Literary Friction: poetics at the operational level of war

This dissertation explores an intersection between literary studies and war studies, approaching literature as a critical medium that can enhance the conceptualization of war as an organizational process directed towards political and strategic ends. This work of scholarship argues that literature provides unique terms for examining war as a complex interpretive structure, and enumerates historical examples of literary practice as a medium for ideational and transformative activity in military domains. Through this lens, the dissertation explicates the literary aspects of the philosophy of BGen. (ret) Shimon Naveh as it is articulated in his writings on “Systemic Operational Design” (SOD) and operational art. It explores Naveh’s influence on professional military education (PME) in the Israel Defense Force and the legacy of his thinking through the writings of the “Naveh school”, which includes Dr. Ofra Graicer and BGen. (ret) Gal Hirsch, alongside a few others. It highlights how the Naveh school engaged with advanced literary and philosophical texts drawn from a broad corpus of modernist and postmodern literary and philosophical production, including TE Lawrence, John Boyd, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Hayden White and Bernard Tschumi. By mapping some intellectual spaces where literature has been enlisted in sophisticating military knowledge and activity, this dissertation seeks to broaden the conceptual repertoire of military and security-focused scholarship, offering insights into the ways literary practice has been incorporated in the conceptualization of warfare and strategy in defence organizations and parallel fields of research which support defence organizations. Ultimately, this work seeks to understand the interplay between literary forms and the logics of warfare, pushing the boundaries of how literature is conceptualized within military-academic spaces, while challenging the terms on which war is conceptualized in humanities scholarship.