Romanian Military Thinking

Opinions • Arguments • Certitudes • Perspectives
is Arthashastra 23 that presents a method,
an algorithm to choose the general strategic
options (which represents more than
a military strategy), respectively to choose
a policy depending on the ratio of forces,
the period of waiting after war or peace,
the negotiations after war or peace etc.
After the great discoveries in the
19 th century, modern combat means have
appeared and “the battle becomes a matter
of both capitalising on the own potential
and immediately exploiting the enemy
vulnerabilities that have to be properly known
in advance and taken advantage of” 24 .
Jomini writes that the transition from
politics to war is a combination “by which
a statesman must judge when a war is
convenient, timely, even indispensable and
to determine the different operations necessary
to achieve the objective” 25 . He also says that
military art has five main branches: strategy,
great tactics, logistics, detailed tactics
and the engineering art, which means that,
in accordance with the results of our
research, military art is a military science,
better to say, one of the military sciences.
Analysing the contemporary military
phenomenon, we have come to the following
conclusions:
the contemporary military
phenomenon represents more than warfare
or armed combat;
the armed combat, warfare’s central
domain, is studied, from the social
perspective, by a distinct science, military
sociology, which is a border science;
the contemporary warfare is more
than armed combat and needs a thorough
approach;
peace is not achieved only by
civilians but also by the military, through
peacekeeping operations;
many sciences study different subjects
even during the war or military action, which
has led to the appearance of new branches
that overlap the study subject of the science
that studies the military phenomenon
or armed combat.
Therefore, there are sciences that
study the military action and have war as
their subject, others that study the armed
forces action for social peace and stability
and others that examine the influence
of the geographic space on the policies
in the military field and on the military
phenomenon. There are others that analyse
human psychology on the battlefield and
the relationships between civilians and the
military in peacetime, during crisis and
at war and sciences that study the combat
means utilized in the military action etc.
If we analyse each military science,
we can see that they have a subject,
a scientific research methodology,
a minimum number of hypotheses, theories,
laws or principles according to which the
examined phenomenon is explained,
as well as a practical application of theory.
Therefore, there is not only one but several
sciences that study the military domain,
fact that emphasizes the idea that there are,
indeed, military sciences.
23 Chaliand Gerard, Anthologie mondiale de la stratégie. Des origins au nucléaire, Edition Robert
Laffont, S.A., Paris, 1990, p. 408.
24 Popescu Mihail [.a., op. cit., p. 42.
25 Chaliand Gerard, op. cit., p. 42.
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