Stratford

3 Key excerpts on "Stratford"

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  eBook - ePub

  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  contextere, ‘that which weaves together’ (Gray, 1999b: 130). Plainly, inanimate physical geography cannot play an active role in strategic history. But it is perhaps misleading to regard it strictly as a passive factor when human actors think, decide and act strategically. Is it sensible to hold that ‘geography does not argue, it simply is’ (Nicholas J. Spykman, quoted in Weigert, 1942: 23)? It is no exaggeration to say that we humans are very much territorial animals, and we cannot help but think and imagine in geographical terms. Place, geographical context, is usually an important key, though not the only one, that can unlock the door to understanding particular historical strategic behaviour. And, as noted above, even when the motives behind strategic choices seem to be thoroughly extra-geographical, physical geography has often triumphed over human imagination and determination.

  Because there is geography behind the entire strategic narrative of this work, it would be impracticable to revisit here the strategic history of the past two centuries, bloody episode by bloody episode, each in its distinctive geographical dimension. Instead, I shall seek a geographically flavoured understanding of the whole period of interest, provided in terms that are sufficiently general, though with some concrete illustration, to hold for the entire two centuries. Yet again, the story is one of both continuity in change and change in continuity.

  Before proceeding further, it is necessary to specify working definitions of the more important concepts relevant to this discussion (see Box 19.1 ).

  Box 19.1 Geography and strategy: principal terms

  • Geography and geographies: the physical features of the world. ‘Five basic elements of physical geography [are] terrain, weather, climate, soil, and vegetation’ (Winters, 1998: vii). The geography of relevance to the contemporary strategist occurs as five geographical environments – or, perhaps inelegantly expressed, geographies (plural) – land, sea, air, earth-orbital space and the electromagnetic spectrum (including cyberspace).
  • Geophysics: the physics of the earth (and Earth), but for our purposes the science distinctive to the nature and character of each of the world's five geographies.
  • Geostrategy:

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  Primary Geography Primary History

  • Peter Knight(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Geography does not exist just as a ‘pure’ study, of the same sort as is medieval history, since it has strength in applied forms, and it has had particular influence in various fields of planning, of which town and country planning is the most obvious. Monitoring and describing the socially constructed variations of space, for example the distribution of various forms of ill-health, of educational achievements, and of female, part-time work, are other manifestations of applied geography. Yet this concern of geography is threatened in those developed countries which have entered a ‘post-welfarist’ phase (Bennett, 1989) in which planning and notions of equality are being replaced by market forces and notions of liberty. Human geography’s claim to be important because it is an applied subject is weakened if free markets have no time for its planning insights.

  Recently there has been a revival of interest in specific locales, not as a revival of the old regional geographies with their emphasis on unanalytical description, but in the recognition that different locations do differ, and that those differences are analytically significant. ‘Geography today’, claimed Cosgrove (1989, p.243) ‘celebrates diversity and particularly contextual studies of locale: historical and cultural reconstruction and a revived description’. While Cosgrove is not without critics (Macmillan, 1989), there is agreement that places, understood as sites of human, social and economic activity, are important as units of analysis, much as in history understanding depends on the match between explanations and particular events.

  The resulting picture is of an area of study which is characterised by a variety of competing and sometimes contradictory definitions. Geography may indeed be a synthesising subject, but it is far from clear what it is synthesising that makes it different from other social studies. ‘From there’, commented Bennett (1989, p.280), ‘it is but a short step to argue that geography should be de-defined’. The claim that spatial relationships are distinctive of geography may be true but it may also be trite. It is hard to think of any study of people which is not also, in principle, interested in the way that things vary across space. This picture is one of a subject which occupies ‘an already fragmented field’, and where examination of the history of the subject ‘has not had the effect of building a consensus about the practices of the discipline’ (Entrikin, 1989, p.5) – if it can be called a discipline.

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  Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

  • Geoffrey Sloan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the final analysis, the relationship between geography and strategy is a complex one. The strategic thinker must ensure that the geographical structure of the field in which military power is exercised remains as favourable as possible while ensuring that enemies, potential or otherwise, are disadvantaged with respect to the geography in which they must operate. Gooch acknowledged this by citing Britain’s historical experience:

  while geography was fixed, strategic geography was not. British strategy makers faced many difficulties in that the significance, value, and strategic vulnerability or defensibility of particular parts of the globe varied depending on political configuration and the level of sophistication of local communications.93

  Though the technology may lead to a reassessment of the significance of a particular location, the security of communities, city states, nation states and empires is dependent on geography, or more specifically the scope and configuration of a field of military action. According to Gray: ‘Each geographically tailored form of military power contributes to the course and outcome of the war in the super-currency of strategic effect . This idea shapes the treatment of “the grammar of strategy” across all distinctive geographical environments of conflict.’94

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