Polemoloji

Humanity has re-entered an age of rearmament. The bipolar world had a balance; the unipolar decades that followed bred their own difficulties; and what has emerged since is not a settled order but movement among the dominant powers. Russia into Ukraine, US-China and US-Russia friction, nuclear weapons coming out of their silos, an unresolved Palestine, and Iran’s nuclear question. The opening of the Arctic route has made a vast geography contested again, and drawn Russia and China closer together.

Layered on top of all that: the financial crisis that opened the 2000s, the pandemic, and a Fourth Industrial Revolution whose transforming effects run through every domain. It is a global fracture that is, read the other way, an enormous leap. His name for the result is new normals, and he means it almost meteorologically: a storm of them, blowing hard enough to astonish anyone.

Against that backdrop the book argues that war is a subject with a science, and that the science is underused. Polemology’s questions arise from inside the conflicts themselves; the task that falls to us is to observe them completely and neutrally, in the correct concepts of the military literature and with their references. The periodizing claim at the center is precise: we are in the transition from fourth-generation to fifth-generation warfare, and metabolizing that transition well is what emerging successfully from the power struggle requires. To speak of the future, he writes, is to speak of survival.

It closes on a complaint that doubles as its purpose. The book is not merely an intellectual compilation but a study made in depth to draw definite conclusions, and a first of its kind in Turkey. His hope is for many more people to work seriously in polemology, because nearly everyone now presents themselves as a security and strategy expert, and without analytic work and deep knowledge even the talk is futile.