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In the second chapter, Israel Shatzman examines grand strategy and military strategy during the period of the Roman Republic. Rome defeated Carthage in two great wars (264–241 and 218–201), crushed the armies of the Macedonian kingdom (197 and 168) and the Seleucid monarchy (191 and 189), and vanquished various other enemies. Shatzman discusses how strategic considerations shaped the Roman strategy for the then‐emerging empire, maintaining that the overall strategy evolved gradually. The military component of the Roman strategy—characterized by extensive recruitment of manpower and huge tactical formations, lines of communications made possible by networks of roads, military discipline combined with virtus, an offensive spirit in pitched battle, and military leaders with both wisdom and determination—was central to sustaining and further expanding the republic. Yet economic, social, and political aspects were equally important in determining the success of the strategy that the Romans practised.

This chapter examines the effects of the discipline (or lack thereof) in the Anarchosyndicalist militia. Although the lack of discipline was an issue with all militia units (especially in contrast to General Franco's more organized military), its solution encountered a philosophical impediment only in those formed by the libertarian movement. The ifrs og liberty of the individual is at the very core of Anarchism, and nothing is so antipodal to its nature as submission to authority. The CNT-FAI militia reflected the ideals of equality, individual liberty, and freedom from obligatory discipline, integral to the Anarchist doctrine. Hence, there was no officers' hierarchy, no saluting, and no regimentation. In the end, however, the drawbacks to this antiauthoritarian system became too severe, and a widespread call for discipline soon arose, prompting further ideological debates within the Anarchosyndicalist camp.

This chapter traces the formation, development, accomplishments, and challenges faced by the Fifth Regiment—which was by far the most renowned military unit of the Civil War. The Fifth Regiment was a military unit headed by the Communist party. Its highly organized military structure was developed without as much scruples as had by the Anarchosyndicalist militia—for Marxist organizations, whose members were indoctrinated with the principles of leadership and control, the problem of military discipline did not provoke any philosophical heart searching. Hence, the Fifth Regiment undertook the Communist party's measures in the training of military cadres and the formation of units with technical staff and specialized departments.

Military justice is central to the relationship between civilians and warfare. This is because the military's judicial apparatus is designed not only to prosecute those who violate military discipline but also to protect the civilian population from assaults by soldiers and any violations of the laws of war. During the period spanning the second half of the seventeenth century until the death of Louis XIV, king of France, in 1715, the nature of military–civilian relations was influenced by warfare. Civilians in early modern Europe were most often affected by war due to military logistics, army provisioning, and associated consequences such as billeting and contributions. This chapter examines the impact of French military justice on civilians under Louis XIV, and how the state administered and maintained the military discipline needed to protect civilian populations from abuses by the army. In particular, it describes military discipline, and the conduct of the French army towards civilians during the Thirty Years War and the Franco-Spanish War.

This chapter explores the ways in which military reformers during the nineteenth century promoted a new notion of military discipline that, like other reformist programs, was articulated in terms of individual ethical conduct. It discusses attempts to reform existing mechanistic military discipline and penal practices, as well as myriad efforts to promote “moral discipline” through the regulation of both the use of leisure and of the social and built environment. By the latter part of the century, such notions that discipline should be interiorized were increasingly understood through the Victorian liberal idiom of character.

This chapter starts with a brief description of conscription, one of the flagship projects of President Manuel Ávila Camacho during the 1940s. It then discusses the advantages, disadvantages, and hardships experienced during the reshaping of the Mexican army. The chapter highlights the radicalism of Cardenista and how it related to the views of the Ávila Camacho administration on military discipline and national unity. The chapter looks at how Mexicans discussed, contested, and resisted military policy in different ways. The conclusion explores conscription in light of neo-Gramscian interpretations that have stressed the hegemonic nature of the postrevolutionary state and argues that it reveals some of the limitations of this approach.

Military ritual has always involved musicians. This chapter discusses the development and nature of such rituals and especially the changes that occurred in the late nineteenth century when military ritual became an important device for asserting state authority. Also addressed are rituals associated with punishment and execution.

This chapter focuses on soldierly self-governance. The key manifestations of soldiers' self-governance were their personal independence, enlistment negotiations, petitions to superior officers, militia constitutions, and negotiations regarding military discipline. American soldiers acted out of confidence in their ability and right to govern and direct their lives in some meaningful, however limited, manner. This construction was so pervasive that it could not help but influence the nature of military service and the imposition, acceptance, and exercise of military discipline. Thus, American military discipline was not so much the unyielding application of incontrovertible regulations by superior officers as it was the result of the military hierarchy's tacit recognition and acceptance of soldiers' insistence on practicing some form of self-governance.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It examines manhood in the north as it played out in the specific context of the Union army. It attempts to recover the place honor held in northern men's conception of manhood and in their daily interactions with one another. Honor, simply put, is when a man's self-worth is based on public reputation and the respect of others. An insult to such a man is a shaming that requires a public vindication of worth. The book also exposes holes in our understanding of Civil War soldiers and the social landscape of the Civil War north, including the influence of class—a topic obscured by historians' reliance on the letters and diaries of elite and middle-class soldiers. The remainder of the chapter provides a quick summary of the basic structure of the army, military discipline, and military justice to serve as background for readers to understand the chapters that follow.

How did the cultural lens of sentimentalism serve as filter through which soldiers and civilians imagined what war would be like? The chapter also focuses on the ways that volunteers became seasoned soldiers through a philosophy of pragmatism. The nature of comradeship, particularly emotional bonding, receives consideration.

Deeply contextualized stories of deserters sustain this chapter, placing the reader in the shoes of men on the run. The reader will find that desertion possessed its own situational logic, rooted in time and place and shaped in decisive ways by the politics and personality of the soldier.

This chapter is based on the study of the first nine volumes of the Gibraltar garrison's order books, covering the years 1720-1791. These order books contain a wealth of material on social and cultural history, and this chapter gives an overview of those entries relating to disciplinary matters, such as special instructions, threats of punishments and sentences of general courts martial, recorded verbatim in order to be read to the troops. The picture emerging from these records demonstrates that, notwithstanding numerous attempts by the garrison commanders, drunkenness and other irregular behaviour by the soldiery could not be restrained. It appears that in spite of stern official regulations, soldiers actually enjoyed a substantial license in their daily doings. This brings in to question the extent to which old-regime authorities could successfully control and discipline their troops.

The very absence of large-scale mutinies in the Indian armed forces between 1939 and 1945 indicates that Indian soldiery was quite content with British military service. Moreover, there were no overt hostile communal feelings among different religious communities within the Indian Army despite the rise of Hindu–Muslim animosity in the ‘greater’ society. How, in the absence of a nationalist ideology, the Indian soldiers were motivated to fight and die in the age of total war is a puzzle which this chapter attempts to resolve. The British could separate the soldiery from the host society by providing tangible and non-tangible incentives to the jawans. Military discipline further converted the agricultural labourers in the ranks into automatons of sorts, while racial/ethnic pride partly enabled the Indian soldiery to encounter the brutal ‘face of battle’.

This chapter examines the French Army's role in Paris and the problem of military discipline during the spring of 1848. More specifically, it considers the army's indiscipline, partisan politics, leadership, and expansion and how it reestablished its discipline and order within a few days of the February Revolution of 1848. The chapter first discusses Parisian civil–military relations during 1848 and goes on to analyze the three centers of influence that controlled the War Ministry during 1848: the war minister, the Commission for the Organization of National Defense, and the professional soldier. It then describes the War Ministry's success in ending troop mutinies in April 1848 and restoring discipline and political reliability in the French Army. It also analyzes the War Ministry's semi-mobilization of a professional army for war in Europe.

Because of the various attributes of medieval society and the nature of medieval society, the events discussed in this book did not serve as a perfect venue for coming up with understandable, reasonable, and humane laws of war. Since there was a great number of states that could be perceived to be equal, the government had to rely on certain hierarchical relations which involved both princes and knights. As the concept of sovereignty is obscured by how knights are treated as higher beings than those who express national loyalty, there is no definite way of distinguishing civil wars from international wars. As such, there was a multitude of misused concepts as a result of the lack of comprehensible distinction. Soon after that, however, medieval society was finally able to come up with a generally accepted artificial distinction between field combat and sieges. The norms within laws of war served as more than just abstract ideas, and as such were imposed by means of military discipline, and various courts.

Chapter 4 reminds the reader that the described conflicts were fought out on territories which had been already heavily affected by the casualties and destructions of the Great War. Postwar Central Europe witnessed epidemics, famine, and a massive refugee crisis. Between 1918 and 1921, Poland’s population was fighting for mere survival. In the meantime, it was menaced by the very men who were meant to protect it: its soldiers. The Polish Army was built from scratch. Desertion, insubordination, and rebellion of whole units was the order of the day. Bands of marauding soldiers harassed the civil population, killing hundreds of Jews. While the border conflicts were state policy put into practice, this wave of paramilitary violence beyond the battlefields was a mixture of cynical pragmatism (shortage of supply), opportunity (possession of arms), and mentality (a sense of superiority of “elite” units towards “ethnic aliens” in general, and Jews in particular).

Chapter 6 examines the shared experiences of communities in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, and Europe in fielding men for combat on land. After discussing the first Spanish campaigns on Hispaniola, the chapter analyzes the challenges of recruiting, training, arming, and feeding warriors, maintaining discipline, demobilizing fighting men, and coping with combat deaths. These challenges are common among all societies engaged in warfare, and they were complicated across the Atlantic world in the early modern era as long-term, long-distance military deployments placed new burdens on fighting men and their communities, straining the logistical capacities of villages and empires.

Why did Civil War soldiers continue to risk their lives in battle, and how did the survivors cope with the trauma of warfare? This chapter focuses on the ways that men in Civil War armies adapted to the practical and cultural mechanisms of authority that were both visible and imperceptible to those in the ranks.