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.

Globalizing Mediterranean identities: the overlapping spheres of Egyptian, Greek and Roman worlds at Trimithis

This article furthers recent gains made in applying globalization perspectives to the Roman world by exploring two Romano-Egyptian houses that used Roman material culture in different ways within the city known as Trimithis (modern day Amheida, in Egypt). In so doing, I suggest that concepts drawn from globalization theory will help us to disentangle and interpret how homogeneous Roman Mediterranean goods may appear heterogeneous on the local level. This theoretical vantage is broadly applicable to other regions in the Roman Mediterranean, as well as other environments in which individuals reflected a multifaceted relationship with their local identity and the broader social milieu.

Bilingual 'tagging' of financial accounts in Demotic and Greek

‘Bilingual’ documents, with text in both Demotic and Greek, can be of several sorts, ranging from complete translations of the same information (e.g. Ptolemaic decrees) to those where the information presented in the two languages is complementary (e.g. mummy labels). The texts discussed in this paper consist of a number of examples of financial records where a full account in one language (L1) is annotated with brief pieces of information in a second language (L2). These L2 ‘tags’ are designed to facilitate extraction of summary data at another level of the administration, functioning in a different language, and probably also to make the document accessible to those who are not literate in the L1.

Alverata: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic typeface

Alverata: a typeface design for Europe This typeface is a response to the extraordinarily diverse forms of letters of the Latin alphabet in manuscripts and inscriptions in the Romanesque period (c. 1000–1200). While the Romanesque did provide inspiration for architectural lettering in the nineteenth century, these letterforms have not until now been systematically considered and redrawn as a working typeface. The defining characteristic of the Romanesque letterform is variety: within an individual inscription or written text, letters such as A, C, E and G might appear with different forms at each appearance. Some of these forms relate to earlier Roman inscriptional forms and are therefore familiar to us, but others are highly geometric and resemble insular and uncial forms. The research underlying the typeface involved the collection of a large number of references for lettering of this period, from library research and direct on-site ivestigation. This investigation traced the wide dispersal of the Romanesque lettering tradition across the whole of Europe. The variety of letter widths and weights encountered, as well as variant shapes for individual letters, offered both direct models and stylistic inspiration for the characters and for the widths and weight variants of the typeface. The ability of the OpenType format to handle multiple stylistic variants of any one character has been exploited to reflect the multiplicity of forms available to stonecutters and scribes of the period. To make a typeface that functions in a contemporary environment, a lower case has been added, and formal and informal variants supported. The pan-European nature of the Romanesque design tradition has inspired an pan-European approach to the character set of the typeface, allowing for text composition in all European languages, and the typeface has been extended into Greek and Cyrillic, so that the broadest representation of European languages can be achieved.

The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb’s syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.