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What does a flawed story about socks have to do winning a war? A lot, according to George R. and Myra T. Cooley Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Professor of Geography Dan Monk. 

“A good chunk of my research has been about the commonplaces of conflict. In other words, the stuff people say and take for granted on the way to making other claims,” Monk says.

The story of the socks comes from The Tanks of Tammuz by Shabtai Teveth, a dramatic eyewitness account of the epochal 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Shabtai Teveth advanced a commonly accepted view that discipline in dress coincided with discipline in fighting — in this case about how members of the tank corps wore uniforms all the way down to black socks. He fostered the belief that when you look alike you act alike and how this thought and behavior lead to victory by Israel’s tank corps, despite being greatly outnumbered by Egyptian forces.

“That really caught my attention,” Monk says of the premise that Israeli’s victory was based on the uniformity and socks, “Wow, these people are making arguments about the survival of other people on the basic of aesthetic terminologies. They don’t realize that’s what they’re doing but they rely on aesthetic categories to make claims about their own survival and that struck me as worth talking about.”

Monk says the Israeli victory in 1967 was remarkable, “but there were many points in the three weeks leading up to this war and right at the start of it where the monumental gambles that were taken could have led to very different results.” He says the story of the victory was far more complex than is explained by the tank corps’ uniformity and its black socks.

Read more about Professor Monk’s research,