Hello, now that we've discussed what we are studying and why we're studying it.

Let's move up to the three levels of

aggregation that I spoke about at the very beginning.

The first one has to do with the individual.

That is, what makes up the warrior?

Then we'll move up to the army.

And the third, we'll take on the society.

But for now, we're interested in the warrior.

What makes the warrior?

What does the warrior experience on the battlefield?

Now this is an important question not because of some vicarious

curiosity and the horror that these men and women go through.

Rather, we need to understand this immediate experience because

it makes this sociological mystery of war even more interesting.

That is, once we understand what these people are going

through, once we understand what this kind of experience entails, then

the true task of explaining how it comes about, how

it becomes so normal, how it becomes so universal, becomes clear.

So, again, let's just begin with that warrior.

And we are going to begin with the battlefield.

It's important to first situate ourselves, what does

this battlefield feel like, what does it look like?

And actually this contrast in the battlefield is

going to become more and more important, especially

in the 20th and the 21st century, when we move to a different kind of war.

Now, increasingly small percentage of men actually participate in fighting.

In fact, the teeth to tail

ratio is something like one to 14 or one to 15.

That is, one soldier is on the front line, to

the 14 or 15 that might be in the background.

Nevertheless, nevertheless, battle is at the very heart of the experience of war.

If we're going to understand war, we have

to understand what this particular experience, now again, for

long periods of time in the history of

war, generalship essentially consisted of trying to avoid battle.

The evasion of battle became the central point of

strategy, even when armies were actively engaged in war.

Combat was relatively rare.

The Napoleonic army's for example, that fought for between 1793

and 1815 basically had 200 days of pitch battle, in

those two decades, and only about 60 to 80% of

the soldiers were effective at any eight point in time.

So, battle remains a relatively rare occurrence in

war, yet it is the defining experience of war.

What does the battlefield look like?

In most of the tradition we're going to be

talking about, war has to occur on the plain.

And the reason for that, it has to be large enough

to accommodate significant numbers of soldiers,

often hundreds of thousands of them.

Remember we talked about war as organized violence, war as level

and, level of organization, a level of aggregation requiring this social effort.

If those efforts, if that level of aggregation,

if that level of organization is going to pay

off, it needs to exist in a particularly

geographical space, the classic valley, the classic plain.

Now, a great deal of combat has taken place in the jungle, or in the mountains.

But you will often see expressions of frustrations with

military, who have been trained to fight in these valleys

or these plains, with the kind of conditions that this

kind of terrain, in particularly this kind of terrain affords.

The classic battlefield is the flat valley, or

the wide plain, this is where these massive aggregates

of men, where all this planning and all

this logistics can come together in that decisive battle.

It allows troops to have effective combinations.

This is the main areas of war, where this, is the main geographical spaces,

where the Western way of war has been fought, most famously at Cannae.

This is a picture of the valley of Cannae.

The prototypical, the dream battle of generals

for over 2,000 years in the Western tradition.

Again, inside a valley, inside this plain.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

The Battlefield

Paradoxos da Guerra

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