Asymmetric War and Its Journalists [Recommended Innovation Articles (and Commentary) #36]

This is a series I am posting to Medium where I share links to articles concerning innovation, strategic change, design thinking, and related topics. You can simply check my article feed and find all of them based on the reoccurring title theme and numbering such as above. People ask me frequently for article suggestions, and I also maintain several innovation distribution lists where I provide commentary and suggestions on one article at a time. I do tons of research for my work and am using this Medium series to share thoughts and recommendations on what stuff I think is top-notch on a wide range of topics and disciplines. All thoughts below are of my own opinion, and while most of the linked articles will be freely available, some may be behind paywalls due to where the article is published. Follow me on Medium, Twitter (@BZweibelson), and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benzweibelson) for new articles in this series.

Image source: https://dartcenter.org/resources/journalists-and-safety-training-experiences-and-opinions

Today’s recommended article is a short, but powerful piece. “Asymmetric War and its Journalists” by Michael Walzer is linked below, and is just under ten pages and likely a 15–20 minute read for most. This article deals with narratives, human bias, and how warfare in an irregular or asymmetric sense involves far more information, politics, propaganda, and veiled agendas than traditional or conventional wars between Westphalian peers and rivals. No paywall on this one:

Asymmetric War and Its Journalists - Dissent Magazine

Before we dive into this, we need to recall 2x other articles in this series for additional context. In an earlier commentary on a different article about Mao and Sino-Marxist insurgency strategies (and philosophies of war), I examined how talked extensively about Mao’s adaptation of Marxist concepts into a Sino-Socialist morphing for China. Mao argued that unlike the Western, Clausewitzian, Newtonian mode of warfare where fighting and destroying the enemy forces would lead to the destruction of political will (the people, the leaders, the nation)- an irregular or political war theory required a…