Science & Tech Quote by Rebecca West

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.