The military tank concentrates within it an enormous amount of offensive energy, designed to affect destructive force, which due to its nature as a vehicle of combat, also necessitates a corresponding buildup of a concentrated outer shield.
Similarly, one sets out to present a far-reaching intellectual work, drawing together abstractions and conclusions built up out of one's own provincial existence. And a large body of that work is built up out of real and imagined responses to external attacks upon that work.
