The term military science generally describes the body of theories, concepts, and methods for employing armed forces. However, as an academic discipline it is ill defined, drawing from a patchwork of curricula including history, foreign affairs, security studies, leadership, operations management, and systems engineering, as well as other elements of the physical and social sciences. Notably, the Department of Defense dictionary does not even provide a definition. This vague categorization is somewhat reflective of the term s diminished status from its 19th-century usage when Military Science was frequently capitalized and placed alongside Physics, Philosophy, and other well-established academic disciplines. An irony of the term s decline is that it occurred over a period when military professionals increasingly conceptualized their discipline in the terminology and metaphors of science. This transformation was driven in part by the institutionalization of officer education programs emphasizing the formalized study of military theory. A second factor, rapid industrialization, firmly established science and technology as the central pillars of American military power and arguably the foundational elements in approaches to doctrine and planning. These trends reinforced the proposition that the practical application of military theory, as expressed through strategy, doctrine, and planning, was becoming more of a science and less of an art. This perspective has reached an apex in recent decades, epitomized by doctrinal methodologies seeking to reduce decisionmaking to formulaic processes not unlike the methods used by chemists mixing compounds for desired effect. In particular, there has been a tendency toward instrumental applications of descriptive theory attempting to distill complex social dynamics into bounded problem statements that fit neatly into proscribed planning schemas and process solutions. ; Published in JFQ 75, 4th Quarter p84-90, 2014.