War

Roles: combatant, enemy, ally, weapon, territory, strategy, victory, defeat, casualty

Organized violent conflict between groups, with clear sides, territorial stakes, and escalating commitment. One of the most pervasive source domains in everyday language — we attack arguments, defend positions, and marshal evidence. The frame’s deep role structure (allies, enemies, weapons, territory) maps cleanly onto almost any adversarial situation.

As Source Frame (30)

• Argument Is War → argumentation
• Art Is a Battle, a Mill That Grinds → creative-process
• Attack Surface → security-analysis
• Blast Radius → security-analysis
• Boots on the Ground → organizational-behavior
• Center of Gravity → competition, leadership-and-management
• Competition Is 1-on-1 Physical Aggression → competition
• Competition Is War → competition
• Deadline → time-and-temporality
• Decisive Point → decision-making, leadership-and-management
• Defense in Depth → security-analysis
• Defense Mechanisms → psychotherapy
• Defense-to-Offense Transition → competition, organizational-behavior
• Difficult Subjects Are Adversaries → intellectual-inquiry
• Economic Moats
• Fog of War → decision-making, leadership-and-management
• Friction in War → systems-thinking, leadership-and-management
• Illness Is an Invader → medicine
• Love Is War → love-and-relationships
• Morality Is War → ethics-and-morality
• Psychological States Are Warfare → mental-experience
• Pyrrhic Victory → economics
• Scenario Analysis
• Sexuality Is An Offensive Weapon → love-and-relationships
• Shotgun Debugging → software-programs
• Social Conflict Is War → social-behavior
• Therapeutic Alliance → psychotherapy
• Treating Illness Is Fighting a War → medicine
• Words Are Weapons → communication
• The Offensive Must Be Sustained

Applied To This Frame (1)

• medicine → Surgical Precision