He draws on chaos theory to show how the biosphere reaches singularities (or bifurcations) which mark self-organization thresholds where emergent properties are displayed and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities.
Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-organizing effects, the singularity is said to be 'mechanism independent'According to DeLanda, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to centralize command and control of each event on the battlefield and get "human will out of the decision-making loop" or they delegate responsibility to individual soldiers (e.g., platoons or the German mission-type tactics) to avoid "friction".
He thus underlines that the US has become a net importer of machine tools for the first time since the 19th century, and points out that while in 1975 all major manufacturers of integrated chips were American, in 1986 only two were not Japanese.
According to DeLanda, the Prussian Army was thus Jominian, that it favored centralized command of the battlefield and the conduct of military affairs over diplomacy and politics.
DeLanda claims that this Jominian theory influenced Prussian militarism, the RAND Corporation and current Pentagon policies concerning research and development.
It may be used to keep the human will out of the loop or prioritize cooperative behavior and decentralization: the classic example used is the hackers' re-appropriation of the military ARPANET in the early ages of the Internet.
Michel Serres thus mentioned Darwin, Marx and Freud as examples in the area of scientific discourse, reservoirs of population, of capital or of unconscious desires, put to work by the use of differences of fitness, class or sex, each following a procedure directing the circulation of naturally selected species, or commodities and labor, or symptoms and fantasies....|Serres (p.141)Thus, Napoleon's armies, born from the 1789 French Revolution, marked a new threshold of the machinic phylum or singularities or bifurcation: emergent properties are displayed in this "evolution" from the "clockwork paradigm" to the "motor paradigm".
DeLanda also notes how John von Neumann was hired by the RAND Corporation to improve war exercises, which he did by devising game theory, which helped The Pentagon think about nuclear strategy.
Since the zero-sum fallacy wasn't yet thought, this led to systemic bias in favor of conflict against cooperative games, according to de Landa.