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The first chapter introduces the history of the Whampoa Military Academy by relaying how it began, the intentions behind its foundation, and how cadets were taught civic education. Xu notes how the academy regularly delved into cadets’ personal lives by reading their correspondence and eavesdropping on conversations. Xu continues by examining the speeches and lectures to the cadets of the academy as well as the commandant Chiang Kai-shek’s efforts to build additional branch campuses during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Much of Chiang’s efforts to increase morale within the cadets’ ranks celebrated physical sacrifice as heroic and dutiful, therefore, corroborating in the creation of a specific soldier figure during this time. The memoirs of Whampoa graduates reveal that Chiang’s intentions were not fully achieved since the discourse of the soldier figure constructed by Chiang was confronted or resisted by some Whampoa cadets and provincial warlords

This chapter traces Dai Li's entry into the ranks of the Guomindang revolutionaries. There are three versions of Dai Li's entry into Whampoa Military Academy, including getting a letter of introduction from the former boss of the Shanghai rackets, Huang Jinrong, to Chiang Kai-shek. He did not graduate from Whampoa. He left the academy in April 1927, was assigned to First Platoon of the National Revolutionary Army's Cavalry Battalion and joined the National Revolutionary Army during its march up the eastern route through Fujian and Zhejiang. It was around this time that he got the job that is the most emphasized as the key to his rise from obscurity. He worked as a petty officer for Hu Zongnan, who later recommended him for a job in the Nanjing office of the Whampoa Alumni Association Investigation Department.

This chapter deals with the initial decades in the life of the Indian Military Academy (IMA). Envisaged as the ‘Indian Sandhurst’, the academy was inaugurated in 1932 and was the first institution that generated a new class of commissioned Indian officers. The IMA, in its early years, grappled with the same administrative and institutional challenges as those of the feeder colleges, highlighting the inter-dependent nature of institutional expansion and reorganisation in the subcontinent. This chapter will shed light on the initial years of its operation where the provisions for joint examinations in India and England; entry for Anglo-Indians; and the IMA’s suitability for sons of the Princely Rulers threatened to erode its legitimacy. The establishment of the IMA also spurred the development of other military institutions in India both on the scale of higher training as well as feeder institutions, chief among them being the National Defence Academy.

This chapter presents two excerpts from Ramseur's first letter to his mother from West Point, dated August 15, 1855 that illustrates his transition from upbringing to matriculation. It reports that the U.S. Military Academy was the nation's premier engineering school with a curriculum designed to prepare its graduates to build the river and harbour works, lighthouses, canals, and railroads needed by a burgeoning nation. The U.S. Military Academy also served to prepare topographical and military engineers for times of war. The chapter notes that the institution had been founded early in the nineteenth century, modeled after Sandhurst and St. Cyr, its counterparts in England and France respectively.

This section provides the biography of Courtney Hicks Hodges, who was born in Perry, Georgia, on January 5, 1887. It tells us that he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, with the incoming class of 1908 in June 1904, a member of the same class as George S. Patton Jr. The section notes that Hodges was “found deficient” in mathematics, as was Patton, and left West Point following his plebe year of 1904–5. It further notes that Hodges enlisted in the army as a private in Company L, Seventeenth Infantry, and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry on November 13, 1909; served in the Philippines and the Mexican Punitive Expedition, and in France during World War I; and received a Distinguished Service Cross for valor during the Meuse–Argonne operation.

The British Secret Intelligence Service identified the RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Health (RSFSR Narkomzdrav) as being the main agency within which ostensibly civil facilities engaged in offensive biological warfare work were concealed. Significant funds for BW research were channeled from RSFSR Narkomzdrav to the Plague Fort at Kronstadt and to other laboratories in Leningrad. Semen Ivanovich Zlatogorov, who had participated in Russian efforts to combat the October 1910 to February 1911 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria, and had subsequently emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on pneumonic plague, was the lead scientist heading up BW research in Leningrad. The key institution operating closely alongside the Narkomzdrav facilities appears to have been the Red Army’s Military-Medical Academy.

This chapter deals with the Training system of the Iraqi armed forces. It describes the Training Division of the General Staff, its missions and responsibilities and its development, especially during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi Military Doctrine and training methods, and the staff directorates subordinated to it. It also describes the basic training of the officers in the military colleges as well as the advanced training of officers in the colleges of the Al-Bakr University for high military studies. The chapter deals also with the training methods of the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq war and the lessons-learning process that had been developed during the wars. It deals also with the Iraqi aid to Arab armies during the years.

This chapter examines Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military education. In January 1896, upon graduating from the military preparatory school in Salonica, Mustafa Kemal enrolled in the military high school in Monastir, then the capital of the Ottoman province of the same name. In 1899, at age eighteen, Mustafa Kemal graduated from this high school with flying colors. Mustafa Kemal then moved to Istanbul, where he enrolled in one of the most prestigious schools in the empire, the Royal Military Academy. Once there, he worked relentlessly to gain admission to the Staff Officer College—a highly competitive elite institution widely regarded as the pinnacle of military education in the empire. In 1902, he graduated from the academy and entered the college for two more years of special education. In 1905, he joined the army as a staff officer captain. Ultimately, Mustafa Kemal's studies at the Royal Military Academy exposed him to a radically new set of ideas.

This article highlights the complexity of material production by focusing on the gunpowder crisis in England during the eighteenth century. It examines the salient features of munitions production and improvement during the period and discusses the national organization of gunpowder production, procurement, and proving. It also considers government reforms in gunpowder manufacture, testing, and improvement, and describes the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich along with its comptroller, who was entrusted with the supervision of gunpowder proof; the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich trained cadets in artillery and engineering; the private owners of gunpowder mills; and the military, which continually complained about the quantity and quality of British gunpowder. To rationalize gunpowder production and to standardize the quality of gunpowder, British officials carried out systematic experiments and measurement, including ballistic testing.

This chapter discusses the reform of Maria Theresa's armies. The reforms they underwent in the run-up to the Seven Years War improved their morale and effectiveness dramatically. The remainder of the chapter covers the modernization of the Austrian artillery; the reform of the cavalry, the hussars, and the infantry; the establishment of the Wiener Neustadt Military Academy; and the reform of the army's medical services. All these reforms were more or less implanted in a period of eight years, the brief interlude between the wars of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. The proof of their success was demonstrated in the coming conflict when Frederick of Prussia would ruefully observe on the battlefield: “unfortunately these are no longer the old Austrians”.

This chapter examines the February coup d'état of 1936, also known as the February Incident, and how it exposed the limits of violent military insubordination in Japan. On February 26, 1936, a group of radical lieutenants and captains mobilized 1,400 soldiers, took over large parts of central Tokyo, and launched attacks on several prominent leaders. When the army minister, General Kawashima Yoshiyuki, asked Captain Yamaguchi Ichitarō, a company commander in the First Infantry Regiment, what to do, the latter replied that it was Kawashima's prerogative to decide whether the mutinous troops were “righteous” or “rebellious.” The chapter first considers the Young Officers movement and their involvement in two events, the May Incident and the Military Academy Incident, before discussing the coup of February 1936 led by Lieutenant Nakahashi Motoaki. It also analyzes Emperor Hirohito's interventions in the coup and concludes with a commentary on the trial and punishment of the rebels.

This chapter examines the political and economic dimensions of William Faulkner’s erotic desire. It suggests that Faulkner’s public discourses in the years following the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 might be read alongside the largely contemporaneous “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, whose members included Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Like Marcuse, Faulkner believed that personal and political categories were closely intertwined and that, in the 1950s, the idea of sexual privacy was in danger of being eroded. The chapter looks at Faulkner’s speech to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and his public admission about his imaginary desire to be a “beautiful woman.” It argues that the suggestion of a transgender desire at this time might be read not only as nonheteronormative, but dangerously un-American, and also contends that the sexuality of early Faulknerian characters is “polymorphous” and often “perverse.”

This chapter recounts President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, during which he sharply distinguished the notion of just wars from holy wars and crusades. In reminding his audience “that no Holy War can ever be a just war,” the president censured those who use religion to justify violence. The context of Obama's Peace Prize address follows his other address at the U.S. Military Academy ten days earlier, in which he had announced a major U.S. troop surge to defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Thus, his Nobel Peace Prize speech sought to reclaim for America the mantle of international consensus that, critics argued, the Iraq War and a militant, often religiously tinged, form of “American exceptionalism” had undermined.