New wine, old bottles, unstable forms: traveling with Biddle’s concept of “the modern system of force employment”

This introduction to the special issue on Stephen Biddle’s concept of the modern system of force employment tracks its affirmation, strain, and transformation as artificial intelligence and autonomy act upon it. It does so by leveraging Edward Said’s insight that what matters in a theory’s travels is the consequence of change more than the fact of it. The modern system is Biddle’s solution to the problem of operating under lethal exposure, which, holds open the temporal and spatial intervals of concealment, movement, and counter-concentration on which survival depends. Read together, the contributions trace a single movement outward, from the terrain Biddle built on toward the domains he deliberately excluded. Near its origin, in Ukraine, the modern system is intensified, not overturned. In the doctrine of small and large powers it is at once most fully vindicated and first outgrown. Carried to sea, to nonstate actors, to the grey zone, and to future command, it is variously domesticated, turned critically against Biddle’s own claims, or abstracted toward a broader logic of adaptation. The modern system survives its travels by transformation rather than displacement, enduring as the theory of an unfinished argument between firepower and manoeuvre that prediction presses but cannot close.