Military doctrine, command philosophy and the generation of fighting power: genesis and theory

Military doctrine is one of the conceptual components of war. Its raison d’être is that of a force multiplier. It enables a smaller force to take on and defeat a larger force in battle. This article’s departure point is the aphorism of Sir Julian Corbett, who described doctrine as ‘the soul of warfare’. The second dimension to creating a force multiplier effect is forging doctrine with an appropriate command philosophy. The challenge for commanders is how, in unique circumstances, to formulate, disseminate and apply an appropriate doctrine and combine it with a relevant command philosophy. This can only be achieved by policy-makers and senior commanders successfully answering the Clausewitzian question: what kind of conflict are they involved in? Once an answer has been provided, a synthesis of these two factors can be developed and applied. Doctrine has implications for all three levels of war. Tactically, doctrine does two things: first, it helps to create a tempo of operations; second, it develops a transitory quality that will produce operational effect, and ultimately facilitate the pursuit of strategic objectives. Its function is to provide both training and instruction. At the operational level instruction and understanding are critical functions. Third, at the strategic level it provides understanding and direction. Using John Gooch’s six components of doctrine, it will be argued that there is a lacunae in the theory of doctrine as these components can manifest themselves in very different ways at the three levels of war. They can in turn affect the transitory quality of tactical operations. Doctrine is pivotal to success in war. Without doctrine and the appropriate command philosophy military operations cannot be successfully concluded against an active and determined foe.

Ancillary narratives: maids, sleepwalking, and agency in nineteenth-century literature and culture

The limited coverage of servants in nineteenth-century literature may plausibly be ascribed to the tenuous nature of the roles they play in primary texts, and especially to the problematic nature of their agency. This idea is implicit in the arguments of Bruce Robbins, whose The Servant’s Hand remains the most cogent approach to giving servants a palpable role in critical narrative: for Robbins, the agency that acts through the servant ‘prosthesis’ rebounds on the master, granting the servant figure a sometimes exorbitant textual agency. The figure of the sleepwalking maid, and the analogies between sleepwalking and domestic service implicit in it, will help to complicate this picture. In anecdotes of spontaneous sleepwalking, and their subsequent appropriation by mesmerists, maids are cast as non-agents in terms of ownership of narrative: their subjectivity is immaterial to the public fate of the story which their acts generate. But this apparent non-agency is itself derived from their spontaneity; from an autonomous, albeit unconscious, self-will. As such, sleepwalking subjectivity is a gift to paternalism; a mastery it does not have to produce. In conclusion, it is this undetermined quality, rather than a simple lack of agency, that characterizes the maid in the novel, and which continues to exclude domestic servants from critical narrative.

Alanine-rich amphiphilic peptide containing the RGD cell adhesion motif: a coating material for human fibroblast attachment and culture

We studied the self-assembly of peptide A6RGD (A: alanine, R: arginine, G: glycine, D: aspartic acid) in water, and the use of A6RGD substrates as coatings to promote the attachment of human cornea stromal fibroblasts (hCSFs). The self-assembled motif of A6RGD was shown to depend on the peptide concentration in water, where both vesicle and fibril formation were observed. Oligomers were detected for 0.7 wt% A6RGD, which evolved into short peptide fibres at 1.0 wt% A6RGD, while a co-existence of vesicles and long peptide fibres was revealed for 2–15 wt% A6RGD. A6RGD vesicle walls were shown to have a multilayer structure built out of highly interdigitated A6 units, while A6RGD fibres were based on β-sheet assemblies. Changes in the self-assembly motif with concentration were reflected in the cell culture assay results. Films dried from 0.1–1.0 wt% A6RGD solutions allowed hCSFs to attach and significantly enhanced cell proliferation relative to the control. In contrast, films dried from 2.5 wt% A6RGD solutions were toxic to hCSFs.

War and culture studies in 2016. Putting 'translation' into the transnational?

The first issue of the 'Journal of War and Culture Studies' in 2008 mapped out the academic space which the discipline sought to occupy. Nearly a decade later, the location of war, traditionally within the nation-state, is being challenged in ways which arguably affect the analytical spaces of War and Culture Studies. The article argues for an overt engagement with a reconceptualization of the location of war as broader in both spatial and temporal terms than the nation-state. Within this framing, it identifies local 'contact zones' which are multi-vocal translational spaces, and calls for an incorporation of 'translation' into our analyses of war: translating identities, including associations of the material as well as of subjective identities, and espousing a conscious interdisciplinarity which might lead us to focus more on the performative than the representational. Putting 'translation' into the 'transnational' marks the spaces of War and culture studies as multilingual, making accessible the cultural products and cultural analyses of a much broader range of sources and reflections. The article calls for the discipline of Translation Studies to become a leading contributor to War and Culture Studies in the years to come.

Linguistic experiments and ordinary language philosophy

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments.

Orde Wingate and the British Army, 1922-1944

Major General Orde Wingate (1903–44) was the most controversial British military commander of the Second World War, due to his idiosynchratic leadership style, which led some to question his sanity, and his fiercely pro-Zionist stance. More than sixty years after his death he still splits opinion amongst soldiers, academics and writers.