Art Of War Research Articles

Loved It: The Boys of Summer

Loved It: The Boys of Summer Karen E. Kubara (bio) Roger Kahn aspired to be a writer. When the crunch came, he promised himself to write one book, his book, about the things and places and people he loved.1 That his subject was baseball is particularly American. Writers had been inspired by organized baseball almost from its beginning. The press box at the Polo Grounds circa 1907– 11 “could easily have been mistaken for an outdoor literary club,” sportswriter Bozeman Bulger once said.2 In The Boys of Summer Kahn is fan, reporter, and literary artist. His book is a classic. I call as my first witness Brett McKay of theartofmanliness.com. After studying the classics in college, McKay will tell you why every man should study classical culture. We know Kahn grew up immersed in the classics, at school and at home, which, to the dismay of some readers, comes through in his writing. McKay, his wife Kate, and their team have compiled a list: 100 Books Every Man Should Read over his lifetime, “a library that centers on books that expand mind and soul, build new mental models, allowing you to become more culturally literate and thus better able to participate in the ‘Great Conversation.’”3 (Lord knows we could use more cultural literacy out there.) Among the works of Jane Austen, Aristotle, and The Art of War by Sun Tzu; Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and Herodotus; The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Orwell’s 1984, and Self-Control: Its Kinship and Majesty, you’ll find one sports book, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. This book is “inspiring enough to make a man hope for another shot on the diamond and join a local soft ball crew.”4 But it also addresses the “big ideas” that philosophers, theologians, and artists have mulled over for thousands of years: What is justice? What is true friendship? What is love? What is honor? How do you live a good life? In The Boys of Summer, not only does Kahn explore such questions, but also, as he brings out, does each man on the team. [End Page 1] The title was the spark. Kahn traces the idea for his book to the evening in 1952 when he heard Dylan Thomas “sonorously” recite in tones of surpassing beauty, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin . . .”5 Over the years ideas for the book evolved, but “baseball became [his] magic portal.”6 The boys of summer, the pleasant lilt of those five syllables, the soft vowels, the bucolic connotations are only part of the first line of the poem. Kahn quotes the complete line prominently on its own page following the table of contents. Clearly it resonated with him. If your eyes are rolling, “This is a baseball journal, lady,” you won’t be surprised that Kahn’s publishers balked at the title. It comes from a poem? Poetry doesn’t sell. “Safely, prosaically, dully,” Kahn’s editor wanted to call the book The Team.7 It took months of debate for Kahn to prevail. Why did he insist? “Is there one basic point to all fine poetry?” Kahn had asked Robert Frost. “The phrase . . . a clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart.”8 And that is why The Boys of Summer and not The Team became the title of Kahn’s book. The Team conjures naught, while The Boys of Summer is so loaded with color and suggestion it became a baseball meme, a synonym for ballplayers in their fleeting prime.9 In 1959 Kahn wrote an article about Babe Ruth for Esquire, in which he stated, “I set down the big man as he really was, with the booze, the babes, the insensitivity, the excess, as well as the howitzer homeruns.” Kahn was creating innovative sports journalism, he says, “hard- edged but not cruel . . . making a hero mortal but scarcely ordinary.”10 That article won the E. P. Dutton Prize for best sports magazine article of the year, reinforcing the approach, Kahn says, that was critical to The Boys of Summer. “In an era of hero worship,” Carl Erskine said, “Kahn...

The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint By MichaelO'Hanlon. Yale University Press, 2021. 304 pages. $22, paperback.

The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint By MichaelO'Hanlon. Yale University Press, 2021. 304 pages. $22, paperback.

The Way of Nature from the Perspective of Laozi, Confucius, and Sunzi

Where do ethics or morals come from? We arrive at vastly different answers, given that these answers are contingent upon various sources, such as legendary stories, the theology of various religions, Western and Eastern philosophies, etc. In the Chinese tradition, Laozi, Confucius, and Sunzi are considered as the three ancient sages from approximately 2500 years ago. Their thoughts and teachings have shaped Chinese culture and characterized the Chinese way of life. This essay attempts to demonstrate a new understanding of their philosophy on ethical principles. Herein, we present select analyses of their literary works—Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing), The Analects, and The Art of War. These three sages posited ethical ideas inspired by nature, and a single thread—the way of nature—sewed those ideas together.

Physical Philosophy: Martial Arts as Embodied Wisdom

While defining martial arts is not prerequisite to philosophizing about them, such a definition is desirable, helping us resolve disputes about the status of hard cases. At one extreme, Martínková and Parry argue that martial arts are distinguished from both close combat (as unsystematic) and combat sports (as competitive), and from warrior arts (as lethal) and martial paths (as spiritual). At the other extreme, mixed martial arts pundits and Bruce Lee speak of combat sports generally as martial arts. I argue that the fine-grained taxonomy proposed by Martínková and Parry can be usefully supplemented by a broader definition, specifically the following: martial arts are systematic fighting styles and practices as ways of embodying wisdom. A possible difficulty here is that such views face the charge of overemphasizing the “philosophical” aspect of martial arts. My definition can, however, avoid this apparent problem. If martial arts essentially aim to embody wisdom, this applies no less to the (strategic) practical wisdom of The Art of War than to the (ethical) practical wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. In an extended sense, then, any systematic fighting style, including combat sports, may count as a martial art insofar as it embodies wisdom by improving practical fighting skills.

Notes on Cold War Historiography

In this essay, Menand raises historiographical questions about the Cold War, arising mainly from his experience of authoring The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

HANNIBALʼS STRATAGEMS

Romeʼs fiercest enemy, the one who defeated Rome on its own in the Second Punic War, Hannibalus was one of the most special warriors of all time, so we can call the Second Punic War, his war. It was through all the actions he really took his war with Rome, both after all the outstanding theories about the war, but especially by the fact that the talented Carthaginian general defeated Rome at her home, shattering the myth of her invincibility, as a city of Mars. We are not wrong when we claim that Hannibal would have defeated the god of war in this conflict as well.From the beginning of military hostilities to their end, the perfect strategist of the Puns fully controlled the theatre of operations, even being its sole director, putting his enemy, Rome, in the most disastrous situation of all time. Basically, Hannibal eliminated the echelon of command of the Roman army, but also the Roman army that is shattered in three successive battles at Trebia, Trasimenus and Cannae, ending up threatening Rome itself through the famous ante portas episode. Even though Hannibalʼs war did not result in Hannibal’s peace, the intention of the brilliant general was to eliminate Rome as an armed force and economic strength, an objective fully accomplished during the military operations. The detail that eluded him was the Roman tenacity, the one that stole his peace, but Hannibal has entirely the paternity of the second war between the Puns and the Romans, being to this day a genius of the art of war, unmatched yet.

Visualising emptiness: the landscape of the Western Front and Australian and English children’s picture books

ABSTRACT Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is the illustrators, however, who have the more complex task, for they have inherited an aesthetic issue that has challenged artists since 1914. Like the British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand official war artists of the time, they are confronted, at every turn, by the challenge of depicting a surreally empty landscape. It was not so much a landscape as the artists understood it before the war, but rather an anti-landscape, as though the war had annihilated Nature. What was left was a dystopian wilderness that bore witness to the destructive power of industrialised warfare. This article will explore how a selection of Australian and English children’s picture book illustrators respond to the emptiness of the battlefield landscape, or as Becca Weir so evocatively characterises it, the paradox of measurable nothingness.

Sun Zi Reimagined: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Strategic Leadership Through The Art of War, Wuxing, and Modern Science

Sun Zi Reimagined: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Strategic Leadership Through The Art of War, Wuxing, and Modern Science

Marketing Doctrines, a Resurrection Guide: Review of The Art of Strategic Marketing War: Pearls of Wardom (2019) by Pete Jeans

Marketing Doctrines, a Resurrection Guide: Review of The Art of Strategic Marketing War: Pearls of Wardom (2019) by Pete Jeans

The Concept of Methodology for Strategic Decision Making of Managers

Globalization of markets, intense competition and implementation of innovations require quick and appropriate strategic decisions made by managers. The traditional strategic planning process is outdated and ineffective. The principles of the Art of War by Sun Tzu combined with modern methods of multi-criteria decision making provide managers with guidance for appropriate and timely strategic decisions. The contribution of the article is in the development of a methodology concept for strategic managerial decision making.Strategic and tactical excellence is the key factor of a company's success. The article deals with the possibilities of implementing the ideas of the Art of War into strategic decision making of managers. When implemented appropriately, managers ensure prosperity of their businesses and employees as well as customer satisfaction. The presented methodology can be a guide mainly for managers of railway passenger operators who are facing a big challenge represented by the liberalization of transport services in the public interest in railway passenger transport.

The Greek army at Troy and its logistics . Based on the “Catalog of ships” called “Boeotia” from the second book of Homer’s Iliad

The author showed a fragment of the Iliad referred to as the Catalogue of Ships, also called Beotia (Bojotia). The name of this part comes from the Beots, whose troops, arriving at Troy, were listed in the Catalogue as the first. The list contains in-formations about the Greek armed forces, rulers and chiefs of the Greek peoples who took part in the naval expedition and the war against the Trojans. It also determines the number of ships brought by the Greeks to Troy. Eager to go to war, they put themselves in Beocia near the city of Aulis where, on the Strait of Eurypus, a large port was located. It can also be assumed that the Catalogue of Greek troops begins with the army of Beocia because the ports of this land were chosen as the place of concentration of troops for the expedition against Troy. A collection of works called the Trojan Cycle was also characterized, which includes 29 books and from which only small fragments (epitomai) and summaries in the so-called Chrestomatia have survived. Despite such poor literature, they are an important source in reproducing the content of the Trojan cycle. The passage showing the Achaean army at Troy, which is a list of Greek nobility, is often omitted in the editions of the Iliad. However, for those studying the art of war, it is an extremely important record of Europe’s past.

How to Use Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to Help Businesses Fulfil Their Corporate Social Responsibility?

CSR is becoming increasingly important as businesses grow. China has a rich cultural background, so incorporating CSR into traditional culture is more appropriate for Chinese businesses. Through a literature review, this article evaluates various inspirations and past cases from the application of traditional culture to corporate governance, and applies Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in Traditional Chinese culture to assist businesses in improving and fulfilling CSR and assisting corporate governance in achieving success. This research utilized Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to corporate management—CSR and integrates diverse theories of international management to conduct joint analysis and discussion, in order to promote the combination and exchange of traditional Chinese culture and culture in the world.

“Vaccinodemic” as a component of the global hybrid conflict between democracy and autocracy: the case of Ukraine

Today, there is no doubt that the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops in February 2022 represents just another phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War that has lasted for nine years. There are many aspects to this confrontation. The consequences of the war will affect the future of the world order. It will include such aspects as security, formation of new political blocs, force interaction of political regimes, the choice of state-building models by the countries, the art of war, the role of civil society, and strengthening of the informational component in the confrontation between states and their alliances. Russia-Iran has already emerged as one such aggressive alliance. In the article, the authors explain the phenomenon of the infodemic and one of its structural elements, the “vaccinodemic”. The COVID-19 pandemic became a vivid example of the global clash of actors in international relations that implement conflicting ideologies – democratic or authoritarian rule in the social and political life of their states – and realize such aspects in foreign policy. The authors assert that the current situation in Ukraine, namely, the open military Russian invasion and the further aggravation of the security crisis, primarily in the European region, are only the next phase of an ideological confrontation that could be observed during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by humanity. Now, this confrontation continues in a more aggressive, conventional format. Manifestations of the infodemic and its unique form, the “vaccinodemic”, captured the essence of the global confrontation, which will determine international processes for decades. Namely, Russia’s fight between democracy and authoritarianism has acquired neo-totalitarian characteristics. This fight will determine, in addition to other social phenomena, the structure and content of the global information space. It is noted that authoritarian regimes have shown some success in addressing the pandemic, which may aggravate the rivalry between democracy and authoritarianism, as the former will have to prove its effectiveness and long-term advantages.

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana Lisa Szefel (bio) Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 2021. 880 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting [End Page 408] democracy into reverse. In the wake of this wheelspin, new articulations of freedom gained traction. Menand’s Tolstoyan epic examines a geometry of “vertical cross-sections” and “horizontal through-lines” (p. xiv), which unveils a deep and broad panorama. What results is not War and Peace, but a series of Polaroid snapshots, a device created in 1948 as one of the era’s technological innovations. Menand captures the moments when creators conceived their art: Jean-Paul Sartre jumping into the void; Jackson Pollock tossing a canvass on the floor; Merce Cunningham chucking choreography for chance. Critics charted this new territory, explaining films, explicating texts, criticizing consumerism, unveiling misogyny, and diagnosing racism. A second goal animates the inquiry: the education Menand absorbed from his parents, a more activist and elevated version of the kind of general readers Joan Shelley Rubin illustrated in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992). Considering art and thought in the Cold War might, Menand suggests, render a more complete portrait of his own subjectivity. What launched the notion that ideas matter? Menand argues that it began with George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram,” which laid out in despairing detail the inherently expansionist nature of Communist ideology. With little hope of peaceful coexistence, only a policy of “vigilant containment” offered protection against yet another global conflagration. Among the first to gauge Atomic Age geopolitical threats was George Orwell whose attempt to join a Communist cell became fodder for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell chronicled his battle against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, while the now-canonical Animal Farm (1948) and 1984 (1949) illuminated the despotic impact of Stalinist cant and dissimulation. Eastern bloc consolidation gave ballast to the publishing fortunes of another political prognosticator, Hannah Arendt. Her etiology of...

Sun Tzu's Dao of Deceit Considering from a Semiotic Perspective

Semioticians’ efforts on lie study, mostly focus on lie and sign relationship, its general characteristics on the basis of a static analysis. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the existing oldest treatise with the theme on lie whose influence extends beyond battle to other competitive spheres such as politics and business by modern readers cannot be overlooked. Sun Tzu, in contrast to semiotic studies of lying, focuses on the dynamic process of lie-sign signification, stating that lie formation is preconditioned by sign observation from the sender, the recipient, and the surrounding environment. He proposes his Xing (形) theory that the manipulation of recipient through the use of signs is the key to subdue him; he presents the formulating process of a lie-sign from the standpoint of a deceiver, which is uncommon in western culture. This study can shed new light on both the classic and the process of L-sign formulation and signification.

Ротмистр Александр Сенявский герба Лелива и его конная рота в 1557 году

This article is devoted to the distinguished commander of the Polish mercenary army, Aleksander Sieniawski (c. 1490—1568) and his horse unit (rota) from 1557. A. Sieniawski was officer in the Polish mercenary army in 1512—1563. The main part of the text is an overview of the composition and armament of the detachment commanded by the captain in 1557. The analysis of information on the equipment of soldiers allows us to recreate the actual condition of the troops guarding the Ruthenian lands of the Kingdom of Poland. Most of the riders in this unit were soldiers armed in Hussar style, the second group were riders armed in the Cossack manner. The equipment of soldiers shows the influence of the eastern art of war, manifested by the use of such elements of armament as, for example, bechter, sahajdaks, helmets of the eastern type, etc. In terms of the composition and armament of soldiers, A. Sieniawski’s rota should be considered a unit typical of this period serving in the Ruthenian lands of The Kingdom of Poland.

A New Way of War: The Swarmers

It seems that the future of warfare is in the hands of technology: drones and machines in general are likely to be among the major players in tomorrow’s battlefield. However, those who believe that human beings will be completely deprived of the art of war are mistaken. In the future, humans will not be mere players from behind the scenes. The human factor will be decisive, just as it was in the days of Alexander III, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Obviously a “new military figure” is needed, one who is capable of combining different ideas in an efficient and successful way. This article seeks to outline this figure on the basis of two fundamental concepts. Consideration will be given to swarming, a tactic used since antiquity and now used primarily for drones, and human-machine teaming, a concept that is gaining momentum in the fields of military science and technology. The intent here is to understand if these ideas can generate a new player capable of interpreting—and winning—future warfare.

Chimes of Freedom

In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand tests the proposition that the West’s victory in the Cold War might have been a bigger win on the cultural level than it was on the political and military ones. Nuclear dread does not pervade his narrative, and he handles strategic affairs interstitially. During the Cold War, he suggests, the United States and the Soviet Union exploited the human foibles illuminated by modern literature on a grand scale. Visual art, for its part, elevated and framed American capitalism as a cultural as well as an economic monolith. The US government, including the CIA, sought to weaponise Western culture, but Menand concludes that its unaided power was far greater than any government instrument’s. Art may now be less useful or powerful as a tool of cultural warfare than it was in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Body Writes Back: The Pharmacopolitics of Cure and Care in Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War

Technoscientific pharmacology involved in finding remedies for diseases has always been concerned with the activity of relevant medical support at the cellular level, working on the principles of the Cartesian treatment of the body as a machine to be tinkered upon and moulded by the power of the pharmakon. As such, the project of determining a cure for any disease ends in creating what Michael Montagne calls pharmacomythology, that is, a single story of the drug (inevitably a remedy or a poison) that concerns itself with dominant patterns only and eliminates the rest as anomalies (13). In doing so, scientific drug narratives overlook the agency of the body that has ingested the drug, something that goes beyond the dose-response relationships and places the diseased body at the crossroads of automation and autonomy. These contradictory aspects reveal themselves in their respective ways; the former allowing the artificial power of the pharmakon to ‘write’, or rather ‘rewrite/overwrite’ the body, and the latter augmenting the ability of the body to exert its own power over the institutionally organised, extraneous control of the pharmakon and ‘write back’. Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War is a novel that contests the largely Western medical paradigm of AIDS care and cure with the anomalous states of the body under the regulation of technomedical knowledge and support. The diseased bodies of the various characters not only narrate against the clinical nature of should-be’s and should-not-be’s in the Western healthcare system with alternative, unscientific dimensions of healing, but also against the sensational and oversentimental rhetoric tailing the former. Bodies that are forced to heal reject the institutionalised care, and those that have lost hope from such care find solace and amelioration (if only temporary) from the non-traditional practices rooted in the non-Western cultural identity of the characters. Bodies also reject the idea that AIDS has a single, unidirectional narrative of dying and death, or that the scientific paradigm of treatment that merely depends on the transparency of a therapeutic cause-effect relationship is the only key to everyday normalcy that HIV-positive patients should aspire to. Ensconced within the recurring motifs of war against a virus and between communities, the silent war of the body against the traditions of healthcare has, according to this researcher, proven a worthy theme of study. This paper, therefore, aims to examine how Alameddine’s novel destabilises the constructed relationship between the diseased and accepted modes of treatment at the intersections of race, faith, gender, sexuality, ability and beyond to establish a dimension of healing that does not cater for the escapism of a cure but for the transformation of care itself.

The artistic image of the ukrainian folk costume in the genre portrait of ukrainian artists (Russian-ukrainian war of 2022)

Purpose of Research. The purpose of the research is to determine the reasons and nature of the evolution of the female portrait in Ukrainian painting during the period of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. Methodology. The work is based on a general scientific complex approach, which combined the methods of art history, cultural, philosophical and aesthetical. The methods of pictorial-stylistic, comparative and compositional-artistic analysis of the works were used. Scientific Novelty. The scientific novelty of the work is the first attempt to analyse the artistic image of the Ukrainian folk costume as a fundamental component of the image of a «beregyna» woman in Ukrainian painting during the war of 2022. It is proven that female images in Ukrainian folk dress has become the leading motif of patriotic painting. Conclusions. The research examines the characteristic features of the use of the artistic image of the Ukrainian national costume in female portrait painting during the period of military operations of Russia against Ukraine in 2022. It is highlighted that the complex of Ukrainian traditional clothing and its elements in artistic works is a symbol of the indomitability of the Ukrainian nation, its connection with the past and respect for folk culture. The works contain the «breathing» of the real world with its tragic events, the reflection of the psycho-emotional state of the society through female images, the combination of ancient and modern folklore, and an emphasis on national identity. A modern Ukrainian woman, dealt with the emotional direction of the work and the use of one or another element of the constume, appears as a Young Girl, Beregynya, Madonna, Warrior. So, we can state that the artistic image of the Ukrainian national costume in genre female portrait painting occupies a special place in the period of the psychological cataclysms in the Ukrainian society in 2022 and it is an effective tool to unite the Ukrainian nation and encourage the preservation of the territorial, spiritual, historical and cultural integrity of Ukraine . Keywords: female symbol, art of war, female portrait.