Search
1000 results for “fields”
-
Hashtag Field Of Vision #Vision
🌍🌏🌎🐝
#Art
Yesterday has deceived you and gone (>
Tomorrow is a doubtful visitor <)
The present is a gift |#EtEarthMission #OneLove
#TomorrowPeople'dontknowthepast…\Hello
#ReadingRainbow
#IandICreation
https://www.obama.org/stories/president-obamas-favorite-books-summer-2025/ #awe#UAPs #Ultraterrestrials #Extraterrestrials
#PlanetBee(> | <)
#FieldOfVision -
Hashtag Field Of Vision #Vision
🌍🌏🌎🐝
#Art
Yesterday has deceived you and gone (>
Tomorrow is a doubtful visitor <)
The present is a gift |#EtEarthMission #OneLove
#TomorrowPeople'dontknowthepast…\Hello
#ReadingRainbow
#IandICreation
https://www.obama.org/stories/president-obamas-favorite-books-summer-2025/ #awe#UAPs #Ultraterrestrials #Extraterrestrials
#PlanetBee(> | <)
#FieldOfVision -
USMC F-35B 168724 of VMFAT-502 'Flying Nightmares" makes a pass vapor across the wing allows visualization of the airflow. Capital Airshow, Mather Field, California March 2025 #airshow #capitalairshow #aviation #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #nikonphotgraphy #CCA2025 #F35B #USMC #VMFAT502
-
USMC F-35B 168724 of VMFAT-502 'Flying Nightmares" makes a pass vapor across the wing allows visualization of the airflow. Capital Airshow, Mather Field, California March 2025 #airshow #capitalairshow #aviation #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #nikonphotgraphy #CCA2025 #F35B #USMC #VMFAT502
-
USMC F-35B 168724 of VMFAT-502 'Flying Nightmares" makes a pass vapor across the wing allows visualization of the airflow. Capital Airshow, Mather Field, California March 2025 #airshow #capitalairshow #aviation #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #nikonphotgraphy #CCA2025 #F35B #USMC #VMFAT502
-
USMC F-35B 168724 of VMFAT-502 'Flying Nightmares" makes a pass vapor across the wing allows visualization of the airflow. Capital Airshow, Mather Field, California March 2025 #airshow #capitalairshow #aviation #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #nikonphotgraphy #CCA2025 #F35B #USMC #VMFAT502
-
USMC F-35B 168724 of VMFAT-502 'Flying Nightmares" makes a pass vapor across the wing allows visualization of the airflow. Capital Airshow, Mather Field, California March 2025 #airshow #capitalairshow #aviation #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #nikonphotgraphy #CCA2025 #F35B #USMC #VMFAT502
-
USMC F-35B 170054 ofVMFA-214 "The Black Sheep" in the break at Moffett Field (KNUQ) throwing multiple wingtip vortexes #USMC #VMFA214 #blacksheep #photography #F35B #militaryaviation #fighter #fighterjet #aviationphotography #AvGeek #photography #aircraft #milair #nikon #cvvhrn
-
USMC F-35B 170054 ofVMFA-214 "The Black Sheep" in the break at Moffett Field (KNUQ) throwing multiple wingtip vortexes #USMC #VMFA214 #blacksheep #photography #F35B #militaryaviation #fighter #fighterjet #aviationphotography #AvGeek #photography #aircraft #milair #nikon #cvvhrn
-
USMC F-35B 170054 ofVMFA-214 "The Black Sheep" in the break at Moffett Field (KNUQ) throwing multiple wingtip vortexes #USMC #VMFA214 #blacksheep #photography #F35B #militaryaviation #fighter #fighterjet #aviationphotography #AvGeek #photography #aircraft #milair #nikon #cvvhrn
-
USMC F-35B 170054 ofVMFA-214 "The Black Sheep" in the break at Moffett Field (KNUQ) throwing multiple wingtip vortexes #USMC #VMFA214 #blacksheep #photography #F35B #militaryaviation #fighter #fighterjet #aviationphotography #AvGeek #photography #aircraft #milair #nikon #cvvhrn
-
USMC F-35B 170054 ofVMFA-214 "The Black Sheep" in the break at Moffett Field (KNUQ) throwing multiple wingtip vortexes #USMC #VMFA214 #blacksheep #photography #F35B #militaryaviation #fighter #fighterjet #aviationphotography #AvGeek #photography #aircraft #milair #nikon #cvvhrn
-
HOY JUEGA MESSI 🇦🇷
#InterMiami vistará el BMO Field en la J12 de la #MLS ante #Toronto con el atacante argentino en el 11 inicial.
📌Berterame arrancará el partido junto a Luis Suárez.
📌 El encuentro iniciará a las 11:00 horas y será transmitido por Apple TV.
-
HOY JUEGA MESSI 🇦🇷
#InterMiami vistará el BMO Field en la J12 de la #MLS ante #Toronto con el atacante argentino en el 11 inicial.
📌Berterame arrancará el partido junto a Luis Suárez.
📌 El encuentro iniciará a las 11:00 horas y será transmitido por Apple TV.
-
2026 NFL draft: 5 cornerbacks for Chargers fans to watch at Combine
On-field testing at the NFL Combine begins on Thursday, but Chargers general manager Joe Hortiz will speak to…
#nfl #nfldraft #NFLDraft #AverySmith #brycecallahan #CamHart #Chargers #ChrisJohnson #ChrisO'Leary #DevinMoore #DonteJackson #Football #Indianapolis #JimHarbaugh #joehortiz #MikeSainristil #NFL #nflcombine #QuinyonMitchell #TheChargers #versatility
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/772557/ -
2026 NFL draft: 5 cornerbacks for Chargers fans to watch at Combine
On-field testing at the NFL Combine begins on Thursday, but Chargers general manager Joe Hortiz will speak to…
#nfl #nfldraft #NFLDraft #AverySmith #brycecallahan #CamHart #Chargers #ChrisJohnson #ChrisO'Leary #DevinMoore #DonteJackson #Football #Indianapolis #JimHarbaugh #joehortiz #MikeSainristil #NFL #nflcombine #QuinyonMitchell #TheChargers #versatility
https://www.rawchili.com/nfl/772557/ -
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
-
There's so much distrust cause #advertising pervades everything. #Marketing may serve your short-term interest but it creates a never ending and expanding race to top others in #attention and exaggeration. Not in quality but #manipulation. What began small now makes the entire culture feel fake. We've given up demanding any kind of #integrity and now judge intelligence and competence based on how well their reality distortion field seems to work on others.
This has to end. #DemocracyOfReach
-
There's so much distrust cause #advertising pervades everything. #Marketing may serve your short-term interest but it creates a never ending and expanding race to top others in #attention and exaggeration. Not in quality but #manipulation. What began small now makes the entire culture feel fake. We've given up demanding any kind of #integrity and now judge intelligence and competence based on how well their reality distortion field seems to work on others.
This has to end. #DemocracyOfReach
-
There's so much distrust cause #advertising pervades everything. #Marketing may serve your short-term interest but it creates a never ending and expanding race to top others in #attention and exaggeration. Not in quality but #manipulation. What began small now makes the entire culture feel fake. We've given up demanding any kind of #integrity and now judge intelligence and competence based on how well their reality distortion field seems to work on others.
This has to end. #DemocracyOfReach
-
The vibrant flower fields at Kuju Flower Park, a sight to be seen only in spring.
#photography #japan #nature #art #artwork #flower #flowers #花 #写真 #beautiful #beauty #bloomscrolling #landscape #scenery #fantasy #oldlens #filmlike #vintage #retro #ephemeral #healing #calm #lightroom #spring #colors #colorful #garden #cloudy
-
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
- Kurt Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece,” in Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein, eds., War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Center for Hellenic Studies: Washington, DC, 1999) p. 133: “Since the goal was to defeat, not annihilate, the enemy, the fleeing losers usually were not pursued and casualties, though potentially serious, often were limited.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
Edit 2026-03-01: Cite Raaflaub
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite -
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
-
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
-
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
-
Since 2022-05-01. I wrote a blog about this, when I started it as a experiment.
https://janvlug.org/blog/one-week-librem-5-field-trial-day-1/
Thanks for asking. I realize now that it was yesterday exactly four years ago.
The software has been improving since then, and it is still improving. The release of the next version of #PureOS for the #Librem5 with the name #Crimson is imminent.