"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology"
About this Quote
Military planning loves to dress itself in the hard hat of inevitability. Rebecca West punctures that costume with a single, wicked comparison: before the shooting starts, “military science” presents as astronomy - orderly, predictive, governed by laws. After the shooting, it looks like astrology - a comforting story told after the fact, heavy on symbols, light on proof.
The line works because it attacks not soldiers but the prestige economy around war: the staff colleges, the models, the confident men with maps who speak in the calm grammar of certainty. “Seems” does a lot of work here. West isn’t claiming strategy has no rigor; she’s noting how its authority is staged, and how outcome retroactively reclassifies expertise. Victory makes planners look like astronomers; defeat turns their same methods into horoscope-reading. That’s the subtext: “science” in war often functions less as truth than as insulation against moral responsibility and political messiness.
Context matters. West wrote in a century that treated technological modernity as an ethical alibi - as if better instruments meant cleaner judgment. Two world wars exposed the gap between calculation and chaos, between what can be quantified and what actually decides wars: luck, weather, morale, misperception, bureaucratic vanity. Her punchline is cynical but not nihilist. It’s a warning about overfitting: the human urge to find patterns in catastrophe, then mistake those patterns for control. War humiliates prediction, and West refuses to let the humiliated quietly rebrand itself as destiny.
The line works because it attacks not soldiers but the prestige economy around war: the staff colleges, the models, the confident men with maps who speak in the calm grammar of certainty. “Seems” does a lot of work here. West isn’t claiming strategy has no rigor; she’s noting how its authority is staged, and how outcome retroactively reclassifies expertise. Victory makes planners look like astronomers; defeat turns their same methods into horoscope-reading. That’s the subtext: “science” in war often functions less as truth than as insulation against moral responsibility and political messiness.
Context matters. West wrote in a century that treated technological modernity as an ethical alibi - as if better instruments meant cleaner judgment. Two world wars exposed the gap between calculation and chaos, between what can be quantified and what actually decides wars: luck, weather, morale, misperception, bureaucratic vanity. Her punchline is cynical but not nihilist. It’s a warning about overfitting: the human urge to find patterns in catastrophe, then mistake those patterns for control. War humiliates prediction, and West refuses to let the humiliated quietly rebrand itself as destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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