Marc | August 31, 2008
One of the things I was trying to do with my Notes towards a Theory of Asymmetric Warfare posts was to broaden the notion of “conflict” to that of “competition”. I feel that this is important to do for a number of reasons including, but certainly not limited to, the fact that people tend to [...]
Marc | August 27, 2008
One of the more fascinating things about the way humans seem to work is that we will frequently do pretty much the same thing while changing the labels and conveniently forgetting that we did it before. We seem to have “default” processes for a number of things including myth. For Anthropologists, “myth” doesn’t [...]
Marc | August 24, 2008
One of the problems with the spread of ‘net-based publishing is that you inevitably miss some real gems. That happened to me today when I stumbled across a posting from 2006 by my SWC colleague, Mark Safranski (aka Zenpundit), entitled The Epistemological Battlespace. In this short post, Mark draws on an essay by [...]
Marc | August 19, 2008
For over a year, I have been using the term “Witch Hunts”to refer to the actions of some people who are violently opposed to the existence on the Human Terrain System. It is important that people realize that when I use that term, it is not being used in the normal meaning of political [...]
Marc | August 17, 2008
[this is the final post in this series]
Topologies of competition
In the previous post, I identified two classes of battlespace topologies: perceptual and technological. While the two classes have common dimensions, it is analytically useful to treat them as if they were separate. Social groups (and individuals) operate across a multiplicity of battlespaces (“workspaces” [...]
Marc | August 14, 2008
[This continues from the previous post]
Linking battle/workspaces into perceptual topologies
In a recent article, Raphaël Baeriswyl, drawing heavily on the work of Jacques Baud, argues that there are six distinct “battlespaces”: topographic space (land, sea), airspace, electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace, and human space. Each of these battlespaces has emerged as technological advances has shifted the [...]
Marc | August 13, 2008
[Note: I am in the process of putting together a journal article on asymmetric warfare and I will be using the next few posts to help me think abut it.]
Competition appears to be an inevitable consequence of our natural (read biological) state. Darwin termed this “natural selection”. But, as with most species, we [...]
Marc | August 11, 2008
Last month, Hugh Gusterson published an article in Foreign Policy entitled When Professors go to War that sparked a fair bit of commentary. This article just sparked a new exchange on the FP site. First, Peter D. Feaver at Duke, responded with a rebuttal called Pentagon Funding? Bring it on. In which he [...]
Marc | August 9, 2008
In case you are wondering why I put the term “theologian” in quotation marks, it’s simple: the quotation marks are used to indicate a verbal tonality, in this case, dripping sarcasm (the red text is used to indicate “Danger”). I use the term “theologian” to indicate a person who is, as Dawkins might say, [...]
Marc | August 7, 2008
On August 5th, my friend Matt Armstrong posted a very interesting article entitled New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation (cross-posted at the CT Lab). As with most of Matt’s work, it is a great blending of solid academic analysis (in plain English!) aimed at an applied topic. Since Matt’s specialty is Strategic [...]
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