Scarry Reading

War's immediate activity is injuring; primary goal is to injure enemy soldiers; defense of own forces is secondary; Clausewitz states the immediate object is to cause general damage and to increase the enemy's suffering.
In battle the soldier's goal is to injure the enemy; preserving his own forces is a secondary aim aimed at exhausting the opponent's progress.
Injuries create the referential record of the contest; the bodily harm is transferred to ideology or political authority; the taboos around pain hinder discourse, making pain unutterable or silenced.
Two targets of war: the people (sentience) and civilization (self-extension); war and torture both deconstruct civilization by destroying the body in imagination and its social significance.
The two functions of injuring: (1) to determine winner/loser during war; (2) after war, to provide a record substantiating the outcome (the violence is the proof).

War is a contest whose central determinant is the depth/magnitude of injuring, not the external issues; contest language risks equating with play, which misleads; external issues such as sovereignty are outside the contest and become anchored only through the violence's aftermath.
The winner/loser is determined by the extent of injuring; the rules of war are arbitrary and based on convention and participation; the external outcomes are later validated by those who participated.

The scale matters: war involves massive participation, unlike peacetime contests with few participants; modeling war as single combat distorts the phenomenon.
A surrogate mass contest across entire populations would create intense national engagement and would still not replicate war's transformation of injuring into territorial/extraterritorial rights at the end.

The body's embedded political identity is learned early; culture resides in the body, shaping gestures, posture, and even pain; physical signs of war endure for decades.
Examples: Berlin and Paris illustrate how a city bears the marks and memory of war; generation memory appears in bodily signs and urban spaces.
The act of injuring serves two functions: (a) referential during war (kill ratios matter for victory); (b) after war, casualties corroborate a single outcome(e.g., unity or justice) regardless of how they were distributed.
Civil War example: early frame uses specific casualty numbers; later summaries translate into a national cost figure; e.g., race and unity costs reflect in a total casualty tally of 204{,}000 including disease.

Kenneth Ford and Clark Glymour discuss how the U.S. military's long support for physics, computer science, engineering is now complemented by biomedical advances.
New advances in physiology, nutrition, neuroscience, and engineering offer potential to prevent or reduce cognitive/physical degradation and to increase performance of warfighters and larger system networks.
The aim is to extend cognitive and physical resilience and to sustain performance under conflict.