Close Order and Close Quarter: The Culture of Combat in the West
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One is not surprised at the interest shown in a supposedly ‘Western Way of War’, because the European Union and the United States appear to hold a military supremacy of an unprecedented kind. Any state wishing to challenge their dominance has no choice but to copy them: China’s purchase of an aircraft carrier from Russia exemplifies imitation as the sincerest form of flattery. But the triumphalist tone of some of the books explaining the supremacy, in particular Victor Davis Hanson’s work, is worrying. Hanson argues that war is shaped not by inherent military probability, or by other mundane considerations, but by culture, 1 a flexible word of which the meaning has varied greatly across time. If it once denoted simply the higher intellectual activities of the élites of various societies, anthropology and sociology have extended it to include all of the products of the human mind and practice. Thus, the salient characteristics of a society define the way in which it thinks about and wages war. In Cossack society, according to John Keegan, culture and war were coterminous. 2
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it