There are fashions in anticipating and writing about armed conflict, its nature, its causes, its purposes and its consequences, just as there are in everything else. These fashions don’t necessarily reflect realities as they are now and as they change, and in fact may run counter to them. So it’s essential to try to separate genuine changes in aspects of conflict both from excitable exaggerations on the one hand, and from the denial of changing reality on the other. That said, I have a feeling that we are at the beginning of a genuine transformation of conflict, for the first time in many years, after a generation or more in which some conceptual models of conflict have become briefly fashionable, only to become almost instantly outdated. Others can perhaps explain the nature of this transformation better than me. For this week I want to focus on the main obstacle to it being widely recognised: the fixation of the Western Security Complex (WSC) on things it thinks it knows, and its determination to deform everything that happens into models it thinks it understands.

You can see this a bit in the way that the conflict in Ukraine is described: I don’t mean in terms of victories and defeats , or even the performance of individual weapons systems. Rather it’s the discourse—that word again—that interests me. If you’ve read some Ukraine article by a pundit that seems illogical and even incomprehensible, it’s usually less a problem of expression than a problem of understanding. Writers who don’t understand what’s going on, and can’t make sense of events as they unfold, nonetheless have to try to find words to describe it, so they use the words and the verbal and intellectual formulas they have to hand, even if they are detached from the reality. At its simplest, we can say that a half-recalled vocabulary from wars of manoeuvre and counter-insurgency has been called into service to describe a war of attrition. The discourse of the war of attrition is simply not well enough known or developed for it to be used and understood correctly, and anyway, the consequences of using it might be politically dangerous, because the wrong side might appear to be winning. Thus, the endless, nerdish obsession with square metres gained and lost. At least that’s easy for everyone to understand.

Put simply, most people who write on the war in Ukraine don’t really understand what it’s “about” in any important sense. That is to say, they may notice individual events, but they have no idea of how to fit them into a wider framework that makes any kind of overall sense, because the words and concepts they have at their disposal—the totality of the discourse—is not the right one. It’s like trying to describe a cricket match while being limited to the vocabulary and concepts of rugby. So far as I can see, the same thing seems to be happening with Gaza.

Trust the experts.