To understand the monumental change that technology has wrought on hostage-taking strategy, let’s first examine two other advances that changed global kidnapping: commercial airlines and the nightly news.

source: grugq

Military monism is the notion that all instances of war boil down to the same fundamental essence. In other words, before you can believe in war’s tool-likeness you must first accept the premise that war is (despite appearances) always one-and-only-one thing. This is a myth – military monism is empirically untrue – but as I’ve already shown, it is ingrained in American language, embedded in everyday words for war. To see how this myth can skew perception, it helps to look at common diagrams of war such as “the spectrum of conflict” displayed in many ROTC textbooks, and the various timelines of war in many recent books on strategy. Such diagrams condense the entire monistic outlook, summarize it at a glance.

Some nice insights here, especially about how we toss everything that doesn’t fit into an orderly system into an “other” category despite being unlike anything else in that category.

source: grugq