Sublime

Petrov also considered the fact that the blaring “missile strike” warnings were coming from a single source: Soviet satellites. For the threat to be authentic, Soviet ground-based radars, while slower to detect an attack than satellites, should have been serving as a second source confirmation—but they remained silent. Finally, Petrov remembered th

Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces covers more recent ground (Robinson 2004).

Lawrence’s second element, the “biological,” concerned the components of war, “sensitive and illogical” human beings. Because of unknown human factors, commanders are forced to hold a body of men in reserve as a safeguard, thus stretching thin their other human resources. Lawrence worked to magnify his enemy’s ignorance: “We were to contain the ene

The ethos of blitzkrieg was “speed of attack through speed of communications.”

THERE WAS NOTHING exceptional about what these soldiers from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division did on this balmy Baghdad night. And that is precisely the point. They were undertaking the sort of modest, tedious, mundane intelligence gathering and security operations that have been a cornerstone of counterinsurgency operations since the days of Al

Like some insect societies, but unlike other great apes, Homo sapiens became eusocial, or highly social. At the same time, in-group sociality was matched by aggression toward out-groups. Cooperation within the group was forged by war between groups.