Prostorna dimenzija rata u vojnom strateškom promišljanju: „disperzija” bojišta
Spatial Dimension in Military Strategic Thinking: Dispersion of the Battlefield

Summary/Abstract: If we start from the postulate that military strategy involves conducting war to achieve a specific goal, a fundamental prerequisite for engaging in military strategy is understanding war. Given that war represents one of the most complex social phenomena, which continuously changes its basic characteristics over time, it is challenging to "tame" the essential traits of war. Considering this complex nature of war, determining its dynamic nature is more practical if we focus on one of its characteristics, in this case, the spatial dimension of war. Understanding the spatial dimension of war is one of the prerequisites for understanding war itself and how it has evolved. Historically, wars were fought through close combat, which allowed for a clearly defined geographical space and a social construct that attributed solely war-related purposes to it. That raises the question of whether the concept of the battlefield can today be defined in both spatial and social-constructivist terms. The fundamental assumption on which this work rests is that the battlefield has undergone a complete transformation, which reached its peak with the development of hybrid warfare, turning from a space where geography had primacy over war into a space where war has primacy over geography. Analysing military strategic thinking from Sun Tzu to contemporary military strategists, it becomes evident that today, in conducting war to achieve political objectives, the focus is not on tactics that best adapt to geographical circumstances but rather on tactics that best overcome geographical circumstances. Thus, the spatial dimension of war, both in strategic thinking and tactical action, has expanded to the point where the battlefield cannot be geographically limited or understood as a social construct that separates military from civilian

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