Starting off substantive engagement with Sun Tzu with a focus on calculation serves a positive purpose. It is a way of emphasizing to contemporary audiences that there is more to Sun Tzu than being tricky or unorthodox – the strands of his way of war that readers, at least Western ones, widely note and often lionize. In present usage, the umbrella term “calculation” is intended to serve as a flexible rubric capable of covering intendedly rational judgments of more than one kind, many intuitive, others more formally structured.

If the intricacies of global supply chains form one crucial aspect of roadblock politics, we also need to investigate another aspect of logistics in order to unpack Congo’s roadblock proliferation. Focusing on Central African hinterlands where roads are a fading memory, Chapter 8 asks how contemporary rebel groups adapt to a terrain that is inimical to military logistics as usual. Rebels themselves have best theorized what military logistics might look like in the debris of infrastructural empire. By providing a glimpse of the inner workings of a few of Central Africa’s many rebel groups, this chapter explores what one armed group itself dubbed ‘non-conventional logistics’. From the perspective of conventional, centralized states, this form of organization is suboptimal, but it is perfectly geared to withdrawal from and rebuttal of the reach of outside powers. Yet the purchase of this approach extends beyond rebels: given the overbearing logistical and geographical constraints, state agents by necessity also practise versions of guerilla foraging, blurring the lines between enemies. Taken together, the examples provided in this chapter prompt one to consider political control not as a fixed property of mutually exclusive territorial configurations, but rather as a mobile and temporary achievement in the political economy of circulation.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.

This chapter is an overview of wind power meterorology at a relatively simple level without too much mathematical complexity. The origins of the wind are explained in the action of solar thermal radiation on the atmosphere, and the equation is given for the geostrophic wind at the top of the earth’s boundary layer. The role of the boundary layer in creating wind shear and turbulence near the earth’s surface is explained, and appropriate engineering equations are given to allow wind speed and turbulence to be estimated. Surface roughness and its relationship to turbulence and shear are explained. Experimental measurements are used to illustrate shear and turbulence for a range of different terrain types. The time and space dependency of wind speeds is also illustrated with site measurements, showing the long-term dependability of annual wind speeds, through the more variable monthly averages, to short-term turbulent variation. Gust factor is explained and illustrated as a function of turbulence intensity. The chapter includes high-resolution wind measurements taken during a storm in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, illustrating the extreme levels of turbulence arising in complex terrain.