Notion Of Warfare Research Articles

"Our fellow-creatures": Women Narrating Political Violence in the 1798 Irish Rebellion

Protestant women's narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, though few in number, constitute a different and valuable genre of rebellion narrative. Their perspective from the interior of a permeable domestic sphere offers more complex and nuanced versions of the rebellion than those found in the male-authored histories. The women's narratives consistently eschew a systematic dehumanization of the insurgents and considerably complicate the prevailing image of the "savage" rebels. Attending to their voices changes our notion of warfare and what it means to participate in a war, underscoring the extent to which civil warfare disrupts and reconfigures gender and class roles and thwarts easy moral determinations.

The Gender of Terror: War as (Im) Moral Institution in Kleist's Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea

This article argues that the notion of warfare as a sublime endeavor does not originate in WWI literature but dates back to the eighteenth century. Alongside the debate on eternal peace, there existed a lively discourse, evidenced in texts by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel and others, that considered war a moral and culturally productive institution and lavished praise on its ennobling features. Secondly, the article suggests that Kleist's Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea contain a critique of such recuperative war discourses. In Kleist's texts, the concept of terror emerges as the dark “Other” of the nexus of war and the sublime. Similarly, representations of savagery and inhuman cruelty are employed to deconstruct the notion of war as a rational, political act. Finally, the article claims that, in spite of these insights, Kleist's texts cannot be read as pacifist manifestos since the critique of war is undercut and confounded by the representation of gender.

CAMPAIGNS: THE ESSENCE OF OPERATIONAL WARFARE

Abstract : On 6 June 1944, American and British forces stormed across the Normandy beaches to begin Operation Overlord, the far-reaching campaign for the liberation of Europe. The unqualified success of that bold venture, which led to the defeat of Nazi Germany, stressed the importance of a well-designed and well-executed campaign as an adjunct to operational warfare. Yet, shortly after the Second World War, this notion of warfare with its associated campaigns largely disappeared from contemporary military thinking. More recently, however, a resurgent interest in operational warfare as an essential step in achieving overall victory in war has evolved among military leaders. Unfortunately, somewhat less attention has been placed on its indivisible component -- the campaign. To better convey the notion of campaigning, this essay delves into a series of campaign fundamentals from four points of view. First, numerous campaigns of the Second World War, in Europe, the Pacific, and Africa, illustrate the elements of war that must be amalgamated to produce victory. Although Overlord was but one of these memorable campaigns, a brief review of its salient points provides a useful historical perspective of a campaign. Second, a precise definition of operational warfare and its companion, the campaign, serves to simplify many of the complexities inherent in these terms. Third, a comparison of campaign planning with other planning functions further delineates the unique wartime role of the campaign. Finally, by examining some of the campaign's major components -- the mission, the concept of operations, and the logistics concept -- we will see these disparate components quickly coalesce under the unifying rubric of the campaign.

Clausewitz and the Fading Dialectic of War

American strategic theorists used to urge that the United States adopt a Clausewitzian point of view on international conflict, that we treat war as something undertaken to serve the larger aims of policy, with the conduct of war subordinated to the larger considerations of policy. Under contemporary conditions, however, this notion of warfare is not appropriate. The experience of warfare since the time of Clausewitz shows that his distinction between war in the abstract and war in the concrete is not any kind of dialectical unity; rather, political war and total war (the concrete manifestation of Clausewitz's war in the abstract) are two distinct phenomena, and our technological and ideological positions discourage political war. War is no longer an instrument of state policy, a means whereby those who rule the state attain their values; instead, it is increasingly the fact or possibility of war which determines the values of the state.