The article is linked here as a pdf document…
Jesus H. Christ!
What a magnificent intellectual wank!
The main theoretical underpinnings of SOD are systems theory, Soviet operational art, French postmodern philosophy, social sciences, psychology, architecture and urban planning, and, more recently, ancient Chinese military thinking.
They’ve made a major discovery there.
Particularly the bit about architecture and urban planning (which the author notes most IDF officers don’t have time to study, so WTF does that have to do with anything?), it being a well known principle of warfare since time immemorial not to harm architecture and to respect the designs of urban planners. Stalingrad, Dresden, and Hiroshima being among some of the best examples of this. FFS!
Western theorists, for example, faced the same dilemmas as their Soviet counterparts but reached different conclusions. Like their Soviet counterparts, French, British, and U.S. theorists recognized the true nature of modern operations as a series of battles, although they did not treat the operational level of war as a distinct entity. But they, like the Soviets,
recognized that operational results emerged as the sum of the results of tactical combat.
And until struck by this blinding flash of cosmic insight the rest of us foolishly thought that all previous wars were not won by a series of battles but by something else, like a propitious alignment of the planets or a death ray from the star Xenon.
All we need now is Derrida and his post-modern French deconstructionists upon whose work SOD is based to demonstrate, in accordance with their post-modern philosophy, that the theory doesn’t exist and the wars it is applied to didn’t happen because, when deconstructed, the words describing them lack their apparent meaning.
I’d love to see the people responsible for this abstract intellectual bullshit do something practical related to war, like designing a weapon.
And here it is.
sod
1. A section of grass-covered surface soil held together by matted roots; turf.
2. The ground, especially when covered with grass.
tr.v. sod·ded, sod·ding, sods
To cover with sod.
sod
1. A sodomite.
2. A person regarded as obnoxious or contemptible.
3. A fellow; a guy: “Poor sod, he almost got lucky for once” (Jack Higgins).
tr.v. sod·ded, sod·ding, sods
To damn.
Phrasal Verb: sod off (Used in the imperative to dismiss someone angrily).