Moltke and His Generals: A Study in Leadership (Book Review) by Quintin Barry

Review of Moltke and His Generals: A Study in Leadership by Quintin Barry

Moltke and His Generals: A Study in Leadership (Book Review) by Quintin Barry

Review of Moltke and His Generals: A Study in Leadership by Quintin Barry

Rehabilitating Mcclellan: Did Radical Republicans Conspire Against \u27Young Napoleon\u27?

He was a charismatic, natural born leader who graduated second in his class at West Point and achieved fame during this country\u27s darkest moment. Why then is George B. McClellan so poorly regarded today? McClellan certainly was an extremely well-educated, superbly trained, experienced officer, as...

The Indispensability of Ghost Fields in the Light-Cone Gauge Quantization of Gauge Fields

We continue McCartor and Robertson's recent demonstration of the indispensability of ghost fields in the light-cone gauge quantization of gauge fields. It is shown that the ghost fields are indispensable in deriving well-defined antiderivatives and in regularizing the most singular component of gauge field propagator. To this end it is sufficient to confine ourselves to noninteracting abelian fields. Furthermore to circumvent dealing with constrained systems, we construct the temporal gauge canonical formulation of the free electromagnetic field in auxiliary coordinates $x^{\mu}=(x^-,x^+,x^1,x^2)$ where $x^-=x^0 cos{\theta}-x^3 sin{\theta}, x^+=x^0 sin{\theta}+x^3 cos{\theta}$ and $x^-$ plays the role of time. In so doing we can quantize the fields canonically without any constraints, unambiguously introduce "static ghost fields" as residual gauge degrees of freedom and construct the light-cone gauge solution in the light-cone representation by simply taking the light-cone limit (${\theta}\to \pi/4$). As a by product we find that, with a suitable choice of vacuum the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt form of the propagator can be derived in the ${\theta}=0$ case (the temporal gauge formulation in the equal-time representation).Comment: 21 pages, uses ptptex.st

Population and Affective Perception: Biopolitics and Anticipatory Action in US Counterinsurgency Doctrine

This paper analyses the biopolitical logics of current US counterinsurgency doctrine in the context of the multiple forms of biopower that make up the “war on terror”. It argues that counterinsurgency doctrine aims to prevent spectral networked insurgencies by intervening on the “environment” of insurgent formation—the relations between three different enactments of “population” (species being, logistical life and ways of life) and a fourth—affectively imbued perception. Counterinsurgency is best characterised, then, as an “environmentality” (Foucault M 2008 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége De France, 1978–1979. Translated by G Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan) that redeploys elements from other forms of biopolitics alongside an emphasis on network topologies, future-orientated action and affective perception