, continue to promote the development of military theory. With the change of military technology, many famous military theories emerged in the modern West, such as Mahan's sea power theory, Du Hei's air power, Fuller's armored warfare and so on. These theories are closely combined with the latest achievements of military science and technology, and generally have the characteristics of strong speculative color, close connection with reality, self consistent demonstration logic and so on. Especially, in 1915, the British engineer F.W. Lanchester put forward the famous "Lanchester equation" and established a set of differential equations to describe the relationship between the forces of both sides in the process of fighting. Based on this set of equations, we can deeply understand the mathematical principle behind the military thought of "concentrating forces". In the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the British Navy defeated the French fleet. After a lapse of more than 100 years, it was found that the results calculated by Lanchester equation were surprisingly consistent with the actual battle losses of the naval battle at that time. Third, continue to promote the transformation of training mode. With the popularization of mechanical thinking, the territory of rational cognition has gradually expanded to the field of military training. In 1811, von leswitz of Prussia invented a game describing the process of war - wargame. Unlike most military historians, his method of describing the war process is not words and drawings, but more like studying an engineering technology: using rules, models, numbers and calculations. Since then, he has opened the door to the new discipline of combat simulation and military simulation. If the traditional war research is like a bystander, it just passively absorbs the wisdom contained in the war experience and explores the way to win; Then the military chess deduction is like an experimenter, actively simulating the war process and predicting the war results, so as to verify the new tactical ideas and military laws. With the development of modern military game and simulation engineering, it has become an indispensable part of Military game and countermeasure technology. Data driven cognition based on big data thinking The so-called big data thinking refers to the thinking mode of mining its internal relevance in a large amount of data, gaining insight into the internal laws of things or providing optimal solutions through logical analysis and quantitative processing. Its core idea is uncertainty and relevance. The so-called uncertainty means that, on the one hand, the world is a complex chaotic system, involving many variables, which cannot be predicted by simple formulas or models; On the other hand, it comes from the objective world itself - uncertainty is a characteristic of the universe, such as the "uncertainty principle" and "Schrodinger's cat" in quantum mechanics. The so-called relevance means that things are generally interrelated, and causality is only a "strong correlation". The bridge between uncertainty and relevance is data, which carries information. According to Shannon's information theory, the essence of information is to eliminate uncertainty. From this, we can know that the principle of big data thinking is that when causality cannot be determined, the information contained in the data can help us eliminate uncertainty, and the correlation between data can replace causality and help us get the desired answer. In short, if the process of mechanical thinking is "raise a problem → analyze the cause → find the root cause → solve the problem", then the process of big data thinking is "raise a problem → analyze data → find relevance → solve the problem". Big data thinking does not care about the causes of problems, but only about the methods to solve problems; That is, no matter "why", just "what to do". To do this, it needs a lot of data support, so it can be regarded as a "Data-Driven" cognitive way. For example, in 2016, Google's alphago computer defeated talented go player Li Shishi. Alphago has high intelligence in go, which comes from its ability to analyze and summarize hundreds of thousands of chess games played by human experts. In fact, goha does not have a large number of intelligent algorithms to sum up the problems of the underlying machine, and goha does not have a large number of intelligent algorithms. In the field of war, this data-driven cognitive style also exists. On March 20, 1935, a Swiss writer named Jacob published a book called "combat intelligence" out of his righteous anger at the Nazis, which publicly disclosed the organizational structure and organizational strength of the German army to the outside world and its intention to expand and prepare for war. After the investigation, the German army found that all the materials of "combat intelligence" were collected and analyzed from German public newspapers, funeral obituaries and even marriage notices, and no one disclosed military secrets. Another example is the United States looking for bin Laden. In 2007, the "9 / 11" suspect mentioned bin Laden's contact. In 2010, relying on big data association analysis technology and human behavior model algorithm, the United States confirmed that Ahmed was the only messenger between bin Laden and Al Qaeda through tracking and analysis of the communication data of senior leaders around the world. Then, through its contact and action monitoring, it finally learned the hiding place of bin Laden. Compared with the three cognitive styles, the difference mainly lies in the different cognitive methods. Perceptual cognition mainly depends on empirical analogy, rational cognition mainly depends on logical reasoning, and data-driven cognition mainly depends on relevance analysis. The three do not conflict and complement each other. Through observation, it will be found that at this stage,