Modern military order is coordination of the disorderly, not cosmic harmony

Evidence

The ponderous warfare of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which ever greater numbers of men were amassed to face each other head-on, was now to seem like the foolish clashing of mere crowds. … The parallel lines and mechanical precision present themselves as a new conception of order. Such order was not a harmony, balance or correspondence between the forces of the world – an older kind of order whose nature I will try to evoke more carefully below – but order itself, a state defined in no other terms than the ordering of what was order-less, the coordinating of what was discontinuous. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharply distinguishes mechanical order (coordination of the discontinuous) from older cosmic harmony/balance order.
• XREF: The harmony-vs-mechanical-order distinction strongly parallels Weber’s disenchantment and the Cartesian mechanical worldview. — connects to: Post-Cold War US military reconfigured around governing recalcitrance to its order