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Because of lingering prejudices against soldiers of fortune at the beginning of the British and Irish civil wars, Scottish and English aristocrats believed that they possessed the best claim to military command because of their superior social rank and the military exploits of their ancestors, despite evidence of the military experience and competence of the British and Irish veterans of the mainland European wars. The concept that military hierarchies were necessary for order and discipline still had not etched itself upon the English military mentality at home. It was thought that the king’s honour required that armies be commanded by men of noble birth, and this emphasis upon social hierarchy made some sense as long as noblemen could recruit their tenants or kinsmen to fill their regiments; the actual command of such units in the field could be entrusted to experienced professionals. This arrangement worked well in Scotland, parts of Ireland, and in Wales and northern England, but was a notable failure throughout the remainder of England where rents rather than loyalty had become the nexus between lord and smallholder. The Parliamentary New Model Army gained an advantage when the grandees, such as the third earl of Essex and the earl of Manchester, who belonged to the peace party which advocated limited war aims, were purged in favour of generals and officers who gained promotion by merit and seniority, and aimed at total victory.

This chapter looks at how Kikuchi found army life somewhat of a rude awakening after having spent two years living in Chicago, working on his master's degree in social work, and conducting research for JERS. It proved to be as much a mental challenge as a physical one: the bureaucracy of the military hierarchy and its conservative ideology were most surprising to Kikuchi. He discovered that deep-seated racism directed toward African American soldiers and civilians pervaded the army ranks, a difficult pill to swallow given his own position as a recently imprisoned Nisei. Nevertheless, he managed to retain an intense faith and belief in the power and potential of America's democracy, hoping that his individual service would, in some small measure, reflect the commitment of the Nisei as a whole.

This chapter examines the procedures for planning the defense industry in the Soviet Union during the interwar period, and describes the three key features of defense planning distinct from the civilian economy. These include the high priority for supply of national defense in the broadest sense, and the forward-looking character of the process of military and economic planning for defense that created the context of defense industry plans. The chapter also mentions that the planning of the defense industry was carried on simultaneously in two separate bureaucracies: a military hierarchy preoccupied with formulating demands; and an industrial hierarchy the task of which was to organize supply.

This chapter examines the dynamics of matching the right to protect and the right to protection in Israel. It begins with an overview of the relationship between the military hierarchy and the social hierarchy in Israel and the role played by the Israel Defense Force in legitimizing social inequalities in the country. It then considers how, until the 1980s, rights were balanced for the secular middle class, which advanced the community's right to protection in exchange for upholding its right to protect, which was convertible into political and social rights. It also explains how the legitimacy to sacrifice declined after the 1970s and especially during the 1980s, following the drop in the motivation of the secular middle class occasioned by the First Lebanon War (1982). The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the devalued right to protect on the middle class, casualty sensitivity, and bereavement discourse.

This chapter examines the reflection of the British military hierarchy in the class relations in settler society by comparing the “respectable” actions of soldiers taking their discharge and becoming settlers with the “rough” actions of drunkenness and desertion. It first considers the garrison's influence in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Natal before discussing the social side of the garrison that emphasized class differentiation. It then explores the reinforcement of the colonial “middling” class by the recruitment of respectable soldier-settlers and how the Christian converts of Edendale, the amaKholwa, provided the new reference points for a community attempting to define itself in terms of middle-class respectability. It also looks at the role of drunkenness in acts of indiscipline and low morale among British troops in the garrison at Fort Napier, along with the hunting ideology that fed into broader concepts of masculinity, aggression, and images of warriors. The chapter shows that garrison activities were integral to the wider social and cultural life of settler society in Natal.

This chapter takes current debates-such as 1) whether soldiers commit less rape when there are race pollution taboos; 2) how we can capture the different, often conflicting, interests of military groups with regard to sexual violence perpetrated by their soldiers; 3) what is sexual about sexual violence; or 4) when sexual violence becomes a weapon and strategy of war-and discusses them in terms of historical source material on World War II. Looking to the past offers the opportunity to consider, more independently of the particular interests of the parties to the conflict in current wars, what structural commonalities and historical specifics we can observe when this form of violence is perpetrated.