Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 23

UNCONVENTIONAL ART

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Starry Night (1889), oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh.

warfare,” the United States very likely would refuse to
sanction organized violence or to regard the situation
as war (though organized, politically motivated violence happens regularly) based on defined thresholds
for “going to war.”
This is the distinct difference between how the
United States narrowly understands war versus
what the broader nature of war could be. To the
United States, war is conventional and defined, and
it looks like Omaha Beach or the race to Baghdad.
Therefore, organized aggression that occurs outside
a declared theater of armed activity or conflict is
unconventional, irregular.
However, to certain cultures the treatment of
war as a narrow and specific activity of violence
may be considered unconventional. Other cultural
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

perspectives on war can be likened to how certain
classic works of Chinese art regard negative space.

Nebulous Conflicts are like
Negative Space
Twentieth-century Chinese leader Mao Zedong
described war as “politics with bloodshed.”11
Similarly, Dau Tranh, the Vietnamese military
strategy of the late twentieth century, sought to
unify war and politics as different forms of the same
struggle that worked in concert with each other.12
These approaches to war, which achieved their
political goals, operated inside the nebulous area between political struggle and armed conflict. A possible reason these East Asian cultures do not define
war as narrowly as Western cultures is that in East
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