War Is Boring

My friend and sometimes publisher Patrick Truffer ruminates on my war-logistics book FROM A TO B.

At a talk at my university last month, a fellow student opined that the media, and in fact we as a society, don’t focus on peace enough. This sentiment begs the question of whether there’s such thing as peace without war. Certainly neither is as black and white as it used to be. Wars are smaller and more dispersed. And probably longer. The only thing for sure about them these days is their ambiguity. If “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” then war and peace seem to exist not as opposites, but in a cycle. What’s more, our current conflicts are completely obscuring any boundaries in that cycle. Sociologist Martin Shaw wrote of 21st century warfare.

For a couple years now, I’ve been working with artist Greg Scott on THE ‘STAN, a comic about the Afghanistan war. It’s inching along. We finally got the first pages in color, courtesy of the super-talented Eric Darnes. Check out a sample above.

“Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime/Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.”

University of South Carolina communications department dean Charles Bierbauer responds to the outrage following my recent speeches.

A paragraph or two a day from my forthcoming book FROM A TO B: HOW LOGISTICS FUELS AMERICAN POWER AND PROSPERITY.

I’d wager a guess that if I asked you to name what comes to mind with “war art,” you would either offer up works highlighting the horrors of war (The 3rd of May, 1808, Guernica, The Massacre at Chios) or propaganda pieces (here’s looking at you, Napoleon). There’s another important role that artistic depictions of war, political turmoil and civil crises play in history: the building of national identity.

In Warco, a new game from Australian developer Defiant Development, you wield a camera instead of a gun. Ars Technica has the scoop.

A review by Kate Gardner.

Owen Van Spall considers war comics on the eve of a big event in the U.K.

In a storm of dust and noise, the blue-painted helicopter belonging to an anonymous military contractor settled onto the playground-size landing zone of a U.S. Amy outpost in eastern Afghanistan, just a few miles from the border with Pakistan. I tumbled onto the loose gravel and, bowed under the weight of my backpack, body armor and cameras, lurched toward a beckoning sergeant. The Taliban had kept this outpost, just outside the town of Margah in eastern Paktika province, under steady rocket bombardment. We had to get under cover.

When we talk about war art, there is a tendency to focus only on the subjects. How does a painting glorify or expose the brutality of a conflict? Are the soldiers and civilians treated with dignity? Is there an element of political propaganda?