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This chapter examines the types of armies in early modern Spain. It suggests that one of the most decisive agents in the formation of the Spanish army was the War of Granada between 1482 and 1492 and this war marked the turning point between medieval and modern warfare. Most of the combatants participated in the war effort as a result of mutual service obligations. These include the nobles, the hidalgos, and the acostamiento.

This chapter explores the sonic experience of the First World War from the perspective of soldiers on the ground, in the sea, and in the air. World War I, with its extensive employment of modern warfare technology, created a new sonic experience that was closely linked with the universal human need to survive. Soldiers developed the ability to translate their individual sonic experiences in the battlefield into a collective bipolar distinction between “sounds of safety” and “sounds of danger” and act upon this distinction, called “wartime sonic mindedness.” This sonic mindedness continued long after the First World War, when many heard the hectic sonic “battlefields” of the post-war era through the auditory lenses of war.

By the start of World War II, the Martians had become involved in politics. They helped the United States get ready for modern warfare, including advancements in air power, the atomic bomb, and an ever-enhanced application of the computer in weapons development. They initiated the Manhattan Project and participated in it. However, they became divided as to the desirability of actually using the atomic bomb after Germany’s defeat.

This chapter identifies terrorism as a multidimensional phenomenon concomitant with the historic and evolutionary trends of modern warfare. Far from being a traditional show of militaristic strength on the battlefield, terrorism also makes use of the media in discouraging military encounters via psychological warfare. At times, terrorist organizations might even challenge the legitimacy of those who govern by performing charitable deeds and the like—in a deft political maneuver that has since come to be known as “hybrid terrorism.” This highly adaptable and multidimensional nature of terrorism remains confounding to international think-tanks, who have yet to agree on a definition of terrorism. Beyond proposing a definition that makes a distinction between terrorism and guerrilla warfare, this chapter also notes that the usual Western tactic of implementing liberal democracy in Arab countries in order to snuff out terrorist inclinations can, in fact, be exploited by terrorist organizations to further their own agendas.

This chapter sheds new light on the relevance of understanding modern warfare. Its main focus is on the connection between the changed nature of warfare and strategy, as well as measuring success in terms of the link between issues of justice and legitimacy. The discussion includes the Multidimensional Trinity Cubed (Plus), which was established by Carl von Clausewitz. This trinity is composed of the population, the armed forces, and the government, and is considered as an important element in understanding the concepts of both success and legitimacy within modern warfare.

Technological progress has enabled belligerents in modern warfare to increasingly use extremely cruel weapons which inflict agonizing and terrible suffering. One need only think of nuclear weapons, whose radiation causes either death or awesome diseases; incendiary weapons, containing napalm and phosphorus, which produce dreadful burnings; and fragmentation and cluster bombs, the latest generation of which consists of bombs containing pellets of plastic, which, having penetrated the human body, cannot be traced by X-ray. This chapter addresses the question of how international law faces these inhumane agencies of destruction. It considers the efforts so far made by international legislators to cope with modern progress of large-scale, industrialized cruelty, as well as to the basic deficiencies of the regulation that States have hitherto achieved.

This chapter argues for a causal connection between (rising) military inequality and (declining) battlefield performance. It does so by first exploring the nature and severity of ethnic inequalities within political communities before detailing how exposure to state policies can affect soldier beliefs and actions. Next, the chapter considers how military commanders, aware of possible issues arising from inequality, adopt a mixture of four strategies to manage soldiers from suspect populations. The chapter then examines how these strategies induce trade-offs between combat power and cohesion that actually undermine battlefield performance. Finally, the chapter considers how enemy actions can intensify these internal contradictions and trade-offs before concluding with a discussion of how several of the arguments' core assumptions can be relaxed.

This essay describes strategies developed by the author for teaching a course on the Just War theory. The most prominent of the western religious traditions to articulate the conditions necessary for the moral use of armed force, the Just War tradition, with its roots in the medieval Catholic theology of Augustine and Aquinas, stipulates two sets of criteria, jus ad bellum (the discernment of the moral reasons for going to war), and jus in bello (the morality of the execution of the war itself). His course trains students in critical thinking about violence by emphasizing the careful analysis of wartime logic and the restraint of violence that this theological tradition has demanded. Students become empowered to exercise creative moral reasoning by exploring the possible expansion of the theory’s criteria, on the basis of the planet’s accumulated experience of 100 years of modern and nuclear warfare, to include a consideration of jus post bellum, the justice of a post-war circumstances, as part of the assessment of an action’s moral status.

The objective of this introduction is to bring the more historical outlook on war and the cultural perspective closer together by introducing the concept of the often overlooked ‘episodic narratives’, the detailed factual texts that decribe the actual stories of the war. It also pleads for the use of ‘Revolt in the Low Countries’ as a more accurate way of refering to what is commonly known as the Dutch Revolt, as not all inhabitants revolted, and the Revolt was not limited to the territory of the subsequent Dutch Republic. It is essential to study the creation of war narratives on the Revolt in a broader European context, reflecting the international character of early modern wars and the Revolt in particular. Moreover, though there are differences between early modern and contemporary war narratives, there is no reason why these texts cannot be studied in comparison.

This chapter concludes the book with the point that strategy fully embraces law and justice, and that these two concepts are considered important to the success of military operations. It first poses the question: ‘what adds up to war during a time of terror’? The discussion then highlights the uncertainty around international criminal justice initiatives and discusses the various trends that place civil justice into war. The chapter’s last section is about the power of wrongdoing and ‘rightdoing’ in modern warfare, and assesses the inborn mutuality of war and war crimes.

This chapter discusses Scott's history that is far from the world of global communications and globalised markets, but which still focuses on issues such as commerce, commercial development and capitalism. The first section takes a look at the novel Rob Roy, which presents a recent and modern history of highland dispossession and popular resistance to foreign imperial power. It is followed by a section on A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, where the assumption that modern warfare is, or could be, governed by ‘civilised’ norms of conduct is looked at. The chapter also examines highland violence and the mercenary.

This chapter examines the connection between the global flow of information and future wars, claiming that the same developments and technologies that enable global information flows among citizens can also be used for conducting wars. This notion of open flows of information in the context of a nation's wars seems counterintuitive for various reasons. For instance, with the existence of interoperable, interconnected networks, the transmission of the battlefield's operational and supply needs to the suppliers and vice versa will be a difficult task. The chapter also raises critical issues that emerge from such open net-centric military structures and compares them to net-related security, privacy, and information assurance issues that exist in the civilian and commercial world today.

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the discoveries of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) from the conflict landscape of the Hejaz Railway. A decade in the desert revealed the anthropological archaeology of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 to be more than the excavation of historically recent places or the survey of ruinous station buildings. It was rather an interdisciplinary study of the railway’s heritage from 1900 to the present, its role as a catalyst in creating a unique conflict landscape, and its intriguing relationships with earlier Hajj routes. The railway was also entangled with the beginnings of modern guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and a complex and sometimes volatile mix of traditional Bedouin culture, modernity, religion, and local and national politics. Furthermore, the Revolt itself was embedded in the wider regional and geo-political framework of the First World War and its many aftermaths: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the modern Middle East; the rise of Arab Nationalism; the Second World War; the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq; the destructive legacy of the Islamic State’s short-lived Caliphate announced in 2014; and Syria’s descent into a tortuous and tragic civil war.

This introductory chapter begins by discussing the history of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It then identifies six principles extracted from the book that are relevant and applicable to modern warfare. These are, firstly, win all without fighting; secondly, avoid strength, attack weakness; thirdly, deception and foreknowledge; fourthly, speed and preparation; fifthly, shaping the enemy; and finally, character-based leadership. This book discusses how each of these principles has been applied throughout history, using examples from ancient and modern battles, campaigns, and wars. These illustrate how the understanding or ignorance of these principles has led to success or failure.