Talk:War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

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"Quoting warfare historians, he thus shows, for example, how the Roman empire could create a phalanx because it had a centralized state, which the Greeks didn't have. "

It is somehow doubtful that M. de Landa stated any such thing, since it would be an error of the grossest sort for a subject that seeks to to theorize "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines", as it is simply factually wrong. it would be a pity to mar an otherwise enormously important topic with such an easily correctable error. So I will do so:

As any of those aforementioned military historians could have explained, the Romans developed the (first manipular, then Marian) legion, not the phalanx. The Greeks developed the phalanx, and the two words are respectively of Latin and Greek origin.

Consequentially the attempted theoretical construction attempting to relate state structure with military formation cannot hold. On the contrary I would hold - as with Machiavelli at least on the Roman side of the matter - that the Roman legions' reputation for flexible deployment derived from its relatively decentralized construction, centered around an internal "modularity" of pure "number", a characteristic according to Deleuze of the pure "nomadic war machine", but here relativized by its "capture" (no doubt of techniques learned in early Rome's many wars with the tribal and semi-nomadic Gauls and Samnites, themselves comprising "war machines" approximating the Deleuzian type) by what was in turn a relatively "decentered" state that was, after all, the very origin of what we call the Republic, as opposed to a centralized monarchy.

The Greeks on the on the hand: Although Classical Greece as a country was almost never unified, the common political unit of Greece, the polis or Greek city state, was an extremely centralized state formation precisely due its small territory (unlike Rome) and the consequent overwhelming preeminence of one large city as a single point of political power. Hence the high degree of integration achieved by the Greek phalanx (especially the post-hoplite formations) at the price of tactical flexibility.

Or one could argue.

76.102.26.23 22:55, 19 July 2007 (UTC)Brad Mayer

Comprehensibility(ism)

As someone who would be interested in the subject of this article if he could work out what it was, I think this article needs some work either in wording or presentation. It is dense and opaque. Unfortunately I've no other access to the subject matter, so can be of no help. Stevebritgimp (talk) 19:35, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

In fact, compare this to the Discipline and punish article - which starts well and clearly sets out the points being made step by step. Anyway, just me griping. Stevebritgimp (talk) 19:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

General comment

Since De Landa is a variety of postmodernist, attributions and citations in this Wikipedia article are very nearly pointless. Postmodernist work, essentially by definition, means whatever the reader wants it to mean. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.0.68.104 (talk) 01:54, 20 September 2012 (UTC)