Browsing by Subject "Tactics"
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Item An analysis of the strategy and tactics of Alexios I Komnenos(2005-05) Price, Jason T.; Howe, John M.; Forsythe, Gary E.This thesis is an attempt to analyze the strategy and tactics used in the most pivotal battles and wars waged by Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor from 1081-1118. Alexios I is generally credited with inciting the Crusades due to his appeal to Pope Urban for assistance against the Muslims. While considering the style and effectiveness of warfare used by Alexios, I examined numerous military treatises, spanning over two thousand years. These included both Byzantine sources, especially Maurice, and non-Byzantine sources, most notably Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz, to gather a comprehensive collection of ideals of warfare. These texts formed the basis with which to judge the quality of generalship. I then compared the strategies and tactics used by Alexios I to those espoused by these authors in their respective military manuals. There were many universal concepts that were consistent in all sources used. After careful consideration of the sources and ideals of warfare presented within the research material, I have determined that Alexios I Komnenos should be considered the penultimate Byzantine general.Item An analysis of the strategy and tactics of Alexios I Komnenos(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Price, Jason T.; Howe, John M.; Forsythe, Gary E.This thesis is an attempt to analyze the strategy and tactics used in the most pivotal battles and wars waged by Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor from 1081-1118. Alexios I is generally credited with inciting the Crusades due to his appeal to Pope Urban for assistance against the Muslims. While considering the style and effectiveness of warfare used by Alexios, I examined numerous military treatises, spanning over two thousand years. These included both Byzantine sources, especially Maurice, and non-Byzantine sources, most notably Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz, to gather a comprehensive collection of ideals of warfare. These texts formed the basis with which to judge the quality of generalship. I then compared the strategies and tactics used by Alexios I to those espoused by these authors in their respective military manuals. There were many universal concepts that were consistent in all sources used. After careful consideration of the sources and ideals of warfare presented within the research material, I have determined that Alexios I Komnenos should be considered the penultimate Byzantine general.Item Culture jamming: ideological struggle and the possibilities for social change(2008-05) Nomai, Afsheen Joseph, 1969-; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-This dissertation examines the activities and texts of four groups of activists who use culture jamming as a tactic to challenge dominant ideologies as they advocate for progressive social, cultural and economic change. Culture jamming, as defined here, is a practice whereby texts critical of the status quo are created through the appropriation and/or mimicry of the aesthetics and/or language that are a part of popular, or at least widely experienced, culture. Exploring the work of the Yes Men, the Adbusters Media Foundation, the Billboard Liberation Front and the Illegal Art exhibit, I argue that through their culture jamming these activists take critical theory into practice as a part of their goal is to raise the critical consciousness of the public. Confronting the issues of globalization, consumerism, and the political economy of the media in the United States, these culture jammers aim to highlight aspects of domination and oppression in their view results primarily from the corporate control of culture and politics. Using theories of ideology and hegemony developed by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams to guide my analysis, I trace how each of these groups develop, present, and promote their critique. I steer clear of discussing the effectiveness of these culture jammers, focusing instead on the actions they take and theorizing some of the possible challenges and limitations they face in light of their own experiences. Differing requirements of cultural capital and deeper contextual information for most, if not all, of these culture jamming activities can make them especially complex forms of activism. What becomes clear is that culture jamming may be a tactic best suited to the maintenance of an activist community of people who already hold a critical position, as the jammer’s challenges to dominant culture and ideologies can be lost because of the form of the critique, or marginalized or otherwise ignored by the mainstream media.Item Enhancing the military decision making process with a simple multi-attribute scoring heuristic using distance functions (SMASH-D)(2010-05) Nunn, Lawrence Randall; Barnes, J. Wesley; Bickel, Eric J.In this article, I discuss a new methodology for course of action comparisons within the Military Decision Making Process MDMP. I discuss the problem with the current methodology used to compare and recommend courses of action to operational or tactical level commanders, and I describe and demonstrate how using this new methodology gives commanders a better tool to select those courses of action. I also provide additional analysis of the comparison that can provide the staff and the commander with actionable information generated from sensitivity analysis.Item Experimental and computational characterization of strong vent flow enclosure fires(2011-08) Weinschenk, Craig George; Ezekoye, Ofodike A.; da Silva, Alexandre K.; Engelhardt, Michael D.; Howell, John R.; Raman, Venkatramanan; Nicks, RobertFirefighters often arrive at structures in which the state of fire progression can be described as ventilation-controlled or under-ventilated. This means that inside the enclosure the pyrolyzed fuel has consumed most, if not all of the available oxygen, resulting in incomplete combustion. Under-ventilated (fuel rich) combustion is particularly dangerous to occupants because of the high yield of toxins such as carbon monoxide and to firefighters because once firefighters enter the structure and introduce oxidizer, the environment can rapidly change into a very dangerous, fast burning condition. The fuel load in many compartment fires would support a several megawatt fire if the fire were not ventilation controlled. In the process of making entrance to the fire compartment, firefighters will likely provide additional ventilation paths for the fire and may initiate firefighting tactics like positive pressure ventilation to push the hot flammable combustion products out of the attack pathway. Forced ventilation creates a strongly mixed flow within the fire compartment. Ventilation creates a complex fluid mechanics and combustion environment that is generally not analyzed on the scale of compartment fires. To better understand the complex coupling of these phenomena, compartment scale non-reacting and reacting experiments were conducted. The experiments, which were conducted at The University of Texas at Austin’s fire research facility, were designed to gain insight into the effects of ventilation on compartment thermal characteristics. Computational models (low and high order) were used to augment the non-reacting and reacting experimental results. Though computationally expensive, computational fluid dynamics models provided significant detail into the coupling of buoyantly driven fire products with externally applied wind or fan flow. A partially stirred reactor model was used to describe strongly driven fire compartment combustion processes because previously there was not an appropriate low dimensional computational tool applicable to this type of problem. This dissertation will focus on the experimental and computational characterization of strong vent flows on single room enclosure fires.Item The production of an urban revolution: tactics, police and public space in Cairo’s uprising(2011-05) Gaber, Sherief A.; Dooling, Sarah; Getman, Julius G.The following thesis presents a narrative of the uprisings that took place in Cairo, Egypt between 25 January, 2011 and 11 February, 2011 as they relate to notions of cities, the state and citizenship in spatial terms. I do so by looking at different series of events that took place during those 18 days of revolution: spatial tactics that protestors used against police, popular committees set up by neighborhoods to defend the streets after the withdrawal of the Egyptian police, the sudden participation of nonpolitical actors and groups, and ultimately the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square and the production of public space and new notions of citizenship that occurred within the square during this period. These various narratives are used to argue that sovereignty is ultimately very spatially limited (ontologically, not necessarily territorially), how the "informal" city and modes of urban existence produced not just resistance to the state but were transformed into tools of provocation and insurrection, and how public space—devalorized and heavily policed by the Egyptian state—was produced through the actions of protestors occupying Tahrir Square.