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This chapter looks at Arendt's historical analysis of a form of war that still shapes the contemporary world. In particular, the chapter assesses her farsighted and prescient claim that late 19th-century wars of imperial conquest helped sow the seeds of 20th-century total war in Europe. The implications are potentially great for how we might think through the social and political processes unwittingly unleashed by various forms of violence, including so-called ‘small wars’. Arendt's writing on imperialism and European total war also reveal some of the flaws in conventional military history and strategic studies which has understood these practices as unrelated. Arendt points us toward relationships that are much closer to Clausewitz's more fundamental insight about war as a social process that transcends the nation-state. Moreover, Arendt may have been the first to articulate what today we call ‘blowback’ and she termed the ‘boomerang effect’.

The introduction focuses on the definition of ‘grand strategy’ and ‘military strategy’, the phenomena and logic of strategy, considerations and factors that shaped imperial and nation‐state politics, and the relationship between the military and political levels of war. It provides a working definition of strategy as ‘the art of winning by purposely matching ends, ways and means’, and briefly summarizes the twelve case studies, from the campaigns of Alexander the Great to the contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also posits the working hypothesis of the book: that nothing essential changes in the intrinsic nature and function (or purpose) of strategy and war, in sharp contrast to the character of individual strategies that reflect the unique circumstances of each conflict.

This chapter on military history begins with a battle for acceptance of the field by other professional historians. Although that effort has enjoyed some success and military history is much admired and read outside of academe and among undergraduates in colleges and universities, its practitioners have generally not regarded the Organization of American Historians as supportive. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes that the “future appears to be brighter than some military historians think”.

This chapter is a conceptual and methodological introduction to the book. It examines the enduring interest in the Spanish Civil War from both an academic and popular perspective, and charts the development of military history to include studies of people at war at the lowest level. In this light, conscripts had a degree of agency, rather than as acting simply as pawns within a rigid military apparatus. The chapter also places the study of conscription within the existing historiography of the Spanish Civil War and elucidates on the scope and purpose of carrying out a comparative study. Finally, it introduces the sources used for this study and examines their strengths and limitations.

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.

The story of Wuhan in 1938 has two dimensions—the military and the social—that are of crucial importance to the history of modern China. Due to a lack of a comprehensive military history of the Anti-Japanese War, this chapter aims to reconstruct the hard facts of the military defense of Wuhan and the central Yangzi before discussing social and cultural matters in depth. This interrelationship is the key to understanding why Wuhan did not suffer the panic and chaos that engulfed Nanjing and Jinan when these cities were under siege by the Japanese in late 1937. The Wuhan period suggests that the Anti-Japanese War brought changes to Chinese society, culture, and politics analogous to those that occurred after World War I in Europe.

As early as September 1914 it was clear that the reputation of the General Staff was in danger. There were also intense internal General Staff battles to assign blame for the defeat on the Marne. It is evident from the personal papers of Wilhelm Groener, the last Chief of the General Staff, that Groener decided in 1919 that the best solution was to place the blame on dead officers, who he alleged did not understand the infallible Schlieffen plan. This explains why there is no mention of the Schlieffen plan being the German war plan before 1919, when Groener ‘invented’ it. The ‘Schlieffen plan’ was therefore not built on documents and proof but on gross generalization and bald assertion. The Schlieffen plan has always been popular because in the simplest terms it tells a wide group of people — from armchair generals to opponents of ‘German militarism’ — exactly what they want to hear. Professional military analysis of actual German war planning documents shows the real nature of Schlieffen's planning and conclusively proves that there never was a ‘Schlieffen plan’.

This chapter argues that neither the leisured class of aristocrats who vied for high social and political status within the polis nor the middling citizen soldiers who defended their farmland provides the origins of archaic Greek arms and tactics. Instead, the chapter suggests looking for the first hoplites fighting as mercenaries in the service of Eastern monarchs in areas such as Syria, Egypt, and Babylon. These soldiers of fortune fought in search of gain and glory, not to defend a civic ideology or ethos. Evidence for this thesis can be found in lyric poetry and in inscriptions, pottery, and the remains of hoplite armor discovered outside Greece. Here, the mercenary service is considered the “Main Event” of Greek military history in the seventh century, in contrast to the sporadic battles between poleis.

This chapter, by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, establishes a framework for studying the American military, a singularly powerful institution, and its relationship to cinema. It first lays out a brief history of the American military and its rise to prominence and power, and then situates the enduring use of cinema across the broad remit of the armed forces alongside previous work in this area. Special attention is paid to the economic and industrial developments that have been intertwined with the military historically. This chapter also summarizes the breadth of the military’s use of cinema, ranging from propaganda to training and from war funding to munitions testing. Knowledge about the military’s use of film helps us to understand more about the history of film and its technologies and also the various ways cinema has been implicated in the complex geopolitical dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The feminist project with history has often been glossed as ‘writing women back into history’, in which case women's role in warfare would seem to be long overdue for revisionist treatment. But the problem is that military history appears to stand forth as the quintessentially patriarchal discourse. Feminist historiography attempts to counteract the effects of this discourse by configuring the project of writing women back into history as a transformation not only of women but also of history. This chapter questions the failure of feminism to engage in the project of narrating a history of warfare. It argues that the figure of Helen of Troy in ancient accounts of war offers a potential model for the feminist historian to rethink history's accounts of causality and accountability. It also compares different versions of ‘the Helen myth’ to redirect attention to previously unrecognised thematics.

The introduction surveys the historical and historiographical contexts which underpin and link the various chapters in Battle-Scarred, before outlining the questions and topics covered in the chapters. By adumbrating trends in military historiography and the history of early modern medicine, the editors highlight how the contributors have utilised potential synergies between these two sub-disciplines in order to make a series of significant contributions to the study of military medicine and war-related welfare. The chapters are arranged in three sections: the first section considers attitudes towards the bodies of the slain and efforts to control epidemic disease in civil-war garrisons; the second brings together professional, political and literary aspects of military medicine; whilst the third explores the complex relationships between war, societal culture, welfare and memorialisation. The editors argue that by examining the myriad ways in which English and Scottish people at various levels of society responded to the trauma and stress of civil war, the volume will help foster a more rounded approach to military history, and a sounder grasp of the historical origins of modern British attitudes towards war-related institutional care.

This chapter discusses how general readers admire the traditional fields of political, economic, military, and diplomatic history more than professional historians do. It identifies a systematic crisis in the profession and questions how the discipline as a whole has dealt with the powerful challenge to the traditional fields from postmodern theories and deconstructionist methodologies. It shows that within the field of U.S. foreign policy, the basis for a mediating role lies between the challengers and the traditionalists, and the chapter ends with a call for more analysis of a traditional kind of American domestic and foreign policy.

In the collective memory, the concept of the First World War is pervaded by the trauma of the modern technologized war on the western front, whereas the events and battles on the eastern front of 1914–1915, other than the battle of Tannenberg, have shifted into the background. Thus, the phrase “all quiet on the eastern front” offers a succinct description of the lack of scholarly research on the first two years of the war on the German eastern front. This volume aims to correct that deficiency, presenting essays by professional historians from eight countries discussing the eastern theater of war in terms of operations, mindset, and cultural-historical issues.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief background on the current study, detailing the processes the author of this book underwent as part of the overall research effort on Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF). It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine how the SDF have made sense of those “odd missions” that Anthony Zinni, a retired general of the U.S. Marine Corps and former commander in chief of United States Central Command, envisions as the future of the military. This is followed by a brief history of the SDF. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.