Chapter three concerns the role and influence of politics and other intangible elements in modern warfare. This is taken from a historical perspective with the philosophy of great military strategy thinkers such as Sun Tzu, Niccolo Macchiavelli and Carl von Clausewitz, and the influence of their ideas on the contemporary information war battlefield that runs parallel to physical wars.

Chapter 2 looks at the formation of a highly influential genre of modern war writing, the critical-military history that can be traced to the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany (1766-90). Recent criticism has challenged traditional views of Lloyd as a merely neo-classical author with little relevance to modern conceptions of war. Building on this new research, this chapter shows how Lloyd’s approach to military history not only helped introduce concerns with the aesthetics of genius and sublimity into military thought, but that it also established a new way of conceptualising the historical conditions of war. By turning military thought away from traditions of memoir and maxims, Lloyd’s writing was critical for breaking down a neo-classical view of the commander as a figure of authority, command and action. As it transformed the history of war from a storehouse of examples to an object to be studied, it simultaneously reimagined the commander in relation to the quasi-natural ‘life’ of the army. A new, biopolitical conception of strategy emerges from Lloyd’s history as he attempts to comprehend the army as, in effect, an organism that lies outside the general’s complete control.

The Romantic theory of war described in this chapter is the product of a group of highly educated Prussian officers trying to grasp the new conditions of politics and warfare that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. They had studied the philosophy of enlightenment, the history of warfare, and the mathematics of probability, they had read the works of the Classical and Romantic poets of their time, and they had fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In order to define the nature of war, one of the most eminent of these thinkers, Carl von Clausewitz, relied on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Describing the reality of war, he also relied on three new sciences that had played a role in Kant’s philosophy: the science of static and mechanics, the science of electro-magnetism, and the science of population statistics. The chapter argues that while Clausewitz was not a precursor of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, one of the most consequential moments of the digital revolution, he does, however, remain relevant to this day as one of the first theorists of irregular warfare.

How do conflicts involving rebels that at first appear quite innocuous and small-scale, grow and aggravate? The chapter discusses the concept of the rebel and demonstrates that rebel groups, just like the state, can be seen as political and strategic actors. The rest of the chapter details the approach and the set-up of the study.

The Introduction defines the main concepts of The Literature of Absolute War (i.e., “absolute war,” “absolute enmity,” “total war,” “traumatic realism,” “catastrophic modernism,” and “spectrum of possibilities”) and comments on some of the extreme challenges posed by absolute war to modern war writing.