History unfolds. Follow the thread.

John Patrick Hewson reconstructs the Egyptian campaign at Megiddo by bringing together inscriptions, their modern translations, and interpretations of the battlefield. The account introduces Thutmose III’s political and military setting before explaining the composition of the opposing forces and the routes available to the Egyptian army. Choosing an approach meant balancing speed and surprise against the danger of moving through restrictive terrain. Hewson follows that decision into the confrontation near the city and considers how the subsequent course of operations affected the campaign. Throughout, the surviving records determine both what can be described and where uncertainty remains. Readers are shown how evidence from an ancient inscription becomes a modern account of movement, command, and combat. The article’s value lies as much in that process of reconstruction as in the battle itself, offering an introduction to the challenges of studying warfare when detailed and independent descriptions are scarce.

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Rob Wanner examines Kadesh through the confrontation between Egyptian and Hittite ambitions in Syria. The campaign’s approach to battle depended on what the commanders believed about enemy locations and intentions, making information and deception central to the narrative. As Egyptian formations became separated, a sudden chariot attack created a crisis that threatened the army’s cohesion and the security of its leadership. Wanner follows the fighting around the camp and the circumstances that changed the balance of the engagement. He also considers the evidence used to describe the battle, including Egyptian representations that place the pharaoh at the center of events. The account links the dramatic combat to questions about preparedness, command, and the consequences of surprise. Readers receive an overview of the campaign’s military setting and an explanation of why this early encounter remains valuable for examining both ancient battlefield tactics and the way rulers represented their own achievements.

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J.D. Miller places the defense of Thermopylae within the larger Persian-Greek confrontation and examines how the battle can be reconstructed from imperfect evidence. The earlier campaigns provide context for the forces assembled and the choices made before the armies reached the pass. Terrain, equipment, and differences in fighting methods help explain why a restricted position offered opportunities to the defenders. Miller then follows the attacks and the developments that changed the military situation. Herodotus’s account remains central, but its strengths and limitations are considered through later historical criticism. The discussion extends to the consequences of the engagement and its place in public memory. By linking campaign history with a review of the sources, the article helps readers distinguish the military problem faced by the participants from the dramatic narrative that has grown around it. Thermopylae emerges as both a battlefield study and a case in the interpretation of ancient history.

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A history of the 479 BC Battle of Plataea, where Greek hoplites defeated Mardonius's Persian army and ended Xerxes's invasion of mainland Greece.

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Jon Martin presents Brasidas as a commander whose effectiveness depended on persuasion and adaptability as much as courage in battle. Operating far from Sparta’s center of power, he had to secure local cooperation, make limited resources useful, and respond to opponents in unfamiliar conditions. The article follows his campaigns during the Peloponnesian War, including the relationship between military operations and the contest for strategically valuable communities. His methods sometimes placed him at odds with the cautious political culture of his own state. Martin examines the ability to seize an opportunity, maintain the confidence of troops, and turn an opponent’s weaknesses into an advantage. Setbacks and difficult withdrawals are considered alongside victories, giving a fuller picture of his command. The account explains why Brasidas’s reputation extends beyond individual engagements and why his combination of diplomacy, initiative, and tactical skill remains an interesting subject for the study of military leadership.

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An examination of the First Samnite War, comparing Roman and Samnite armies, disputed sources, diplomacy, and campaigns that began Rome's struggle for Italy.

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The interval between Rome’s early wars with Samnium was filled with fighting that transformed the political map of southern Italy. Gordon Davis examines how revolts, regional rivalries, and campaigns against smaller communities drew several powers into overlapping struggles. Roman and Samnite ambitions were only part of the story: Greek cities and the peoples of the interior also sought military support and alliances to protect their interests. The narrative follows movement across mountain and plain, the pressure exerted by sieges, and the efforts of threatened states to preserve their independence. These operations gradually changed the relationships between larger powers and their neighbors. Davis treats the period as a connected military history, showing why a break between formally named wars did not mean an absence of conflict. Readers gain context for the next Roman-Samnite confrontation and for the process through which numerous independent communities became incorporated into broader spheres of power.

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Gordon Davis examines the opening phase of the Second Samnite War through the campaigns fought across central Italy. The contest was shaped by competing claims to territory, the position of allied communities, and the difficulty of moving and sustaining forces in varied terrain. Davis follows operations across several campaigning seasons, explaining how individual engagements contributed to the wider struggle between Roman and Samnite power. He also addresses the problems of relying on later accounts for a period with limited surviving evidence. Disputed episodes are considered alongside patterns of movement and strategic purpose that can still support a useful reconstruction. The interruption of fighting raises a further question about how historians divide a prolonged rivalry into separate wars. By combining military narrative with attention to sources and chronology, the article offers readers a more detailed understanding of a conflict often reduced to a few famous incidents in Rome’s expansion.

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Gordon Davis reconstructs the opening campaigns of the conflict he identifies as the Third Romano-Samnite War, concentrating on the struggle between Rome and Samnium before additional powers became involved. Rather than presenting a succession of disconnected battles, he relates operations to geography, alliances, and control of the towns and approaches of central Italy. Roman reverses and subsequent recovery reveal how both opponents could threaten the other’s position without immediately settling the contest. Sieges and campaigning in Campania receive particular attention, alongside the expanding demands placed on Roman forces. Davis also considers how the available manpower and military organization affected the scale of operations. Davis uses the surviving narrative to build a broader strategic picture while acknowledging the difficulties of reconstructing this early period. The article shows a rivalry becoming more extensive and demanding, setting the stage for the wider fighting addressed in the next phase of the war.

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A succession dispute in the Bosporan kingdom provides the setting for John Patrick Hewson’s account of the Battle of Thatis River. Rival claimants drew support from neighboring peoples, bringing Greek troops and the mounted warriors of the steppe into the same military contest. Hewson first explains the migrations and relationships that made these alliances possible, then examines the forces each side assembled. His reconstruction follows the interaction between cavalry fighting in the center and infantry actions on the wings. Success in one part of the field did not automatically decide the engagement elsewhere, requiring commanders to respond to a changing battle. The narrative connects these tactical choices to the dynastic ambitions that brought the armies together. It also introduces readers to a military environment where political authority depended on access to different communities and fighting traditions, making the struggle a useful example of warfare along the boundary between the Greek and steppe worlds.

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Fabio Lusiani follows Hannibal’s arrival in northern Italy through the first confrontation with a Roman army at the Ticinus River. The Alpine crossing had weakened the invaders, making local alliances and an early demonstration of military strength especially important. Scipio’s response brought the two commanders into contact before either could fully determine the course of the campaign. The account explains the composition and employment of their mounted forces, the relationship between reconnaissance and battle, and the advantages Hannibal sought from his different cavalry contingents. It also places the engagement within the struggle to win support among the peoples of Cisalpine Gaul. The significance of the encounter extends beyond its immediate battlefield result: confidence, political allegiance, and freedom of movement would influence the operations that followed. Readers receive a close view of the opening contest between two commanders whose rivalry would shape the wider war.

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Andrew Wright separates Hannibal’s remarkable battlefield achievement at Cannae from the larger question of whether it advanced Carthage’s war aims. He reconstructs the roles of infantry and cavalry, showing how the Roman attack became vulnerable to encirclement as the fighting developed. By tracing the sequence of decisions, Wright explains why the maneuver succeeded rather than presenting it as a diagram that commanders can simply reproduce. The discussion also considers the Roman response and the limitations facing Hannibal after the battle. Rome’s ability to continue fighting complicates the familiar portrayal of Cannae as an ideal model of decisive victory. Wright argues that the destruction of an enemy army must be judged against the political and strategic effects it produces. This account gives readers both an explanation of the tactical success and a reason to question why later military thinkers have so often focused on that success in isolation.

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Stefano Spagarino uses Rome’s defeat in the Teutoburg Forest to examine the limits of military superiority when intelligence, judgment, and local understanding fail. Varus entered Germania expecting administrative authority and established relationships to provide security. Arminius exploited that confidence, combining knowledge of Roman methods with the ability to organize resistance among neighboring tribes. The article connects the ambush to terrain, the vulnerability of a marching column, and the breakdown of leadership under pressure. Its analysis then moves beyond the destruction of the legions to the effects on morale and imperial policy. Rome’s reassessment of its northern frontier demonstrates how one military disaster can alter long-term strategic choices. Spagarino also considers the consequences for the Germanic peoples, challenging an interpretation based solely on winners and losers. The result is a study of how an army’s assumptions can become as consequential as its weapons, training, and numbers.

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John Griffiths reconstructs Rome’s first assault on Anglesey as an operation against a center of resistance with religious as well as political importance. The island’s position forced the attackers to solve problems of approach, transport, and coordination before they could bring their superior military resources to bear. Griffiths considers the forces and equipment available to Suetonius Paulinus, then examines how they might have supported the crossing and fighting on the island. His account gives particular attention to the relationship between the physical landscape and the practical requirements of an invasion. The violence of the campaign is placed within Rome’s wider methods of imposing authority in Britain. Readers are invited to look beyond a simple story of conquest and assess how an army prepared for a difficult objective. The article also establishes the background for understanding why later Roman operations would return to the island.

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Agricola’s return to Anglesey forms the focus of John Griffiths’s reconstruction of Rome’s efforts to complete an earlier conquest. The article compares the later campaign with the operation under Suetonius Paulinus, considering what had remained unresolved and what the available accounts reveal. Tacitus’s biography provides an important source, but Griffiths also uses the island’s geography and the organization of Roman forces to explore practical questions about the attack. Local knowledge, supporting troops, and the ability to negotiate a hazardous crossing receive close attention. Where direct evidence is limited, the author develops possible explanations for how the operation succeeded. These interpretations connect the military narrative to the landscape and to the resources a Roman commander could employ. Readers gain a focused study of the invasion and an example of how written testimony, logistical reasoning, and knowledge of terrain can be combined to reconstruct a campaign.

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An Unenviable Experience: An Analysis of the Roman Army’s Punitive Expeditions into Dacia, 86-88 CE

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Steve Haas explores the possible historical setting behind Arthur by examining Britain’s changing relationship with Roman power. The story moves from imperial involvement and external threats to the efforts of local rulers to organize defense when support from Rome became unreliable. Haas brings together accounts of British leadership, regional connections, and competing identifications of the figure later remembered as Arthur. These interpretations reveal the difficulty of moving from familiar legend to a secure historical reconstruction. Military resistance is considered alongside questions of ancestry, political authority, and links across the Channel. The article offers a broad narrative of the conditions in which stories about a unifying leader could develop, rather than treating the later traditions as a straightforward campaign record. Readers are introduced to several ways of approaching Arthur’s identity and to the wider struggle for order that gives those interpretations their significance.

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Robert C. Daniels investigates why the Muslim invasion of Iberia advanced so rapidly despite the strength that its Christian opponents appeared to possess. The article looks behind the battlefield encounters to the peninsula’s political divisions, earlier history, and the condition of its ruling institutions. It follows the invading forces from their arrival through the collapse of resistance and the occupation of important centers. Decisions by local leaders and the dispersal of authority help explain why numerical strength did not translate into an effective defense. Daniels contrasts this experience with the later confrontation involving the Franks, using the comparison to question simple explanations based on the invaders’ military power alone. Geography and communications add further context to the campaign. The result is an account of conquest that emphasizes the relationship between armies and political cohesion, showing how the ability to organize resistance can be as important as the forces nominally available.

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John Patrick Hewson places the Third Battle of Anchialus within the prolonged rivalry between Byzantium and Bulgaria. Migration, political organization, and periods of cooperation establish the background to a conflict in which earlier relationships could become strategic liabilities. The article explains how the opposing armies were raised and arranged, including the different roles of mounted troops and infantry. It then relates military preparations and battlefield decisions to the ambitions of the rulers directing the campaign. The discussion makes clear that the engagement belonged to a wider contest over authority and influence, rather than an isolated collision between armies. Hewson uses the encounter to connect changes in regional power with the practical conduct of war. Readers gain an overview of the institutions and fighting methods involved, as well as a narrative of how those resources were brought together in a consequential confrontation between neighboring states.

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David W. Tschanz follows Cairo’s Citadel through its development as a fortress, a seat of government, and a prominent symbol of authority. Its commanding position made it a military asset, but its importance also came from the rulers who adapted and occupied it. The article traces changes to walls, entrances, palaces, mosques, and supporting facilities, connecting those structures to different periods in the city’s history. Practical requirements of defense and administration existed alongside the desire to express legitimacy and prestige. Architectural details therefore become evidence of political priorities as well as engineering choices. Tschanz also considers how the complex’s functions changed over time and how its surviving features can be understood by present-day visitors. Readers receive a historical tour that brings together military architecture and urban life, revealing how a fortified enclosure could serve as both a protective stronghold and a center from which the surrounding city was governed.

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A review of Michael Livingston's Crecy: Battle of the Five Kings, exploring its reconstruction of the 1346 battle, medieval politics, commanders, and combat.

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Alessandro Lusiani explains the success of Milanese armor through the system that produced it, from the supply of iron to the organization of specialized urban workshops. Demand from military customers encouraged coordinated production, while water transport and guild oversight helped connect materials, labor, and finished equipment. The article then examines the design of the armor itself. Curved surfaces, differences in thickness, and treatment of the metal shaped how a harness absorbed or deflected the weapons encountered in combat. Comparison with other armor styles shows that appearance and protection could develop together rather than serving separate purposes. Lusiani argues that Milan’s reputation rested on an interaction between industrial organization and technical experimentation. The discussion gives readers an account of both the craftsmen’s work and the wider commercial setting, showing how a military object can reveal changes in manufacturing, battlefield practice, and the demand for reliable equipment.

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An account of the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury, where Henry IV and Prince Hal defeated Henry Hotspur in a deadly contest dominated by English longbowmen.

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Thomas Leckwold examines how Luther’s challenge to church practice became part of a much wider transformation in European society. The Ninety-Five Theses provide the starting point, but the article’s central question is whether the events that followed should be understood as a revolution. Religious conviction interacted with economic grievances, political interests, and disputes over authority, drawing rulers and communities into a confrontation that could not be contained within theological debate. Leckwold follows the escalation of the conflict and the competing pressures facing those expected to enforce or resist reform. He also considers interpretations of revolution and how they apply to the Reformation. The discussion shows why an action’s consequences may extend beyond the intentions of its author. Readers gain a framework for examining the movement from criticism to institutional conflict, and for connecting the religious disputes of the period to the social upheaval and warfare that accompanied them.

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Kai Isaksen revisits Pinkie Cleugh as a battle whose military importance exceeded its lasting political results. The English campaign and the Scottish response are placed within the disputes that brought the two kingdoms into renewed conflict. Isaksen follows the preparations, preliminary fighting, and changing options available to the opposing commanders. Infantry, mounted troops, artillery, and support from warships played different but connected roles, allowing the engagement to illustrate the growing importance of coordination among arms. The Scottish position became increasingly difficult as earlier losses and enemy firepower restricted its choices. The article also considers why defeat on the field did not settle the political questions that had motivated the campaign. This combination of tactical narrative and wider context gives readers a way to assess Pinkie’s place in military history, while challenging the assumption that a decisive victory necessarily produces an equally decisive settlement.

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Comer Plummer traces Mohammed ash-Shaykh’s rise through the rivalries and shifting alliances of sixteenth-century Morocco. The account connects his personal ambitions to the struggle for political authority, examining how military opportunities and negotiations with foreign powers could strengthen or endanger a ruler’s position. Relations with Portugal form one strand of a larger story that also involves local competitors and pressure from the Ottoman world. Plummer follows the choices made as circumstances changed, showing that apparent partners could pursue aims quite different from those of the Moroccan leader. Descriptions of campaigns and fighting methods reveal the military dimension behind the diplomatic exchanges. The article’s attention to the ruler’s eventual fate gives these calculations a human consequence. Readers receive an account of the making and vulnerability of political power, where negotiation, religious legitimacy, and armed force operated together in a contest extending beyond Morocco’s borders.

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The defense of Portugal’s fortified position at Mazagan becomes a test of endurance in Comer Plummer’s account of the Moroccan siege. Political ambitions on both sides establish the stakes before the narrative turns to the garrison, its fortifications, and the resources available to the attackers. Preparations outside the walls developed into an extended contest of artillery, engineering, and attempts to overcome the defenses. The defenders had to sustain resistance while looking toward the possibility of relief, making time and access to support essential parts of the story. Plummer also connects events in Morocco to the Portuguese court, where the young King Sebastian’s interests gave the conflict a broader significance. The article explains why a coastal stronghold could matter far beyond its immediate surroundings. Readers gain a detailed siege narrative and an introduction to the relationship between overseas possessions, royal expectations, and the practical demands of defending an imperial foothold.

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Comer Plummer examines the expedition that brought Portugal’s King Sebastian into battle against rival Moroccan rulers. Political ambitions and personal expectations shaped the campaign before the armies met. Experienced advisers faced the difficulty of influencing a king determined to act on his own conception of command. The account follows the fighting, showing how poor coordination affected the Portuguese while Moroccan leaders exploited their opportunities. Sebastian’s conduct and the experience of soldiers such as Thomas Stukeley give the military narrative a personal dimension. Plummer then considers the disaster’s consequences for the participants and Portugal’s future. The battle becomes a study of how dynastic ambitions, misplaced confidence, and unrealistic expectations can overwhelm practical judgment, with effects extending far beyond the defeat of an army.

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A Moroccan expedition’s difficult journey across the Sahara provides the opening problem in Comer Plummer’s account of the conquest of Songhay. Judar Pasha reached the confrontation near Tondibi with a force already strained by distance and losses, facing opponents whose numbers and local position presented a serious challenge. The article explains the military resources available to each side and follows the decisions that shaped the battle. It then examines the occupation of Gao, the search for the wealth that had encouraged the expedition, and the negotiations that followed. Battlefield victory did not remove the difficulties of ruling distant territory or reconcile the expectations of the conquerors with what they found. Plummer connects command, weapons, logistics, and political ambition in a narrative of conquest and disappointment. The account offers readers a view of how a successful expedition could unsettle a regional power while creating new problems for those who had launched it.

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Eric Niderost examines the siege of Osaka through the unresolved rivalry between Tokugawa authority and the Toyotomi household. Formal control of Japan did not eliminate the political importance of a rival family occupying a formidable military position. The article explains how that tension developed into a campaign, introducing the commanders, defenders, and fortifications involved. Attacks on outlying strongpoints prepared the way for operations against the castle itself, while the difficulties of assaulting such defenses shaped the choices of the besiegers. Niderost follows the fighting and negotiations as military pressure and political calculation interacted. The contrast between authority already claimed and authority still requiring enforcement gives the campaign its wider significance. Readers receive a siege narrative that also explores the consolidation of power, showing how the practical problems of reducing a fortress could become inseparable from the question of which ruling house would command the country.

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Steve Wilson examines Gustavus Adolphus’s reputation as an innovator through the organization and coordination of his forces. The article connects Swedish battlefield methods to the problem of making infantry, cavalry, and artillery support one another as conditions changed. Lighter and more mobile guns, arrangements for delivering fire, and the ability to move formations are considered as parts of a common system rather than isolated improvements in equipment. Wilson contrasts this flexibility with opposing methods that made rapid adjustment more difficult. The discussion also links tactical practice to the king’s ability to direct troops and exploit opportunities during an engagement. Modern combined-arms operations provide a point of comparison, helping readers see why these earlier developments remain relevant to the study of command. The account presents the Swedish army’s effectiveness as a product of organization, mobility, and cooperation, showing how innovation depends on putting different capabilities to work together.

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Walt Giersbach examines the violence associated with Willem Kieft’s government by setting it within the trade and political relationships of New Netherland. The colony’s commercial opportunities depended on dealings with Native communities, but competition for resources and unequal access to weapons complicated those relationships. Kieft’s decisions turned existing tensions into a wider conflict, exposing settlers as well as Native families to devastating consequences. The article follows the sequence of provocations and attacks, while explaining how events beyond Manhattan influenced the position of peoples closer to the Dutch settlements. Commerce, tribute, and military pressure were closely connected, making the governor’s actions part of a regional struggle rather than a purely local dispute. Giersbach also considers the contrast between the colony’s favorable reputation and the conduct of its leadership. Readers gain an account of how misjudgment and coercion could damage the relationships on which a colonial enterprise depended.

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Andrew McGregor recounts the raid on Thurso as an episode in the final fortunes of the Irish fighters who had served the Royalist cause in Scotland. The article first explains the military background of the Redshanks and the circumstances that brought a small group of veterans into Caithness. Their attack became a struggle with local inhabitants rather than the easy opportunity its organizers had expected. McGregor follows the fighting through the town and into the defense of a nearby house, where personal associations added to the confusion over motives and responsibility. The careers of the men involved give the encounter significance beyond its modest scale. The account links their violent end to the collapse of a wider military enterprise during the British Civil War. Readers gain a close view of an overlooked clash and of how experienced soldiers could survive major campaigns only to be defeated in an unexpected local confrontation.

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Walt Giersbach traces King Philip’s War from deteriorating relations in New England to a conflict that devastated Native communities and colonial settlements alike. Metacom’s leadership is placed within disputes over land, the independence of Native rulers, and the growing demands of the English colonies. The narrative follows the expansion of hostilities and the attacks through which both sides sought security and survival. Attention to food supplies, vulnerable settlements, and the involvement of civilians shows why the consequences extended well beyond organized fighting forces. Giersbach also examines episodes of destruction that complicate familiar accounts of colonial progress. The article assesses the war’s human costs and the changes it brought to the region’s political balance. Readers are offered a connected explanation of how a fragile peace broke down, and why an event often given limited attention occupies such an important place in the history of early American conflict.

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Walt Giersbach presents Bacon’s Rebellion as a conflict with several overlapping causes, rather than a straightforward uprising against colonial government. Disputes over frontier security combined with economic grievances, resentment of Governor Berkeley, and the competing interests of settlers and Native peoples. Nathaniel Bacon’s armed following became an instrument for challenging authority as well as carrying out attacks. The article follows the struggle toward Jamestown, examining how decisions by the rival leaders escalated the confrontation and widened its consequences. Giersbach gives attention to the varied people drawn into Bacon’s force and to the costs imposed on communities outside it. His account resists reducing the episode to a single heroic or villainous figure. Readers receive a narrative of a colony under strain, where military action, political defiance, and frontier violence reinforced one another and where the participants’ different grievances could produce a temporary alliance without a shared long-term purpose.

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Robert C. Daniels follows the Fox Wars through the struggle over trade, alliances, and political independence in the interior of North America. The article introduces the Mesquakie people and explains how their position and relationships brought them into conflict with French commercial and imperial interests. Campaigns were accompanied by diplomatic pressure, as French leaders sought to isolate their opponents and influence the choices of neighboring communities. Daniels traces the escalation across successive phases of fighting, showing how decisions about access to trade could become instruments of coercion as well as sources of hostility. The experience of the Foxes gives the narrative its human focus, while the involvement of other Native peoples complicates a simple two-sided account. Readers gain an explanation of a prolonged regional conflict in which commerce and military power were closely connected, and in which the struggle to preserve independence carried devastating consequences for the people resisting French demands.

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Vernon Yates examines British victory in the French and Indian War as a process of adapting military activity to the conditions of North America. Forests, waterways, local relationships, and different fighting traditions challenged methods that armies brought from other settings. The article compares French and British responses, giving attention to alliances with Indigenous peoples and the coordination of military resources. Early setbacks exposed the costs of misunderstanding the environment, while changes in leadership and national priorities altered the conduct of the campaign. Yates connects these developments to the choices made at the political level, including the commitment of resources and the relationship between colonial operations and the wider war. His argument emphasizes the interaction between practical adaptation and a coherent strategic purpose. Readers receive an explanation of imperial success that goes beyond relative strength, showing why the ability to change methods and align military effort with policy mattered to the outcome.

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Comer Plummer examines the French defense of Carillon within the wider contest for the waterways linking the rival North American colonies. Montcalm faced a stronger attacking army while also contending with decisions about the distribution of his own limited forces. The article explains the importance of the position, the preparations made by the defenders, and the choices available to the British as they approached it. The sequence of attacks reveals how battlefield conditions and command decisions could outweigh an advantage in numbers. Plummer gives close attention to the soldiers’ experience without losing sight of the campaign’s strategic setting. The French success is considered alongside the vulnerabilities that remained and the later significance of the site. Readers receive an account of a striking defensive victory that connects leadership, fieldworks, and the conduct of an assault to the larger struggle for control of movement and territory in the colonial interior.

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Brick Billing brings James Cook’s surveying work into the story of the British campaign against Quebec. Before the confrontation on the Plains of Abraham, the fleet had to negotiate a river whose shoals, currents, and tides made movement hazardous. Cook’s contribution lay in turning careful observations into knowledge that other sailors could use. The article connects his practical education and maritime experience to his developing skill as a surveyor, including his association with Samuel Holland. It then follows the difficult work of sounding and marking the passage through La Traverse while British boats operated under the threat of French fire. Billing shows how preparation on the water supported the movement of ships, soldiers, and supplies toward the campaign’s objective. The account gives readers a broader understanding of the victory at Quebec by restoring attention to the naval work that helped make the better-known land operations possible.

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Michael F. Dilley follows Robert Rogers beyond the campaigns that first made his Rangers famous. Financial obligations, disputed accounts, and the difficulty of obtaining payment shaped his situation after the French and Indian War. The article explains how those pressures formed the background to his later return to military organization during the American Revolution. Raising another Ranger unit involved questions of loyalty, employment, and the resources needed to make a force useful. Dilley follows the unit’s activities and the events at Mamaroneck, where the arrangement of outposts and the actions of American opponents exposed its vulnerabilities. The account extends the familiar image of Rogers as a successful frontier commander by examining a less secure phase of his career. Readers gain a study of how reputation could create new opportunities without guaranteeing success, and how the practical burdens of administration and command continued after a celebrated military achievement.

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Roger Daene examines Benedict Arnold’s Canadian expedition as a demanding test of leadership during the opening year of the American Revolution. Earlier successes had demonstrated his initiative, but disputes over money and personal loss complicated the circumstances in which he undertook the new mission. The article follows the advance through difficult country, where movement, food, and the condition of the troops became as important as the plans made before departure. It then turns to operations near Quebec and the attempted assault, tracing how battlefield events affected Arnold and the men under his command. The narrative combines the expedition’s military purpose with the experiences of those trying to carry it out. Readers see the gap between an ambitious objective and the resources required to achieve it, while gaining a view of Arnold before his later betrayal overshadowed his contributions and the risks he accepted in the revolutionary cause.

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Steven Christopher Ippolito follows the relationship between George Washington and James Monroe from wartime association into the political and diplomatic disputes of the early United States. Images and memories of the Revolution provide an opening framework, but the article’s main concern is how shared service could lead to different understandings of national policy. Monroe’s dealings with France are placed alongside Washington’s responsibilities as president and the pressures created by relations with Britain. Correspondence, public reactions, and competing judgments of diplomatic conduct reveal the difficulty of reconciling personal confidence with institutional expectations. The narrative extends beyond a single appointment or disagreement to consider the wider consequences of those choices. Readers receive an account of the transition from revolutionary cooperation to governing an independent state, showing how veterans of the same cause could disagree over the best way to defend its interests in a changing international setting.

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Walt Giersbach traces Margaret Cochran Corbin’s life from the hardships of her early years to her service and wounding during the American Revolution. Her action at the gun after her husband was killed provides the central wartime episode, but the article also follows the consequences of permanent disability and the efforts to obtain support for her afterward. Recognition and a military pension form part of a longer story about what happened when a woman’s battlefield contribution challenged conventional expectations. Giersbach considers the later recovery of Corbin’s story, including the organizations and commemorations that helped establish her place in public memory. Questions surrounding her burial and subsequent honors show that remembrance can be complicated even when an individual’s courage is celebrated. Readers receive a biographical account that connects military service to survival after injury and to the changing ways a community chooses to recognize an overlooked participant in its history.

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Gerald J. Krieger traces Benedict Arnold’s passage from celebrated Continental commander to British conspirator through his troubled tenure as military governor of Philadelphia. Recovering from his Saratoga wound, Arnold entered a city divided by wartime loyalties, commercial disputes, and hostility toward military authority. His protection of former Loyalists, courtship of Peggy Shippen, and efforts to restore his finances brought him into conflict with Joseph Reed and Pennsylvania’s government. Krieger follows the accusations against Arnold, repeated delays to his court-martial, and appeals to George Washington that failed to relieve his growing sense of grievance. He places Arnold’s secret dealings with the British alongside these disputes, challenging the view that the general defected primarily because he considered American defeat inevitable. The article closes by examining the mismatch between battlefield talent and political responsibility, and what Arnold’s failure suggests about leaders’ obligations to understand their subordinates, manage civilian relationships, and recognize the destructive force of wounded pride.

More about Sibi Totique (for himself and for all): The Birth of Benedict Arnold's Treason: A Study in Leadership

Vernon E. Yates and Robert Shawlinski assess Camden as a British battlefield success that encouraged misleading expectations about the war in the South. The article begins with the decision to shift attention away from the northern colonies and explains the strategic advantages British leaders hoped to obtain. It then compares the opposing forces and follows the deployment and breakdown of the American army. Horatio Gates’s choices about positioning, troop reliability, and command receive particular attention, alongside the resistance offered by the Continentals. The analysis connects what happened during the fighting to the conclusions British leaders drew afterward. Defeating an army did not necessarily secure control of a region or end the conditions sustaining resistance. Readers receive both a reconstruction of the engagement and an examination of its political meaning, showing how an apparent confirmation of strategy can conceal weaknesses that become clearer as a campaign continues.

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Mark R. Froom interprets the siege of Yorktown through the problem of making a multinational coalition operate effectively. American and French forces shared an objective, but cooperation required arrangements for command, communication, planning, and the use of different military capabilities. The article connects these practical relationships to principles described in modern multinational operations doctrine. Decisions about where to concentrate effort and how to coordinate land and naval forces become central to the explanation of success. Froom also follows the change from earlier plans toward the campaign in Virginia, showing how the partners responded to new information and opportunities. The siege is therefore examined as a product of collective action rather than simply a series of tactical events around British defenses. Readers gain a historical example of how trust, a common purpose, and workable coordination can allow forces with separate national responsibilities to achieve a result that none could produce alone.

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John Pezzola examines the Battle of Hobkirk’s Hill, fought on April 25, 1781, a mile and a half north of the British post at Camden, South Carolina. With Cornwallis gone to Wilmington, Major General Nathanael Greene carried the war back into South Carolina, sending Lee and Marion against British communications while his army moved on Camden. Pezzola explains how the flintlock musket, the bayonet, field artillery, and Colonel William Washington’s dragoons shaped the fighting, then follows the engagement itself: Lord Rawdon’s attack on Greene’s camp, the American guns that briefly drove the British back, and the collapse of the First Maryland after Captain William Beaty fell, a withdrawal Greene later judged unnecessary. He also weighs criticism of Washington’s wide circuit, which left his dragoons guarding prisoners. Rawdon held the hill, but his losses could not be replaced, and within weeks he abandoned Camden. Greene lost the battle, Pezzola concludes, yet won the campaign, as the British outposts in the South Carolina interior soon ceased to function.

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Isaac Mounce places Blue Licks within the western fighting that continued beyond the best-known campaigns of the American Revolution. Settlement in Kentucky brought repeated conflict with Native peoples supported by British interests, making local security and control of land central to the war’s meaning in the region. The article follows the events leading to the battle and the decisions made by the pursuing militia. Terrain, judgment, and the pressure to act quickly shaped an encounter whose consequences were severe for the Kentucky force. Mounce traces the collapse and retreat, then considers the loss in relation to the wider contest over settlement and resistance. Victory on the field did not provide a lasting answer to the political and territorial pressures facing the Native participants. The account introduces readers to an often overlooked theater and shows why the end of a major campaign elsewhere did not mean that communities on the frontier had found peace.

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Timothy Neeno explains why the Caribbean became an important theater of the American Revolutionary War. Island possessions, maritime commerce, and access to military supplies drew Britain, France, and other powers into operations whose effects reached well beyond the region. The article follows naval movements, attacks on colonial holdings, and the struggle over trading centers that supported the American rebels. The capture of shipping and goods could serve strategic aims while also creating powerful incentives for individual commanders. Neeno connects these activities to the confrontation at the Saintes, where fleets seeking an advantage finally met in a major engagement. The broader account shows how the war’s participants pursued several interests at once, including the defense of empire and the protection of valuable commercial networks. Readers gain a perspective on the Revolution as an international maritime conflict, in which events far from the mainland influenced the resources and choices available to the powers fighting there.

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Alexander Zakrzewski recounts one of the most spectacular cavalry charges of the Napoleonic Wars. On the foggy morning of November 30, 1808, Napoleon’s Grande Armée stalled before the pass of Somosierra in Spain’s Sierra de Guadarrama, the last obstacle on the road to Madrid, where a small but determined Spanish force held fortified positions covered by cannon and musket fire. Impatient, Napoleon ordered the 3rd Squadron of the Chevau-Légers Polonais of the Imperial Guard, commanded by Jan Kozietulski, to charge straight up the defile. Zakrzewski explains how the French had used war with Portugal as a pretext to send troops into Spain, describes the Spanish defenses, and follows the Polish horsemen as they cleared the pass in about seven minutes and captured its guns and standards. He then traces the regiment’s later history: rearmed as lancers, feared in Spain as “the devil’s lancers,” imitated by other cavalry in Russia, accompanying Napoleon into exile on Elba, and serving him a final time at Waterloo.

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A biography of Yoshida Shōin, the radical teacher and imperial loyalist whose ideas and students helped drive the Meiji Restoration in Japan.

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An assessment of the leadership, training, discipline, and battlefield performance of Native, militia, and regular forces in the 1832 Black Hawk War.

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Robert F. Williams examines British strategy in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838–1842, a campaign shaped by the nineteenth-century “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia. Anxious to shield India, the “crown jewel” of the Empire, British leaders acted on faulty assumptions about the Russian threat and about their ability to pacify a politically fractured country. They chose to replace Dost Mohammed with the unpopular Shah Shuja and tried to build a strong central government where power had traditionally been local. Williams argues that Britain had the means to invade but failed to match its military strength to realistic political ends, a mismatch that led to the destruction of the Kabul garrison under Major General William Elphinstone. Yet Britain later achieved a broader goal: a friendly Afghanistan serving as a buffer against Russian and Persian influence. The article closes by tracing the war’s legacy, from the Durand Line to the Soviet and American interventions that repeated the same misjudgments.

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Robert Shawlinski argues that General Winfield Scott’s Mexico City Campaign of 1847 ranks among the most operationally sophisticated undertakings in American military history. Sent by President James K. Polk with an expeditionary force of about 10,000 troops, Scott landed at Veracruz in March 1847 and fought his way inland to capture the Mexican capital on September 14. The article examines the campaign through four lenses drawn from current U.S. Army doctrine: mission command and commander’s intent, combined arms and unified action, offensive operations and tempo, and consolidating gains. Battles from Cerro Gordo to Chapultepec illustrate both Scott’s skill and the friction created by uncoordinated subordinates. Shawlinski shows how clear intent, disciplined initiative, synchronized combined arms, relentless tempo, and deliberate consolidation produced a decisive result in a war that reshaped North America. Modern doctrine, he concludes, inherited these principles rather than inventing them.

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Dave McCormick recovers a little-known episode in which Kentuckians tried to change the future of Cuba. In 1850, General Narciso López organized an expedition to overthrow Spanish colonial rule, and its vanguard was the Kentucky Regiment under Colonel Theodore O’Hara. These “Kentucky Filibusters” came from every walk of life, including laborers, tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and physicians. They were the first to land, led the attack on Cárdenas, and suffered about a third of the expedition’s casualties. As they entered Quintayros Plaza, a Spanish sentinel’s shot alerted the jail’s defenders, whose volley wounded several men, including O’Hara. McCormick follows the capture of the town, the collapse of the venture, and its legal aftermath in the United States, where the leaders were indicted for violating the Neutrality Act. Three trials in New Orleans ended in hung juries before the government dropped the charges. The article also weighs differing accounts of the rewards promised to the volunteers and the Louisville monuments that have honored them.

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A biography of Katsu Kaishū, founder of Japan's modern navy and Tokugawa statesman whose diplomacy helped spare Edo during the Meiji Restoration.

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A biography of Sakamoto Ryōma, the low-ranking samurai whose naval vision and political alliances helped bring down the Tokugawa shogunate.

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James Bowden challenges the enduring popularity of the Zouaves, the colorfully uniformed regiments that served on both sides of the Civil War. Examining regimental histories, battle accounts, and the French North African units that inspired them, he argues that American Zouaves were rarely effective except in limited roles. In most cases they suffered fewer combat casualties than the regiments on their flanks, which he reads as a reluctance to engage the enemy as directly as their peers. Bowden traces this to the units’ composition, their failure to use small-unit tactics, and their performance when measured against comparable non-Zouave units in company-level actions. He narrows his study to four representative regiments, two Union and two Confederate, including Collis’ Zouaves of the 114th Pennsylvania and Hawkins’ Zouaves of the 9th New York. His conclusion is that the Zouaves were more a phenomenon of popular image than of battlefield achievement, and he suggests further research on a wider range of units, North and South.

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An analysis of how Confederate railroads moved troops and supplies along interior lines, sustaining Southern armies while structural weaknesses hastened defeat.

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Richard D. Pitts follows the Ringgold Cavalry Company through its first months of Civil War service in the Alleghenies, from June to November 1861. When the war began, the regular army’s handful of cavalry, dragoon, and mounted rifle regiments was scattered across the country, but one independent company was already prepared. Formed in 1847 by residents of Beallsville and Washington County, Pennsylvania, and named for Major Samuel Ringgold, who was mortally wounded at Palo Alto, the company had continued to drill as a militia unit, providing its own horses, equipment, and weapons. Pitts traces how Colonel, later General, Benjamin Franklin Kelley put these experienced horsemen to work in western Virginia, scouting and fighting along steep ridges, narrow valleys, and farm trails, culminating in operations against Romney. These months, he argues, made the Ringgold as proficient as its Confederate opponents and kept it on the front line, preparing it for years of service against partisan rangers and cavalry leaders such as John Imboden and John McCausland.

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Walter Giersbach tells the story of Timothy Webster, the first Union spy hanged by the Confederacy. Born in England in 1822, Webster grew up in New Jersey, became a New York City policeman, and met Allan Pinkerton while on duty at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1853. He later joined Pinkerton’s detective agency, and when war came he was one of its most valuable operatives. Working with a female agent, Hattie Lewis, who posed as his wife, Webster established himself in Maryland and then in Richmond, where his apparent loyalty to the South won the trust of Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin. Recruited as a courier on the Confederacy’s secret line between Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, he became a double agent, carrying Confederate messages while reporting to Pinkerton. Giersbach follows his eventual exposure, trial, and grim execution in Richmond, when the rope slipped and he had to be hanged a second time. Pinkerton later declared that no braver or truer man died during the war.

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Michael Collie questions a long-standing theme in Civil War historiography: that the conflict was the first modern, or total, war. Since the Second World War, many historians have pointed to breech-loading weapons, primitive machine guns, ironclads, balloons, trench warfare, railroads, the telegraph, mass volunteer armies, industrial capacity, and the targeting of civilians as evidence that the Civil War opened a new era. Collie argues that “modern war” is an imprecise idea, since every war is modern in its own time, and that “total war” is properly a twentieth-century concept. Examining tactics, weapons, logistics, economics, and the treatment of civilians, he shows that many supposedly new features had clear precedents in European warfare from the sixteenth century through the Napoleonic Wars, while others were only partly developed in 1861–1865. Drawing on scholars who see the war as essentially old-fashioned, he asks at what point truly modern industrial war was achieved, and suggests that the Civil War was in many ways an old-fashioned war.

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Richard Tilley argues that the most significant innovation of the Civil War was neither the railroad nor the rifled musket, but Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph. The telegraph introduced electronic command and control and permanently changed the relationship between the commander-in-chief and his generals. Tilley traces how Lincoln, after early setbacks at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, moved the army’s communications center to the War Department beside the White House and secured legislation giving the army control of the nation’s telegraph lines. From there he could follow and influence operations as no head of state had before. The telegraph had limits, as the Shenandoah Valley Campaign showed when Lincoln tried to direct distant forces against Stonewall Jackson, but he overcame them by finding Ulysses S. Grant and letting him manage the war in both theaters. Today’s leaders who watch operations from the White House Situation Room, Tilley concludes, owe their command system to Lincoln’s adaptation.

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Jim Stempel challenges the long-held view that the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. He turns instead to January 9 of that year, when South Carolina troops, acting on their governor’s orders a month before the Confederacy was formed, fired on the Star of the West , a chartered side-wheel steamer carrying provisions and some 200 soldiers to Major Robert Anderson’s garrison. Drawing on the recollections of cadets Robert Sams and Irvine Walker, Sergeant S. E. Welch, Lieutenant Charles R. Woods, and the ship’s captain, he reconstructs how a battery of four siege guns manned by Citadel cadets on Morris Island fired a warning shot across her bow and then struck the vessel, forcing her back to sea while Fort Sumter’s guns stayed silent. Setting the episode amid the secession fever of Charleston, Stempel argues that those shots were an act of war, recognized as such by many at the time, and that the April attack on Sumter exceeded them only in scale. An epilogue follows the later lives of the cadets, the ship, and the battle flag that flew over their battery.

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A history of the 1862 Battle of Picacho Pass and California Column, including Arizona's Confederate occupation, desert logistics, weapons, and Apache conflict.

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Michael Collie investigates who conceived the bold flank march around John Pope’s Army of Virginia in August 1862, the maneuver that led to the Confederate victory at Second Manassas. His starting point is an entry in the wartime journal of Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson’s topographical engineer. In March 1863, during a visit to J.E.B. Stuart’s headquarters, Hotchkiss recorded Stuart’s remark that Jackson deserved all the credit for the movement around the enemy and that Lee had only very reluctantly consented to it. Collie weighs this evidence against Douglas Southall Freeman’s interpretation, which credited the plan to Lee and dismissed recollections of councils between the two generals as confused memories. Examining the accounts of Hotchkiss, Hunter McGuire, Henry Kyd Douglas, and others, as well as the meaning of Lee’s “consent,” he argues that Freeman’s reasoning is convoluted. Collie concludes that the more likely explanation is that Jackson proposed the movement and Lee agreed to it, although detailed planning and swift execution were essential to its success.

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Walt Giersbach tells the remarkable story of Robert Smalls, an enslaved South Carolinian who stole a Confederate vessel, carried his family to freedom, and within a decade won election to Congress. Born in Beaufort in 1839, Smalls was hired out in Charleston as a longshoreman, rigger, sailmaker, and finally wheelman aboard the cotton steamer Planter , becoming its pilot in all but name. His intimate knowledge of Charleston harbor made his escape possible. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, with the white officers ashore, Smalls and an enslaved crew took the Planter past the harbor defenses to the Union blockading fleet. Giersbach follows his later life as a newspaper publisher, state legislator, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as his bitter experience of watching South Carolina’s 1895 constitution strip Black citizens of the vote. Smalls died in 1915 in the Beaufort house where he had been born enslaved, insisting that his people needed only “an equal chance in the battle of life.”

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An operational analysis of Stonewall Jackson's 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign as a classic example of tempo, surprise, interior lines, and maneuver warfare.

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Joseph Ryan reopens one of the most famous episodes of the Civil War: the discovery by Union soldiers of Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191 during the Maryland Campaign of September 1862. After crossing the Potomac, Lee needed to bring his worn-out army into the Shenandoah Valley, and the lost order, wrapped around cigars, revealed his plan to divide his forces. Traditional accounts treat its loss as a near-catastrophic accident that allowed George McClellan to attack at South Mountain and Antietam. Ryan weighs the evidence like a trial lawyer, examining Lee’s staff procedures, the testimony of participants, and the movements of both armies. He concludes that, taken as a whole, the evidence makes it more probable that Lee lost the order intentionally, as a ruse to draw McClellan’s weight against Turner’s Gap rather than Crampton’s Gap. Comparing Lee’s calculated risk with Eisenhower’s gamble before the Battle of the Bulge, Ryan argues that the ruse bought the Confederacy time and two more years of existence in the East.

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Walter Giersbach follows the improbable Civil War career of Henry Morton Stanley, later famous as the explorer who greeted David Livingstone in Africa. Born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, in 1840, Stanley endured a childhood that included years in a workhouse before making his way to America and settling in Arkansas, where he joined the Dixie Greys of the 6th Arkansas Regiment more for adventure than for patriotism. Giersbach recounts his experience at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, where on the second day he found himself almost alone facing a line of Union soldiers and was taken prisoner. Sent to Camp Douglas outside Chicago, Stanley gained his release by enlisting in the Union artillery, only to be struck down by dysentery. He later served in the Union Navy and observed the attacks on Fort Fisher, writing vivid accounts that newspapers welcomed. By the war’s end, Giersbach shows, Stanley had discovered his two lifelong professions, newspaper correspondent and adventurer, that would eventually take him deep into Africa.

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An account of the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, where Samuel Curtis defeated Earl Van Dorn's Confederate army and secured Union control of Missouri and northern Arkansas.

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Patrick Smith offers a provocative reassessment of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign and the competing theories of victory held by Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan. As General-in-Chief, McClellan proposed a national strategy of joint, coordinated operations, built on a thorough understanding of both armies and the theater. Smith argues that this plan could have produced the war’s decisive campaign, but that Lincoln’s interference at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels disrupted its execution. Driven by a limited grasp of military operations, impatience to end the war quickly, and pressure from Radical Republican backers, Lincoln dissolved McClellan’s broader command and shifted priorities, leaving Union forces in Virginia isolated as the campaign stalled on the James River. Smith contends that the war in the East became a dismal record of defeats until Grant, after costly battles such as Cold Harbor, combined multiple armies, naval support, siege operations, and unity of command, the approach McClellan had advocated from the start.

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Roger Craig and Michael Artis examine the Battle of Chickamauga, fought along Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia in September 1863 for control of the region around Chattanooga, with its fertile land and vital rail connections. Having lost the Tullahoma Campaign to Major General William Rosecrans, General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate army gathered reinforcements and a numerical advantage, while the Union army brought momentum and higher morale. The authors follow the costly fighting that became a battle of attrition, the roles of commanders such as George H. Thomas, Joe Wheeler, and Joe Hooker, and the mistakes, indecision, and luck that shaped the outcome on both sides. Although the Confederates won the battle, Bragg failed to exploit his victory, allowing the Union army to recover its strength around Chattanooga and inflict heavy losses on his forces. The authors argue that Chickamauga was therefore the Confederate victory that led to Confederate defeat, opening the way for the Union advance to Atlanta and the Atlantic coast.

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Roger Daene recovers the story of Colonel Patrick O’Rorke and the 140th New York, whose role in the defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg is often overshadowed by Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. History, he observes, is often written by those who survive the battle, and O’Rorke did not. Daene traces O’Rorke’s path to command, including his education at West Point, and explains how the armies converged on the crossroads town of Gettysburg in late June 1863. On July 2, as General Gouverneur K. Warren recognized the danger to the undefended hill, O’Rorke led his regiment up Little Round Top at the critical moment, arriving as the right flank of Colonel Strong Vincent’s brigade began to give way. O’Rorke was mortally wounded leading the charge that stabilized the line. Daene argues that the failure to take the Round Tops helped lead to Pickett’s disastrous assault the next day, and that O’Rorke deserves recognition on a par with Chamberlain and Vincent.

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Bryan J. Dickerson examines the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, a day usually remembered only for Pickett’s Charge. Placing the battle alongside the fall of Vicksburg as a decisive turning point, he reviews how the first two days of fighting left the attacking and defending armies essentially stalemated, despite Confederate successes in the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard. Dickerson then analyzes four separate attacks made on July 3. Robert E. Lee launched three: renewed morning assaults on Culp’s Hill, the great infantry charge against the Union center, and J.E.B. Stuart’s wide cavalry sweep toward the Union rear. Late in the day, a Union cavalry attack ordered against the Confederate right under Elon Farnsworth also failed. Dickerson shows how defensible terrain and interior lines gave the Union army decisive advantages, while the Army of Northern Virginia lost more than 8,500 men that day. His conclusion is that July 3 was a day on which the defense decisively prevailed, a pattern that extended well beyond Pickett’s famous charge.

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SGM Paola M. Delarosa-Lloret looks beyond the generals who dominate Civil War history to the enlisted leaders who held regiments together in combat. Her case study is the assault of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, an attack remembered for the death of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the heroism of Sergeant William H. Carney. The regiment advanced along a narrow approach against earthworks and interlocking fields of fire that inflicted severe officer casualties within minutes. With its commissioned leadership decimated, continuity depended on the sergeants and corporals embedded in the ranks. Drawing on the regimental history and institutional records, the author shows how these noncommissioned officers steadied their men, contested the parapet under intense fire, and brought the regiment back in organized formation. Carney’s preservation of the colors, she argues, symbolizes a broader reality: in volunteer armies with uneven officer experience, NCOs were the backbone that translated intent into action, even in tactical defeat.

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MSG Robert D. Wall Jr. reviews the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, and defends one of the most criticized decisions of the war. More than 165,000 soldiers of George Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia converged on the Pennsylvania crossroads town during Lee’s second invasion of the North, and the three days of fighting produced an estimated 51,000 casualties, making Gettysburg the bloodiest battle of the conflict. Wall outlines the condition of both armies before the battle and the course of the fighting that turned the war against the Confederacy. He then examines why Meade did not pursue Lee across the Potomac, a failure that drew sharp criticism from President Lincoln. Meade’s officers opposed an aggressive pursuit, his troops were exhausted and short of supplies and ammunition, many men lacked shoes after weeks of marching, and heavy rains made Confederate movements impossible to track. Given these handicaps and Lee’s fortified position, Wall concludes that Meade was right not to pursue.

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An account of the 1863 Bear River Massacre, where U.S. volunteers under Patrick Connor attacked a Northwestern Shoshone village in present-day Idaho.

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An analysis of Robert E. Lee's decision to order Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg and why the frontal assault became the Confederacy's defining military mistake.

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MSG Garrett D. Roberson Jr. argues that the Union victory at Vicksburg in July 1863 mattered even more to the outcome of the war than the better-known triumph at Gettysburg. By October 1862 the Union controlled the Mississippi River from its source down to Vicksburg and from the Gulf of Mexico up to Port Hudson, leaving Vicksburg as the Confederacy’s vital link between its eastern and western states. Roberson explains why both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis regarded the city as essential and follows Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to take it, culminating in a siege that forced the surrender of some 29,000 Confederate soldiers along with their weapons and equipment. Its fall gave the Union the entire Mississippi, cut the South’s supply lines, and split the Confederacy in two. Roberson contends that Vicksburg broke the South’s fighting spirit and marked the beginning of the end for the Confederate cause. If Gettysburg was the nail in the Confederacy’s coffin, he concludes, Vicksburg was the lid.

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Larry Parker tells the remarkable story of an ironclad that served under six flags without ever firing a shot as a Confederate warship. Built in France and patterned on the French battleship Gloire , she carried a 300-pounder Armstrong gun, two 70-pounders, and a ram, and looked formidable on paper. In reality she was poorly constructed, leaked badly, drew too much water, and wallowed dangerously in heavy seas. Parker follows her through the diplomatic maneuvering that saw her French builder sell her to Denmark, her acquisition by the Confederacy as the CSS Stonewall , and her sale in Havana after the war ended. Passing to the United States and then to Japan, she became the Kotetsu and played a prominent role in the Boshin War, helping end the 268-year rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Renamed Azuma , she later took part in suppressing the Saga and Satsuma rebellions before being scrapped in 1908, a ship that had helped set Japan on its path to empire.

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Walter Giersbach recounts the Confederate plot to set Manhattan ablaze on November 25, 1864. Eight men calling themselves the Confederate Army of Manhattan checked into hotels across the city, each carrying bottles of the incendiary “Greek fire” and responsible for burning four buildings. Within minutes fires broke out at the St. James Hotel, Barnum’s Museum, and many other buildings, but the blazes were contained. Giersbach explains that the scheme had begun as something larger: Confederate agents operating from Canada had planned to strike as Lincoln’s re-election approached, seizing federal buildings, arming sympathizers, and sparking a Copperhead uprising in New York. When that plan fell through, only the arson attack went forward. All but one of the conspirators made it home; Robert Cobb Kennedy was arrested near Detroit, tried in New York, and hanged at Fort Lafayette in March 1865. Giersbach concludes that even the larger plot was unlikely to succeed and that the fires were an odd sideshow in the war’s final year.

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A campaign history of Sherman's advance from Dalton toward Atlanta in May–June 1864 and Joseph Johnston's defensive maneuvers with the Army of Tennessee.

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Michael Irvin defends William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea against the charge that it was a criminal act. Atlanta, the industrial and railroad hub known as the Gate City of the South, fell in September 1864 after months of fighting, giving Lincoln a crucial boost toward re-election. In November, approximately 60,000 Union soldiers left the city for the Atlantic coast, determined to destroy Georgia’s ability and will to support the Confederacy. Irvin explains how Sherman won the approval of a cautious Lincoln and Grant, then follows the march across Georgia to Savannah, where General Hardee chose to evacuate his army into South Carolina rather than lose it. Sherman presented the city to Lincoln as a Christmas gift, complete with heavy guns, ammunition, and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. Irvin acknowledges that Sherman’s men did things that would be unacceptable today and took more than they needed, but he argues that they committed no war crimes and, for an army moving through hostile territory, treated civilians remarkably well.

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An account of Hood's 1864 Tennessee Campaign and the Battle of Franklin, where repeated Confederate assaults devastated the Army of Tennessee.

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An account of Custer's March 2, 1865 victory at Waynesboro, which destroyed Jubal Early's last organized Confederate force in the Shenandoah Valley.

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Timothy Neeno examines France’s attempt to build an empire in Mexico while the United States was paralyzed by civil war. Beginning in 1862, Napoleon III sought to rule Mexico through a puppet emperor, the Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Neeno first explains how three centuries of Spanish rule and decades of upheaval after independence left Mexico divided, with the army, wealthy landowners, and the Catholic Church, which controlled nearly half the taxable land, competing for power. He then follows the French intervention, from the defeat at Puebla commemorated as Cinco de Mayo through Marshal François Achille Bazaine’s campaigns to secure the country and the persistence of Benito Juárez’s republican forces, who refused to surrender. In the end Maximilian’s empire collapsed, its final act played out on the Hill of the Bells outside Querétaro. Some 300,000 Mexicans died in the struggle, Neeno concludes, but Mexico emerged with renewed national pride, firm republican institutions, and the freedom to shape its own future.

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Walt Giersbach examines the Fenian Raids, an audacious plan by Irish-American veterans of the Civil War to seize British North America and hold Canada hostage until Britain freed Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, whose followers were known as Fenians, claimed perhaps 125,000 members in the United States and Canada, and thousands of former Union and Confederate soldiers joined its ranks. Giersbach traces the movement’s leadership quarrels and its plans for a multi-pronged invasion. He follows John O’Neill and his men across the Niagara frontier to the Battle of Ridgeway, and the June 1866 attack in which Brigadier Samuel P. Spear led some 2,000 veterans across the border from St. Albans, Vermont. Throughout, he highlights the political calculations of President Andrew Johnson, who sought reparations from Britain for aiding the Confederacy and may have tolerated the Fenians as a lever before enforcing the neutrality laws. In a later interview, Johnson reportedly told O’Neill that he had given the Fenians five full days before stopping them.

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Robert Shawlinski and Vernon Yates compare the French and Prussian approaches to strategy in the Franco-Prussian War. For centuries, they argue, European wars had been fought with strategy as an afterthought, until Prussia began to treat strategy as both a science and an art. Under Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, whose power overshadowed even the Prussian monarch, Prussia pursued two clear goals: uniting all Germans under one flag and eliminating the threat France posed on its western frontier. France, led by Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, still relied on élan , the aggressive spirit that had served its armies in earlier wars, rather than on systematic planning. The authors trace how Prussian preparation and coordination overwhelmed the French in the field, culminating in the fall of Sedan, where Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner. Bismarck then dictated a peace that cost France Alsace-Lorraine and five billion francs. The war, they conclude, created the German Empire and showed the price France paid for neglecting strategic planning.

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SGM Lusiani, Mr. Shawlinski, and Mr. Yates tell the story of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, a violent clash rooted in competing ideas about who owned a vital resource. For generations, the Hispanic communities of the El Paso valley had treated the salt deposits, or salinas , near the Guadalupe Mountains as common property, traveling long distances to gather “white gold” essential to daily life and trade. In the 1870s Anglo-American entrepreneurs sought to claim the salt beds as private property and charge for access. When politician and speculator Charles Howard laid claim to the salt lakes and the activist Louis Cardis was murdered, the unrest escalated into an uprising and the siege of San Elizario, where the Texas Rangers ultimately surrendered their arms. The authors trace the lasting consequences: the county seat moved to El Paso, Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry were stationed at a re-established Fort Bliss, and the railroad bypassed San Elizario, accelerating the marginalization of the region’s Tejano community.

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Dr. Andrew McGregor examines the campaign of Romolo Gessi Pasha, an Italian soldier of fortune who served Charles “Chinese” Gordon in the Sudan, as an early case study in counterinsurgency. In Bahr al-Ghazal, Gessi faced Arab traders and slavers led by Sulayman Bey Zubayr, a force larger than his own, equipped with similar weapons, experienced in both irregular and conventional warfare, entrenched in fortified positions, at home in the terrain, and backed by influential parts of Sudanese society. McGregor follows Gessi from his early service as an interpreter in the Crimean War through a hard-fought campaign that broke the slavers’ power. He then assesses why the campaign attracted little attention in European military academies, leaving lessons to be relearned by Belgian forces in the Congo and later by French theorists such as Roger Trinquier and David Galula. Gessi’s military success proved incomplete, McGregor concludes, because broken promises to his Arab allies fed the discontent that soon erupted in the Mahdist rebellion.

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John Pezzola recounts the destruction of Colonel William Hicks Pasha’s Egyptian army at Shaykan, near El Obeid in Kordofan, from November 3 to 5, 1883. Since 1881 the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, had been building an army in Kordofan and Darfur, and an earlier Egyptian force of 4,000 men sent to arrest him had been ambushed and its weapons captured. Hicks, a former British Army officer, led roughly 9,000 infantry away from the Nile in pursuit, through country where temperatures reached 125 degrees, water ran short, intelligence proved unreliable, and morale steadily declined. In the wooded ground at Shaykan the Mahdists overwhelmed the expedition. Only about 500 Egyptian soldiers escaped to Khartoum, every officer was killed, and the journalists Edmund O’Donovan and Frank Vizetelly died with the column. Pezzola weighs the differing accounts of how Hicks himself fell and shows how the victory brought the Mahdi new followers, delegations from across the Islamic world, and control of most of Sudan, setting the course of the conflict until Omdurman in 1898.

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Larry Parker examines the career of Alfred Thayer Mahan and his influence on American naval power. At the end of the Civil War the U.S. Navy mustered some 700 ships and 5,000 guns, yet within five years more than ninety percent of the fleet had been sold, scrapped, or laid up, experienced officers and sailors had left the service, and even the fast steam warship USS Wampanoag was discarded to save money on coal. As the frontier closed and the United States began to look outward, Mahan, invited to lecture at the newly established Naval War College, developed the ideas published in 1890 as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History . Parker shows how Mahan connected sea power with national power and prosperity and helped rejuvenate the Navy as the twentieth century began. He closes with a warning for the present: the United States risks repeating the mistakes of 1807, 1865, and 1945 by neglecting its navy, and it needs a modern Mahan to make the case for sea power.

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Bob Seals traces the long history behind the crossed arrows worn by U.S. Army Special Forces. When Special Forces became a basic branch of the Army in April 1987, its new insignia revived a symbol first worn by the U.S. Indian Scouts in 1890, at the close of the American frontier. Seals tells the little-known story of First Lieutenant Edward L. Casey of the 22nd Infantry, the visionary officer who championed the Scouts, and his tragic death. He follows the arrows through their wear by the Scouts, their adoption by the First Special Service Force, the American-Canadian commando unit of the Second World War, and the repeated, unsuccessful attempts by Special Forces soldiers to win approval to wear them again in the decades that followed. Seals describes how this persistent advocacy finally succeeded in 1987, and how Special Forces warrant officers, who had worn the general warrant officer insignia, adopted the arrows in 2004. The story, he suggests, shows how deeply soldiers value the heritage that insignia convey.

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Dr. Andrew McGregor reveals the uncomfortable story behind France’s 1894 occupation of Timbuktu, the conquest that helped launch the career of Joseph Joffre. Far from a triumph of French policy, the occupation was a deliberate act of insubordination by colonial officers, for France did not want the city. Lieutenant-Colonel Etienne Bonnier devised the plan to seize Timbuktu in defiance of official orders, and Major Joffre, leading a column along the Niger River, became his willing accomplice. McGregor contrasts the dry, economical official report Joffre later published as My March to Timbuctoo with the insubordination, atrocities, and war for its own sake that lay behind it. He follows Joffre from Timbuktu to command of all French armies in 1914, his celebrated victory at the Marne, the costly failures that led to his removal from operational command in December 1916, and his elevation to Marshal of France. In later life, Joffre conceded that Bonnier was the true conqueror of Timbuktu, adding, “as for me, I guarded it.”

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Beginning in 1898, a secret society in northern China known as the I‑ho ch’uan, the “Boxers,” turned from frustration with the Qing dynasty to violent opposition to foreigners and Chinese Christians, eventually winning support from the Empress Dowager Cixi. When the movement reached Peking in 1900, the United States, Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan deployed forces as the Eight-Nation Alliance. Mark R. Froom measures their cooperation against the principles of Joint Publication 3-16, Multinational Operations , weighing national interests, command relationships, trust, and interoperability. The councils of senior naval commanders met regularly and functioned much like a modern coordination center, while coordination among the land forces was confined largely to critical moments, such as a meeting of commanders before the assault on Tientsin. Froom closes by proposing further study of each nation’s joint operations before such concepts entered doctrine.

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John Pezzola describes the Battle of the Atbara, fought on April 8, 1898, at the confluence of the Nile and Atbara Rivers during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan. Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s army confronted the Mahdist forces of Mahmoud Ahmad and Osman Digna, entrenched behind a thorn zeriba. The attack began at 06:20 when, after a brief artillery bombardment, the British Brigade under Lieutenant General Sir William Gatacre and two brigades of Major General Archibald Hunter’s Egyptian Division advanced on the camp. The attackers were soon inside, often fighting hand-to-hand. Osman Digna escaped south with a few thousand warriors, while Mahmoud was captured by loyal Sudanese troops. More than 2,000 Mahdist dead were found inside the zeriba, and many prisoners were later enlisted in Kitchener’s Sudanese battalions. Pezzola details the cost to the attackers and explains how the victory opened the way for Kitchener’s advance on Khartoum and the final defeat of the Khalifa.

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An examination of imperial wars of expansion and how industrial-era firearms, machine guns, artillery, and logistics transformed colonial conquest.

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Larry Parker brings the 1898 Omdurman campaign to life through a series of dated, eyewitness-style entries written from inside Kitchener’s army. Thirteen years after Gordon’s death at Khartoum, the Anglo-Egyptian force has advanced more than 1,000 miles from Cairo, building a 400-mile railroad across the Nubian desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed and hauling gunboats and supply vessels through the Nile cataracts to sustain 25,000 men. The narrative follows the great Mahdist assault against the army’s defenses, Kitchener’s premature advance on Omdurman, and the second charge that fell on General Hector Macdonald’s Sudanese brigade, which held its ground with disciplined fire and the support of the gunboats. Parker also recounts the charge of the 21st Lancers, in which 400 horsemen, Winston Churchill among them, crashed into some 2,000 warriors concealed in a wadi. He closes by reflecting on how Churchill survived Omdurman, the Boer War, and the trenches of the First World War to lead Britain in 1940.

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Michael Headley asks why many Americans traveled thousands of miles to fight in the Boer War of 1899–1902, even though their government chose to remain neutral. He shows that they served on both sides and for very different reasons. Some, such as John Blake and many Irish-Americans, joined the Boers out of hatred for British imperialism. Adventurous, liberty-minded volunteers like John Hassell and the American Scouts saw the Boer republics’ struggle as an echo of America’s own fight for independence. Others, like the Detroit-born engineer George Labram, were drawn in by business interests in South Africa and helped the British defend Kimberley. Humanitarian outrage over British conduct moved some Americans, while others, including Major Frederick Russell Burnham, served the British Crown. Headley sets these stories against official American policy, which favored good relations with Britain and economic opportunity, and concludes that the passions of individual citizens made it extremely difficult for the United States to remain detached from European wars.

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An analysis of the British command, reconnaissance, terrain, and tactical failures that produced defeat at Spion Kop during the Second Boer War.

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Edward J. Langer asks whether the U.S. Navy possessed a battlecruiser after all, despite never officially completing one. The battlecruiser was meant to be the ship that could do everything: scout, defeat cruisers and destroyers, protect shipping lanes, and join the battle line against enemy capital ships. Britain and Germany built them, while the U.S. Navy debated the idea for years. Langer traces that debate from the 1903 Summer Conference at the Naval War College, through the lessons of the Battle of Tsushima and the rise of the all-big-gun battleship, to the American battlecruisers that were begun but never finished, with several under construction converted into the aircraft carriers USS Lexington and USS Saratoga . He then examines two later classes of large cruisers that came close to filling the battlecruiser’s roles: the Alaska class and the Des Moines class. Langer weighs their design, armament, and service, and reflects on the battlecruiser’s mixed record, from its success at the Falkland Islands to its weakness in the battle line.

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Occasionally one comes across references to the 1919 Transcontinental Convoy that traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. The significance of this and surrounding events is glossed over and treated as a minor historical occurrence hardly worth note. It has a greater impact and meaning to the motorization of the U.S. Army and development of the U.S. highway system deserving more attention. The existence of what could be considered a national road system in 1919 was only notional and good paved roads between select cities existed only east of the Mississippi and in California. The rest of the rural roads in the country were graded gravel or dirt paths, at best some still only the remnants of wagon wheel ruts from western migration in the 19th century. With the introduction of the automobile, several hardy individuals and daring manufacturers dared to cross long distances in their vehicles as a challenge or to promote their products.

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A history of the Mexican Revolution and U.S. intervention from 1910–17, including factional civil war, border raids, Pershing's expedition, and Patton's early combat.

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Peter Kauffner revisits Alfred von Schlieffen’s famous plan to invade France through Belgium, drawing on scholarship and translated deployment plans published around the war’s centenary in 2014. Schlieffen led the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, and a modified version of his plan was used when war broke out in August 1914. Kauffner challenges the common claim that the plan was a response to the threat of a two-front war, showing that Schlieffen’s own writings point elsewhere. He argues that the plan is better understood as an expression of the “cult of the offensive,” an aggressive approach to military planning popular across Europe at the time, and that political pressure from Kaiser Wilhelm II and others may also have shaped it. Kauffner examines the plan Schlieffen passed to his successor, Helmuth von Moltke, and the 1914 campaign that carried German armies into northeastern France before they ran short of supplies and dug in along the Marne, beginning four years of trench warfare.

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Bob Seals examines the U.S. Army Model 1913 Cavalry Saber, the last saber issued to American mounted troops and popularly known as “the Patton Saber.” For some 159 years, Army cavalrymen, dragoons, and light horse carried an edged sword, but some historians have doubted that a mere second lieutenant could have shaped the Army’s choice of a new weapon. Seals traces Second Lieutenant George S. Patton Jr.’s advocacy of a straight-bladed saber designed for the thrust rather than the cut, inspired by Napoleon’s instruction to his cavalry, “Don’t cut! The point!” He follows Patton’s study at the French cavalry school at Saumur, his visit to Springfield Armory to confer on the design, and his appointment as the Army’s first Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley. Seals also considers the saber’s later fate, including blades converted into fighting knives in the Second World War, and concludes that the M1913 deserves to be remembered as the Patton saber.

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Shawn Reagan examines how the United States learned from European battlefield experience before entering the First World War. Trench systems, concentrated artillery, and industrial firepower exposed weaknesses in assumptions that had shaped American military preparation. Direct experience was limited, so military observers and attachés became important sources of information about the changing character of combat. Reagan follows the movement of that information from overseas reporting into technical analysis and recommendations for reform. Organization, weapons, supporting services, and the requirements of a larger army all enter the discussion. The article argues that observation could become a practical instrument of modernization when institutions were able to interpret and apply what their representatives had learned. Readers gain an account of adaptation before combat, showing how an army could use another conflict’s costly lessons to reconsider its own methods and prepare for demands its earlier doctrine had not adequately anticipated.

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Roger Daene examines how German offensive and defensive tactics evolved during the First World War, and why those changes still failed to win the war in 1918. Starting from Wilhelm Balck’s observation that “bullets quickly write new tactics,” he follows the German Army from the costly lessons of the First Battle of Ypres through major reforms in the winters of 1916–17 and 1917–18. Daene describes the development of defense in depth and the elastic defense, the debates among German commanders over how much ground to yield, and the creation of stormtrooper units for infiltration attacks. He then analyzes the 1918 Spring Offensive, in which Operation Michael nearly severed the British and French armies and drove the British Fifth Army to the verge of collapse. Instead of concentrating for a decisive blow, Ludendorff divided his effort and later squandered his reserves. Daene concludes that the Allies, not the Germans, developed the winning combination of infantry, tanks, aircraft, and artillery.

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Vernon Yates compares the Idealist and Realist approaches that shaped how the First World War was fought and how its peace was made. He begins with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which Napoleon III and Otto von Bismarck fought as Realists focused on national power, and traces how rivalries over territory, alliances, and hard power carried Europe toward war in 1914. The war’s destruction, Yates argues, made secret treaties and imperialist ambitions harder to tolerate. He then examines the peace settlement through both lenses, contrasting President Woodrow Wilson’s Idealist Fourteen Points and his hopes for a League of Nations with the Realist aims of the victorious European powers at Versailles, including France’s determination to punish Germany. Wilson staked his political future on the League, Yates notes, but misjudged an American public unwilling to become entangled in European politics. He concludes that national power must be exercised and national interests pursued daily, not invoked only in a crisis.

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Herman Warden of Stellenbosch University examines how a divided South Africa has remembered its participation in the First World War through two very different events. The Battle of Delville Wood, fought from 14 July 1916 during the Somme offensive, saw the First South African Infantry Brigade ordered to secure the wood near Longueval and hold it against German counterattacks at terrible cost. The sinking of the SS Mendi off the Isle of Wight in 1917, after a collision with the SS Darro , brought heavy loss of life to men of the South African Native Labour Corps. Warden traces how the apartheid-era state celebrated Delville Wood as South Africa’s “finest hour,” while Black South Africans kept the memory of the Mendi alive. Since 1994, he shows, the Mendi has largely surpassed Delville Wood as the nation’s most celebrated sacrifice, though both are still commemorated. He also considers how school curricula and public memory shape which stories younger South Africans learn.

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Edward J. Langer looks beyond the immediate causes of the First World War to the ideas that shaped how Europe’s rulers justified it. He begins with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip of the Black Hand, and follows the month of diplomacy that failed to prevent Austria-Hungary’s war on Serbia from spreading as Russia, Germany, France, and Britain mobilized. Langer then traces the intellectual roots of the conflict, from Saint Augustine’s concept of the just war and the ideas of Martin Luther to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Langer also shows how each belligerent government, bound to show that its cause was just, issued an official “color book” of diplomatic documents explaining its decision to fight. He closes by asking whether nationalism, greed, or religious belief carried Europe into a war that was anything but a splendid little war.

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Birrion Sondahl examines the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, the first major battle of the First World War on the Eastern Front. With most of its army committed to the Schlieffen Plan in the west, Germany faced a Russian invasion of East Prussia with a single army, the Eighth, initially commanded by General Prittwitz. Sondahl explains how a minor German setback at Gumbinnen shaped the campaign and how the Eighth Army then concentrated against General Samsonov’s Russian Second Army, encircling and nearly annihilating it while General Rennenkampf’s First Army failed to intervene. He analyzes the factors behind the German victory, including logistics, intelligence, reconnaissance, terrain, and communication, and the Russian failures in supply and coordination. While Hindenburg and Ludendorff received the credit, Sondahl argues that Colonel Max Hoffmann, who devised the plan and persuaded his superiors to keep to it, deserves much of it. Tannenberg, he concludes, was a rare battle of maneuver in a war remembered for static fronts.

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Daniel McEwen asks whether the alliances that divided Europe before 1914 deterred war or made it inevitable. He opens in November 1918, as exhausted German soldiers walk home from a war that killed some 40 million people and reset the global order. Although history has placed most of the blame on Germany’s military leaders, McEwen examines the culpability of the two blocs: the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. He traces how each of the six powers, circling the declining Ottoman Empire and competing for influence in the Balkans, used its commitments after Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. McEwen gives special attention to Italy, which at first stayed out of the war, then switched sides for the best offer, and emerged with a peace its nationalists called a “mutilated victory,” a grievance Benito Mussolini later exploited. His conclusion is that an alliance is only as strong as the character of those charged with honoring it.

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Roger Daene challenges the popular image of the Western Front as a series of senseless battles in which infantry ran across open ground to be slaughtered while generals clung to outdated tactics. Quoting the German commander Wilhelm Balck, “Bullets quickly write new tactics,” he traces how the British Army adapted after the Battle of the Marne turned the war into a struggle of positions. The war introduced or transformed the airplane, the tank, poison gas, the machine gun, and heavy artillery, and Daene shows how British infantry learned to fight alongside them. He follows the evolution of platoon and section tactics, including the introduction of the Lewis gun to restore firepower, the development of creeping barrages, and the growing importance of communications and close air support through the costly lessons of the Somme and Passchendaele. Daene concludes that the British integrated infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft more effectively than the Germans, and that this combination of arms ultimately brought victory in 1918.

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Andrew Wright asks whether Britain was right to enter the First World War, a question shaped by the horrendous casualties, lost wealth, and diminished world position that followed. Protected by the English Channel and the Royal Navy, Britain could have stayed out of the conflict after Germany invaded Belgium, yet it chose to stand with Belgium and France. Wright argues that the decision was justified on strategic, legal, and moral grounds. Strategically, Britain depended on seaborne trade, and a German victory would have given a hostile power control of the continent and a navy able to threaten British sovereignty. Legally, the Treaty of London of 1839 bound the great powers, Germany included, to respect Belgian neutrality, and Britain had made assurances to its allies. Morally, Germany’s conduct and war aims were unjust, even if Allied propaganda exaggerated German atrocities. As in the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, Wright concludes, Britain had little choice but to fight, and its sacrifice was neither mistaken nor in vain.

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James J. Warrick examines the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, which saw the first large-scale use of poison gas in war. He tells the story through Private Percy Kingsley of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s 5th Battalion, a young volunteer from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, who had spent a week in the trenches of the Ypres salient when, on the afternoon of April 22, a yellow-green cloud of chlorine drifted across no man’s land. Warrick explains that the danger of chemical weapons had been recognized as early as the Hague Convention of 1899, and that captured German soldiers, including deserters, had warned of the gas canisters. Yet the French and British did not take the threat seriously. The gas fell on French colonial troops, opening a four-mile gap that left the Canadians exposed, but the Germans, unprepared for their new weapon’s success, could not exploit it. Warrick concludes that the Allies learned a hard lesson about heeding intelligence, and follows Kingsley through a long life that ended in 1982.

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Evan Pilling examines T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” as a master of asymmetric warfare. Books, films, and Lawrence’s own sense of mystery have clouded the reality of the man, but Pilling argues that his record as British liaison to the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks from 1916 to 1918 offers a dramatic example of irregular warfare. Drawing on his knowledge of the region and its people, Lawrence served as political advisor to the Arab field commander Feisal and led Arab forces himself. Pilling follows the campaign’s strategic vision of threatening the Hejaz Railway, which ran 800 miles from Damascus into the Arabian Peninsula, and its most dramatic success, the surprise capture of Aqaba in July 1917. Although a sideshow in the larger war, the revolt tied down Ottoman forces out of proportion to its size and supported the British victory in Palestine. Pilling also examines the principles of irregular warfare Lawrence set out in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and other writings, which he argues remain relevant to insurgents and counterinsurgents alike.

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Alan R. McGahey examines the Battle of Jutland in 1916 in the shadow of Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar, the victory that had secured British naval supremacy for a century and raised expectations of another decisive success. Instead, Jutland left the Royal Navy asking, in Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s famous words, whether there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.” McGahey follows the battlecruiser action in which HMS Indefatigable , Queen Mary , and Invincible blew up, and weighs the decisions of Beatty and Admiral Sir John Jellicoe that may have cost Britain another Trafalgar. He argues that the deeper causes of disaster lay in Admiralty choices: the adoption of Commander Frederic Dreyer’s system of “rapid-independent fire” and the decision to overload ships with ammunition and cordite. Drawing on surveys of the wreck of Invincible , McGahey shows how fire passed from turret to magazine, and concludes that these decisions sent more than 3,000 sailors to their deaths.

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James Perdue examines the Battle of Jutland, fought on 31 May and 1 June 1916, as a test of naval command rather than simply a contest of firepower. The largest naval engagement of the First World War and the only full-scale clash between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, Jutland exposed the complexity of commanding fleets with early twentieth-century technology. Perdue sets the battle in the strategic context of the North Sea war and explores the technological foundations of both fleets, the intelligence that alerted the British on 30 May that the Germans were preparing to sail, and the contrasting command philosophies of Admirals John Jellicoe and Reinhard Scheer. He traces the communication breakdowns that hampered Vice Admiral David Beatty’s battlecruisers, the course of the engagement, and its outcomes. Jutland’s lasting lesson, Perdue concludes, is that clear intent, shared understanding, and reliable communication are as decisive as firepower, a lesson that shaped interwar improvements in fire control, signaling, and damage control.

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Del Kostka tells the story of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, when two great armies fought to the brink of annihilation over ground neither considered strategically important. The story begins in August 1914, when Britain entered the war with a small professional army and Lord Kitchener called for volunteers. Kostka explains how Edward Stanley, the 17th Earl of Derby, raised battalions in Liverpool by promising that friends and neighbors could serve together, creating the “Pals” battalions that soon spread across Britain. He follows these volunteers to Picardy and the first day of the offensive, July 1, 1916, when mines exploded beneath the German trenches at 7:28 a.m. and whole communities suffered devastating losses within hours. Kostka reflects on why the Somme has come to symbolize the futility of war and describes the Thiepval Memorial, which bears the names of more than 72,000 missing men. He closes with practical advice for travelers who wish to visit the battlefields, memorials, and villages of the region today.

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James Perdue analyzes the catastrophic first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, through the lens of modern mission command doctrine. For seven days British guns fired more than a million shells at the German lines, on the assumption that the bombardment would destroy the defenders and allow the infantry to walk across no man’s land. Perdue argues that the staggering casualties that followed were not simply the result of new technology or strong German defenses, but the predictable outcome of a failed command philosophy. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army adopted a rigid, centralized, timetable-driven plan that stifled initiative, suppressed contradictory intelligence, and showed little trust in junior leaders and soldiers. Perdue concludes that the high command violated every tenet of mission command: clear intent, disciplined initiative, shared understanding, and mutual trust. The “lions led by donkeys” verdict, he contends, is doctrinally sound, and the Somme remains a lesson that courage cannot compensate for a failed command philosophy.

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James Perdue examines the Battle of Caporetto, fought in October 1917 along the Isonzo Front, as a case study in failed command. The Italian Army did not simply lose a battle; it suffered a systemic breakdown of leadership, communication, morale, and cohesion that sent it into a great retreat to the Piave River. Perdue traces many of these weaknesses to General Luigi Cadorna and the rigid, punitive culture he imposed, in which officers were removed for minor mistakes and units were sometimes decimated as punishment for retreating under pressure. Against an army stifled by inflexible doctrine and mistrust, German and Austro-Hungarian forces used infiltration tactics to break through and advance with astonishing speed. Perdue then follows the aftermath: Cadorna’s removal and his replacement by General Armando Diaz, whose reforms emphasizing morale, initiative, and realistic planning stabilized the front and laid the foundation for victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918. Caporetto, he concludes, still warns modern leaders against rigidity, mistrust, and poor communication.

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James Perdue examines the Battle of Cambrai, fought from 20 November to 7 December 1917, through the principles of mission command set out in current U.S. Army doctrine. Cambrai is remembered as the first large-scale, effective use of tanks, but Perdue argues that its deeper significance lies in its combination of artillery, armor, infantry, and air power, which broke sharply with the attritional warfare that had dominated the Western Front. He shows how General Julian Byng’s clear intent and the disciplined initiative of subordinate units, illustrated by actions such as the capture of Flesquières, produced a remarkable breakthrough on the first day. The advance then stalled on Bourlon Ridge, the cavalry positioned to exploit success was repeatedly delayed, and on 30 November a massive German counterattack recovered much of the lost ground. Perdue concludes that Cambrai was a missed opportunity: the British achieved the breakthrough that had eluded them for years, but a breakdown in the very principles behind their success kept them from exploiting it.

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David W. Tschanz recounts the influenza pandemic of 1918, which spread across the globe in two months while the First World War raged. Its victims were mostly young adults, many of whom went from perfect health to death in less than a day, and by conservative estimates it killed at least 27 million people, including twelve million in India. Tschanz traces early outbreaks among soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, and shows how crowded camps and troopships carried the disease to the front, where it crippled troop movements, slowed the reinforcement of General Pershing’s army, and further broke Germany’s fragile morale. Nearly three times as many American soldiers died of influenza as from enemy action in the same period. He describes the dilemma faced by President Woodrow Wilson as military leaders weighed the risks of continuing to ship men overseas. Tschanz closes with the pandemic’s reach into the families of the powerful, including a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who barely survived.

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Michael G. Stroud examines the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, which he calls the beginning of the end for the German army. The German spring offensives, the Kaiserschlacht, had driven deep into Allied lines but failed to force a settlement before the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in strength, and cost Germany more than 340,000 casualties. Recognizing that the German army was exhausted, troubled by unrest at home, and weakened by influenza, Marshal Ferdinand Foch planned a series of Allied attacks to seize the initiative, beginning at the logistically important city of Amiens. Stroud describes how Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, with British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand divisions supported by tanks, aircraft, and artillery, used surprise and the cover of heavy morning fog to advance on August 8 farther than at any time since 1914. Low German morale compounded the defeat. Amiens, Stroud concludes, restored mobility to the battlefield through combined arms and foreshadowed how the next war would be fought on an even larger scale.

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Comer Plummer recounts the Annual Disaster of 1921, a catastrophic Spanish defeat in northern Morocco. On the evening of July 21, Spanish officers at Annual realized they were trapped in a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, their forward outposts lost and tribes in their rear joining the rebellion. The crisis had begun on June 1, when the Riffians, Berber tribesmen of the Rif Mountains led by Mohammad Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi, began attacking Spanish positions. Plummer explains why a Spanish army that looked overwhelming on paper was poorly trained, ill-equipped, and ignorant of the country it occupied, and how General Manuel Silvestre’s overextended advance invited catastrophe. He follows the collapse of the camp, the disastrous retreat, Silvestre’s mysterious death, and the siege of Mount Arruit, where General Felipe Navarro and about 3,000 men took refuge. Plummer then traces Abd el-Krim’s Rif Republic, his influence on later revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, and his enduring legacy in Morocco.

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An analysis of how democratic nonintervention and foreign support during the Spanish Civil War strengthened communist influence within the divided Republic.

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A history and assessment of RAF Bomber Command, from Britain's desperate position in 1940 through the development of strategic night bombing against Germany.

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Kai Isaksen tells the story of the Czechoslovak soldiers and airmen who continued to fight after their country was dismembered. In 1938 the Czechoslovak Army was among the largest and best-equipped in Europe, with modern tanks and aircraft and strong border fortifications, yet the Munich agreement handed the Sudetenland to Germany without a fight, and the rest of the country soon fell under German control or was divided among its neighbors. Isaksen follows the thousands who escaped to Poland, France, the Middle East, Britain, and the Soviet Union. He describes the infantry units that fought in France in 1940, the battalion besieged with Allied forces at Tobruk, and the four Czechoslovak squadrons of the Royal Air Force, including No. 310 Squadron in the Battle of Britain and No. 311 Squadron in Bomber Command. In the east, the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps fought at the Dukla Pass and in support of the Slovak uprising. Their reward was a return to a free Czechoslovakia in 1945, though within the Soviet bloc.

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Christopher Lyon examines the American Volunteer Group, the famous Flying Tigers, within the larger story of how the United States moved toward war with Japan. As early as December 1939, he argues, the Roosevelt administration was preparing for conflict, and by mid-1940 it was planning to support hard-pressed China with modern fighters, bombers, and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. China had faced Japan’s technological might with aging aircraft and outdated weapons while also fighting a civil war. Lyon follows Claire Chennault, an adviser to the Chinese military since 1937, who oversaw the creation of a unit of American servicemen and pilots who volunteered to fight for China. He explores the propaganda, diplomacy, and realpolitik behind the venture, and the idealized vision of China promoted by figures such as the publisher Henry Luce. The Flying Tigers won no major battles, Lyon concludes, but for a few months in 1941 and 1942 they gave hope to two nations, one near surrender and one about to awaken.

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A comparative study of Nomonhan and Okinawa examining how the opening and closing battles of the Pacific War shaped Japanese strategy and later history.

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A history of the 1939 Nomonhan conflict, where Soviet-Mongolian forces under Georgy Zhukov defeated Japan's Kwantung Army along the Manchurian border.

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Bill Wilson offers a guide to the most important published orders of battle for the land forces of the Second World War. Orders of battle identify which units fought in particular battles and campaigns and how they were organized and subordinated, information made vital by the hundreds of divisions mobilized for total war, especially on the Eastern Front. Wilson evaluates selected works for Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States, setting aside archival sources. He describes Georg Tessin’s monumental multi-volume study of the German armed forces, the Soviet Boevoi sostav volumes, Lieutenant Colonel H. F. Joslen’s Orders of Battle, Second World War for the British Army, the French official history Les Grandes Unités Françaises , Shelby Stanton’s World War II Order of Battle for the U.S. Army, and Gordon Rottman’s order of battle for the U.S. Marine Corps. For each, he explains its scope, organization, strengths, and limitations, and he closes with a table comparing their language, the echelons covered, the nature of their data, and their treatment of non-divisional units.

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Thomas Anderson’s The History of the Panzerwaffe, Volume 3: The Panzer Division examines the organization and development of Germany’s armored formations. Chris Buckham reviews the book’s treatment of the personnel, equipment, supporting arms, and practical requirements that made a panzer division more than a collection of tanks. The discussion considers how infantry, artillery, engineers, communications, and supply contributed to the formation’s effectiveness. It also assesses the value of Anderson’s research and presentation for readers interested in German armored warfare. The review places the volume within the broader study of how these divisions were organized, sustained, and employed during the Second World War. Buckham also considers the relationship between the division’s structure and the demands placed upon it in combat. The book’s attention to supporting services helps readers assess armored formations as complete military organizations. Its value rests in connecting weapons and vehicles to the people, administrative systems, and logistical arrangements required to put them into effective service.

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The USS Squalus sank on 23 May 1939 during a seemingly routine test dive off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The main induction valve failed during the dive, flooding the aft compartments and killing 26 Sailors within minutes. The catastrophic flooding trapped 33 Sailors in the forward compartments at a depth of 240 feet. The Navy faced a moment with no precedent nor margin for error that tested its leadership, professionalism, and technical capacity. Previous submarine disasters had resulted in all crew lost. This time, Navy leaders acted swiftly and decisively, a move that would ultimately result in the successful rescue of all 33 survivors and the salvage of the submarine (Cole, 1939). The Navy dispatched rescue ships within hours of losing contact with the USS Squalus while divers prepared to operate at unprecedented depths. The crisis forced the Navy to employ experimental technology and unproven diving techniques to attempt a rescue at such a deep depth.

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Richard Anderson provides a detailed reference history of the organization of the United States Army in the Second World War, first written in 1993 as an appendix to Hitler’s Last Gamble , his book on the Battle of the Bulge with Trevor N. Dupuy and David Bongard, and substantially revised since. In June 1939 the Regular Army numbered fewer than 190,000 officers and men, with a National Guard of similar size. Within three years it had been transformed into a force that peaked at more than 8.2 million men in 89 divisions. Anderson explains how the old “square” infantry divisions gave way to the leaner “triangular” organization and describes the structure and evolution of infantry, armored, airborne, and cavalry divisions, as well as separate tank, tank destroyer, artillery, and support units. He also covers specialized formations and experiments, from rocket launcher battalions to units equipped with captured German artillery during ammunition shortages, offering a valuable guide to how the wartime Army was built and fought.

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Michael F. Dilley provides a concise history of the American airborne units of the Second World War, from groups and squadrons to battalions, regiments, divisions, and the single airborne corps. He traces the idea back to October 1918, when Brigadier General Billy Mitchell proposed dropping an American division by parachute near Metz, a plan worked out by Major Lewis H. Brereton, who later commanded the First Allied Airborne Army. Dilley follows the creation of the Parachute Test Platoon at Fort Benning in June 1940, the expansion into parachute battalions such as the 501st through 504th, and the activation of the 11th, 13th, 17th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne Divisions and the XVIII Airborne Corps, along with glider units. He summarizes the combat jumps and glider operations of these formations in Europe and the Pacific. The article also traces the development of airborne insignia, including the parachutist and glider badges, and later additions such as the Senior and Master Parachutist badges and the Navy and Marine Corps jump wings.

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Captain Brick Billing tells the story of a remarkable piece of improvised nutrition created inside a German prison camp. For Allied prisoners of war held deep inside enemy territory, escaping was only the first problem; an escaper on the run needed concentrated, high-energy food that was light and compact enough to carry for days. At Stalag Luft III, David Lubbock of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve set out to solve that problem. Billing explains how Lubbock worked with scarce German rations and the contents of International Red Cross food parcels to produce a dense, calorie-rich mixture that could be cooked in secret, poured into small tins, and hidden until needed. As Paul Brickhill recorded, one four-ounce tin was reckoned to sustain a man for two days, even if it was hard to swallow. From 1943, every escaper from the camp, including the 76 men of the Great Escape in March 1944, carried at least one tin of “Escaper’s Fudge,” and several credited it with helping them succeed.

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An account of Britain's 1940 attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, tracing the armistice crisis, failed negotiations, and deadly clash between allies.

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Roger Daene examines Operation Compass, the British offensive in North Africa that in 1940–41 turned a local counterattack into a crushing victory over the Italian army. After Italy declared war on France and Britain in June 1940, Italian forces crossed into Egypt, advanced about fifty miles, and halted near Sidi Barrani in a chain of fortified camps. Generals Archibald Wavell and Richard O’Connor, with some 30,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops, struck those camps and then refused to let the enemy rest, driving deep into Libya. Daene follows the campaign through the capture of successive Italian strongholds to the final encirclement at Beda Fomm, where mobility proved decisive. By the end, nearly all of Libya had been taken and fewer than 20,000 of some 150,000 Italian soldiers escaped. Daene then analyzes why the Italian military collapsed, pointing to poor higher command, outdated equipment, and weak cooperation between the services, while recognizing the bravery of Italian soldiers and artillerymen who fought to the end.

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Shawn Reagan contends that the United States effectively entered the Second World War in 1940, well before its formal declaration of war, and that the French Caribbean was where this shift took shape. After France fell in just 46 days, Martinique and Guadeloupe passed under Vichy authority, and American officials feared that the islands, together with French warships, the carrier Béarn , and aircraft bought from the United States, could give the Axis a foothold in the hemisphere. Drawing on William C. Bullitt’s dispatches, State Department records, and Roosevelt Library files, Reagan shows how Washington pressed Vichy, kept the aircraft ashore, and secured a naval observer on Martinique. He traces the strain on neutrality through the Inter-American Neutrality Committee’s debates over German merchant ships, the Havana meeting of foreign ministers that treated any transfer of European possessions in the Americas as a common threat, and the destroyers-for-bases agreement with Britain. These, he concludes, were the measures of a nation already at war in all but name.

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John Harris investigates the wartime role of Tancred Borenius, a London scholar who had once served as an envoy for Finland, and asks whether he was a forgotten intelligence hero or a messenger in a plot against Winston Churchill. In the spring of 1941 Britain stood battered and alone after Dunkirk and the Blitz, and some influential figures favored a negotiated peace with Germany. Borenius, secretary of the Polish Relief Fund, traveled to Geneva, where he met the diplomat Carl Burckhardt. According to German sources, he conveyed the impression that powerful circles in Britain were ready to make peace and might move against Churchill. Harris examines who stood behind the mission, including the intelligence officer Claude Dansey, why Borenius received no recognition while others involved were heavily decorated, and Churchill’s decision to call a confidence vote days before Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941. He concludes that the Borenius mission may have unintentionally given Hess a reason to believe a coup against Churchill was imminent.

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Gerald Krieger argues that Germany’s rapid conquest of France in 1940 owed much to the willingness of its armored commanders to defy cautious superiors. In the spring of 1940 the Western Allies had numerical parity, more heavy tanks, and the Maginot Line, and most senior officers on both sides expected a long war of attrition. Krieger shows how a radical minority of commanders embraced speed, combined arms, and air support while the Army High Command feared overextended supply lines. He follows Erich von Manstein’s Sickle Cut plan, which shifted the main effort to the Ardennes and the crossing of the Meuse at Sedan, and Heinz Guderian’s drive with XIX Panzer Corps, during which Guderian was so angered by halt orders that on May 17 he offered his resignation mid-campaign. Krieger concludes that although French tanks often had heavier armor, German superiority in doctrine, communications, and concentration of armor, combined with officers willing to risk their careers by exploiting opportunities, proved decisive.

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An account of how U.S. forces attacked German-held Maginot Line fortifications in 1944–45, overcoming underground defenses through maneuver, firepower, and siege tactics.

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An account of Japan's 1941–42 Malaya campaign and capture of Singapore, highlighting bicycle infantry, operational planning, British defenses, and rapid maneuver.

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David W. Tschanz examines how defective torpedoes undermined the American submarine campaign against Japan. Submarines eventually strangled Japanese shipping, cutting imports of oil and iron ore by nearly 90 percent, but for the first two years of the war American skippers fired the Mark XIV torpedo, which ran about eleven feet deeper than set, carried a magnetic detonator that exploded prematurely, and used a contact pin that failed on direct hits. Tschanz shows how submarine captains’ reports of failures ran into the resistance of a Bureau of Ordnance that defended its weapon. He follows Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood’s determination to test the torpedoes himself, the objections of Rear Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie, who had helped develop the magnetic exploder, and the order in November 1943 that finally deactivated it. A fix for the faulty firing pin followed the same month. Tschanz asks how many months these failures and hidebound bureaucrats added to the war.

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Chad Davis tells the story of Chief Yeoman Theodore Richard Brownell of Fort Smith, Arkansas, whose wartime service embodied the phrase “a yeoman’s job.” Separating fact from the legends that crept into official Navy publications, Davis traces Brownell from his hometown, where he once worked at the Boston Store, to his service as a crewman of the submarine tender USS Canopus in the Philippines. After the fall of Bataan, Brownell joined the defense of Corregidor alongside the Marines and was captured when the island fell in 1942. Davis follows him through years of captivity at Cabanatuan and other camps, the starvation, dehydration, exposure, slave labor, and death marches endured by Allied prisoners, and the voyage to Japan aboard the infamous hell ships. Throughout, fellow prisoners described Brownell as unbroken, resourceful, and humorous, with “wisdom far in excess of his rank.” Davis closes with Brownell’s postwar career and a family tradition of Navy service that spanned more than 95 years.

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A memorial biography of naval aviator James A. Nist, who served aboard USS Bunker Hill and was killed during the carrier's kamikaze attack in May 1945.

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A detailed examination of Soviet ground-force organization on 22 June 1941, emphasizing the Red Army's evolving armored formations at the start of Barbarossa.

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A reconstruction of the Battle of the Java Sea's final phase, examining disputed maneuvers and the destruction of the Allied ABDA striking force in 1942.

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Carson Teuscher examines the improbable campaign of Edson D. Raff’s Tunisian Task Force during the opening months of the Allied campaign in North Africa. After the Operation Torch landings of November 1942, French commanders in North Africa, disobeying Vichy, agreed to help the Anglo-Americans, and the new allies raced east to seize Tunisia before Axis forces arrived in strength. Raff, a parachute officer who had begun his career in the 501st Parachute Battalion, secured the airfield at Youks les Bains and then expanded his operations toward Tébessa and Gafsa on the Allies’ exposed southern flank. Teuscher shows how Raff’s small detachment of American paratroopers worked alongside French Zouaves, Chasseurs, Tirailleurs, Spahis, and even a Moroccan camel corps, overcoming a confusing dual command system and a language barrier. Through deception, speed, and partnership with French forces, the task force kept the enemy off balance for weeks. Eisenhower called the story “a minor epic in itself,” and Teuscher argues that it foreshadowed the greater Allied cooperation to come.

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An account of Japan's 1942 attack on Dutch Harbor and Aleutian campaign, examining how the northern operation complicated and weakened its Pacific strategy.

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The ordeal of U.S. Marine Edmond Babler and other Allied prisoners transported from the Philippines to Japan aboard brutal and deadly Japanese hell ships.

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LtCol Richard Beil argues that the Pacific island-hopping campaign of the Second World War repeated some of the costliest mistakes of the First. He begins with the Schlieffen Plan and the way rigid planning, rooted in Clausewitz’s emphasis on the decisive battle, shaped the opening of the Great War and its descent into trench warfare. Beil then turns to the Central Pacific, where American planners advanced along a line of islands toward Japan. Some heavily defended bases, such as Rabaul and Truk, were bypassed, but others of limited value were attacked frontally. What the campaign needed, he contends, was an island suitable for airfields and anchorages, not any particular island, yet battles such as Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima were fought at a cost of thousands of Marine lives when alternatives were available. Reflecting on the saying that generals always fight the last war, Beil warns that history is a reconstruction of the past, and that drawing the wrong lessons from it can be fatal.

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The story of Japan's enormous I-400-class submarine aircraft carriers, their Seiran bombers, planned Panama Canal attack, and secret postwar disposal.

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A history of the 1942–45 Hump airlift that carried supplies from India over the Himalayas to sustain China after Japan closed its land and sea routes.

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SGM Rene O. Aleman analyzes Operation Drumbeat, the German U-boat offensive against merchant shipping along the East Coast of the United States and Canada that began immediately after Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war. Using the frameworks of operational art and design, he examines how German planners struck Allied supply lines at their source. The offensive’s early success, Aleman argues, came from surprise, the exploitation of unprepared coastal defenses, and the sound application of submarine warfare principles. In the first six months of 1942 alone, U-boats sank more than three million tons of shipping and supplies. Yet the advantage proved temporary. The United States learned hard lessons and responded with an effective convoy system, long-range patrol bombers devoted to anti-submarine warfare, improved radar and sonar, and joint action by the Navy, Army Air Forces, and Coast Guard. Drumbeat, Aleman concludes, won tactical victories but failed strategically against an adversary with greater industrial capacity and the ability to adapt.

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A history of Vladimir Peniakoff and Popski's Private Army, the small British unit that conducted reconnaissance, sabotage, and partisan support in Africa and Italy.

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An account of Operation Jubilee, the failed 1942 Dieppe Raid, examining Allied planning errors, German defenses, heavy Canadian losses, and lessons for D-Day.

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A history of Japan's Kido Butai carrier strike force, following its triumph at Pearl Harbor and the wartime fate of its ships, aircraft, and aircrews.

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Paul S. Teague examines the Battle of Buna-Gona on the north coast of New Guinea in 1942–43, an early and bitter test for American troops in the Pacific. Japan sought to cut the lines of communication between the United States and Australia by seizing Port Moresby. After the Battle of the Coral Sea prevented a seaborne landing, Japanese forces landed on the north coast and attacked across the Owen Stanley Mountains along the Kokoda Trail. Australian troops drove them back to fortified positions at Buna, Gona, and Sanananda, and General Douglas MacArthur committed the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division to capture Buna. After the division struggled against jungle, disease, and strong defenses, MacArthur sent Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, who relieved the division commander, Major General Edwin Harding, and two regimental commanders. Teague argues that Harding’s difficulties stemmed from faulty intelligence, poor logistics, and inadequate training originating in MacArthur’s headquarters, and that with Eichelberger’s tanks and artillery Harding might have won.

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An account of U.S. Army combat engineers during the Battle of Attu and the final Japanese banzai attack that ended organized resistance in May 1943.

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A detailed history of Operation Husky, covering Allied strategic debate, planning, airborne and amphibious landings, and the 1943 campaign for Sicily.

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A history of Allied efforts to sabotage German heavy-water production at Norway's Norsk Hydro plant and disrupt Nazi nuclear research.

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An account of the First Special Service Force's assault on Monte La Difensa in December 1943 and its breakthrough of Germany's Winter Line in Italy.

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Bruce Oliver Newsome reexamines the British intelligence reports on Tiger 131, the most famous tank in the world. The first Tiger brought to Britain, it became the most studied and photographed tank in Allied intelligence and is today the only running Tiger anywhere. Its British reports have long puzzled researchers: their numbering and dating suggest that some were never completed, some contradict others, some are undated, and fine drawings and paintings survive without captions. After surveying every surviving report in Britain and North America, Newsome reconstructs their original state. He also explains the Tiger program itself, which produced two different tanks bearing the name: the Henschel design that entered service and Ferdinand Porsche’s losing design, whose hulls were converted into self-propelled guns. The findings are unflattering to Allied intelligence. Much of the analysis arrived too late, mobility trials ended when the engine and suspension broke in 1944, and there is no evidence Allied designers were influenced, so Western tanks changed little in response.

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Jeffrey Cox investigates the loss of four American submarines, Argonaut , Amberjack , Grampus , and Triton , within a few weeks between January and March 1943. Drawing an analogy with the claustrophobic world of the film Alien , he evokes the cramped, dangerous life aboard a submarine, where a boat could vanish without a sound and leave no survivors to explain what happened. Cox finds a common denominator in Captain James Fife Jr., who took command of the submarine force operating from Brisbane in December 1942. He examines Fife’s tight control of his boats, his frequent radio transmissions, and the aggressive patrol assignments he gave them in the Solomons campaign, then reconstructs what is known of each boat’s final patrol. Cox also follows the informal investigation conducted by Captain Allan McCann, whose report never saw the light of day. McCann exonerated Fife but added a troubling possibility: some of the boats may have been sunk by American aircraft.

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An examination of Operation Shingle at Anzio, contrasting the stalled Allied beachhead and command failures with the naval forces that sustained it under attack.

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An analysis of the costly 1944 Battle of Peleliu, its disputed strategic necessity, hardened Japanese defenses, Marine casualties, and lessons for later Pacific operations.

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John Pezzola recounts the Canadian assault on Carpiquet, a village and airfield west of Caen that one regiment remembered as “the graveyard of the regiment.” Caen had been a D-Day objective, but stiff German resistance kept it in German hands and allowed the defenders to fortify the surrounding countryside. Carpiquet’s airfield, formerly used by the Luftwaffe, offered observation over key routes toward the Odon Valley and was held by veterans of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Pezzola follows Operation Windsor, launched on July 4, 1944, in which Canadian battalions, including the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, advanced across open ground into heavy fire to seize the village and parts of the airfield. He describes the brutal fighting for the hangars and bunkers, where Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks supported the infantry, and explains why the operation did not achieve complete success. The article closes with a detailed look at the development and operation of the Crocodile, from its fuel trailer to its range of controlled bursts.

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Bruce Malone examines Operation Dragoon, originally called Anvil, the Allied invasion of southern France on 15 August 1944, often called France’s forgotten D-Day. Although one of the least celebrated Allied operations of the war, it was among the most controversial strategic decisions, launched by the United States over strenuous British objections. Malone traces the long debate over its merits, with American supporters emphasizing its help to the campaign in northern France and British critics arguing that it weakened the Italian front. He follows the planning that weighed landings near Toulon and Marseille, the friction between American and French commanders such as Lieutenant General Alexander Patch and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, and the rapid advance up the Rhône Valley. Malone concludes that the operation was a stunning success: it demolished the German Nineteenth Army, forced Army Group G to retreat, opened major ports to supply Allied forces in France, did no harm to the Italian campaign, and confirmed the United States as the senior partner in the alliance.

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HD Bedell provides an overview of the 1944 Burma Campaign, fought in the complex and often overlooked China-Burma-India Theater. With Japanese forces occupying Burma, supplies for China had to be flown over the Himalayas, an operation known as “the Hump” that cost more than 600 aircraft and crews. Bedell explains the theater’s tangled command structure, in which Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell held several overlapping roles. He then follows two long-range penetration forces: the American 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), known as Galahad or Merrill’s Marauders, and the British Chindits, inspired by Brigadier Orde Wingate’s earlier raid into Burma. Both forces endured months of hard jungle fighting, disease, and exhaustion, culminating in the capture of Myitkyina, while Stilwell’s demands strained them to the breaking point. Bedell concludes that Galahad and the Chindits influenced the campaign far more than their commanders acknowledged, as Japanese attacks on Imphal and Kohima engulfed the entire theater in fierce fighting.

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A history of Adlerhorst, Hitler's concealed command complex near Bad Nauheim that served as his headquarters during the 1944 Ardennes Offensive.

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John Pezzola examines Japan’s attempts to use airborne forces to recover Leyte after American forces landed there in October 1944. Regarding the Philippines as vital to its sea routes and to the resources of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, the Japanese 14th Army under General Tomoyuki Yamashita planned a counterattack that combined a ground offensive with airborne operations. Paratroopers were tasked with seizing American airfields, including Buri and San Pablo, while the 16th Division attacked overland. Pezzola describes three separate airborne operations, the equipment and tactics of the Japanese airborne units, including the 2nd Raiding Brigade known as the Takachiho Paratroopers, and the fighting that followed the main assault on December 6, 1944. Despite some initial gains, the effort failed. He follows the American response through the capture of Purple Heart Hill by the 187th Glider Infantry in late December, where the remains of 238 Japanese soldiers revealed that both the airborne and ground assaults had ended in disaster.

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Walter F. Giersbach recounts the strange story of Japan’s balloon bomb campaign and the only civilians killed by enemy action on the American mainland during the Second World War. On May 5, 1945, near Bly, Oregon, Elsye Mitchell, a pregnant young wife, and five children from a Sunday school group came upon a strange object in the forest while her husband, the Rev. Archie Mitchell, parked their car. It exploded, killing all six. Giersbach explains that between November 1944 and April 1945 Japan launched more than 9,000 paper balloons carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs in an operation called Fu-Go, using the jet stream to carry them across the Pacific. Most fell harmlessly into the ocean, but many reached North America, landing from Alaska to California, and one was found buried in British Columbia as late as 2014. He also follows the later life of Archie Mitchell, who remarried and became a missionary in South Vietnam, where he was kidnapped by the Viet Cong in 1962 and never seen again.

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MSG James F. Seifert Jr. analyzes the Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from 23 to 26 October 1944 off Leyte, Samar, and Mindanao, from the U.S. Navy’s perspective. The battle ended the Japanese navy’s capacity for conventional offensive operations and marked the end of the Japanese naval threat in the Pacific. Seifert examines the challenges the Pacific Fleet faced before and during the battle, including a fluid command structure, the interplay of land-based and carrier-based air power, and changes in the geographic alignment of forces. Applying the joint concepts of operational art and operational design, he studies how Admiral Chester Nimitz set objectives and an end state while subordinate fleet commanders, Admirals William Halsey and Thomas Kinkaid, had to cooperate and devise their own plans. Halsey’s decisions succeeded but placed the strategic objective at risk. Seifert concludes that the battle might have benefited from a more robust joint staff, and that the “ways” and “means” lie at the heart of operational art.

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An account of the 1944 Battle of Surigao Strait, where Oldendorf's U.S. force destroyed Nishimura's southern fleet in history's last crossing-the-T battleship action.

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A history of the September 1944 battles around Lunéville, where U.S. cavalry, armored, and infantry units fought German forces during the advance into Lorraine.

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Tom Hogan investigates the legend of John Ford’s lost D-Day film. In his 1994 book on the Normandy landings, Stephen Ambrose described Ford leading cameramen on Omaha Beach to film everything, quoting the director’s claim that the government suppressed the color footage because it showed too many American casualties. Historians searched for decades, but the film was never found. Drawing on newly discovered records in the National Archives, Hogan traces Ford’s commission in the Naval Reserve, the creation of his Field Photographic Branch within the Office of Strategic Services, and the unit’s actual assignments for the invasion, including the work of Lieutenant Mark Armistead’s team. He shows that the footage Ford later described was not hidden away because it was too graphic; it never existed. Hogan identifies the documentary the unit did produce in London in June 1944, rediscovered among Army Signal Corps holdings, and argues that the surviving images deserve greater appreciation.

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James Hinton challenges the popular memory of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, celebrated as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” the greatest carrier battle of the war. American pilots from fifteen carriers destroyed most of the Japanese aircraft sent against them, and naval aviators were credited with ending the Japanese carrier threat. Hinton argues that the truth is more complicated. The planes were relatively cheap and their pilots inexperienced; the irreplaceable losses were Japan’s fleet carriers, and those were sunk mainly by American submarines. He traces the roots of the Marianas campaign and follows the boats that shaped the battle, from USS Flying Fish , which spotted the Japanese fleet, to Albacore , which torpedoed the new carrier Taiho , and Cavalla , which sank Shokaku . Hinton shows how contemporary news reports, postwar documentaries, and modern television have given submarines little more than a footnote, leaving the quiet professionals of the “Silent Service” as the unsung heroes of the day.

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SGM Mauricio da Silva Souza examines the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB), the only South American ground force to fight in Europe during the Second World War. In early 1942 a popular saying held that a snake would sooner smoke a pipe than Brazil would send troops abroad, yet Axis submarine attacks on Brazilian shipping drew the country into the war, and more than 25,000 Brazilian soldiers deployed to the Italian front under General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Moraes. Souza traces the force’s rapid modernization through American logistical channels, its integration with the U.S. Fifth Army and Major General Willis D. Crittenberger’s IV Corps, and the coordination achieved in medical support, artillery fire direction, and combat engineering. He follows the FEB through the grueling fight for Monte Castello, urban combat in Montese, and the encirclement of the German 148th Infantry Division at Fornovo di Taro. The campaign, he concludes, proved the fighting value of the Brazilian soldier and created a lasting model of coalition partnership.

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A military history of the 1944 Petsamo–Kirkenes Offensive, in which Soviet forces drove German troops from the Arctic regions of Finland and Norway.

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An examination of the wartime relationship between Eisenhower and Patton and how controversy, command decisions, and Omar Bradley's rise shaped their roles.

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An account of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division's winter fighting in the Vosges and Alsace during the Seventh Army campaign in late 1944.

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HD Bedell traces the evolution of American nuclear policy from the end of the Second World War to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. In the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons played a surprisingly small role in U.S. policy. Bedell argues that policy developed around two competing themes, preparation and disavowal. The first expression of disavowal was the Baruch Plan, which would have frozen the American monopoly in place and which the Soviet Union rejected. He then follows the shift to massive retaliation under the Eisenhower administration, the move toward flexible response, and the strategic thinking of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his civilian analysts, which led to mutual assured destruction. Bedell examines the SALT I negotiations and the ABM Treaty, arguing that the Soviet Union gained parity and superpower status while the United States received the illusions of détente and MAD. The pattern, he concludes, was one of conflict between those who believed in preparation and those who believed in disavowal.

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A biography of Rudi Horvath, whose wartime childhood in Hungary, escape from communism, and immigration led to a career in U.S. Army Special Forces.

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Werner L. Heider examines one of the most unusual American missions of the war’s final days: the rescue of the horses at the German-held stud farm at Hostau in western Bohemia in late April 1945. Among several hundred breeding horses were Lipizzaners from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, regarded as part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Hostau lay between Patton’s Third Army, advancing from the west, and Soviet forces moving toward Prague, while German officers on the spot sought to influence the animals’ fate. Heider reconstructs the mission from the records of the 2nd Cavalry Group and other sources, following Captain Thomas M. Stewart and the German veterinarian Rudolf Lessing as they made first contact, the task force under Major Robert P. Andrews that secured the farm, and the slow evacuation of the horses under wartime constraints. He weighs later popular accounts, including the meeting between Alois Podhajsky and Patton, and notes that the name “Operation Cowboy” was applied only afterward, not as an official codename.

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Russell Moore asks whether the costliest battle between American and Japanese forces could have been fought differently. The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 offered a bloody preview of an invasion of the Japanese home islands, killing thousands of American soldiers, Marines, and sailors and wounding tens of thousands more. Moore reviews the criticism of Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commander of the Tenth Army, who rejected flanking amphibious landings and instead sent his troops into repeated frontal assaults against the Japanese defenses around Shuri in the south of the island. Buckner’s defenders argued that such landings risked an Anzio-style stalemate. Moore proposes another option: a strategy of isolation rather than annihilation, containing the Japanese in the south once the airfields and anchorages needed for the war against Japan were secure. Buckner, he concludes, followed his orders by the book, but more senior commanders should have considered isolation, which might have saved tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

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A history of SAARF, the multinational airborne force created in 1945 to monitor German POW camps and protect Allied prisoners during the war's final days.

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Bill Wilson examines the Soviet rifle corps of 1945, an echelon of the Red Army that remains little understood. German intelligence never fully grasped the structure of Soviet forces, and wartime misconceptions about “red hordes” and overwhelming numbers have lingered in popular memory. The sheer number of Soviet fronts, armies, and corps also makes them difficult to study. Wilson corrects a common misconception that the Red Army abolished the rifle corps in late 1941 for the rest of the war. The echelon nearly disappeared, but it was rebuilt from late 1942 as the wartime Soviet force structure matured. He explains the differences between regular rifle corps, guards rifle corps, and the short-lived light rifle corps, the official establishments that governed their organization, and the artillery, rocket, self-propelled gun, and anti-aircraft units that supported them. Wilson compares these establishments with the forces actually available in January 1945, when 112 regular and 40 guards rifle corps faced the Germans or stood in reserve.

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CSM Benjamin L. Arold argues that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, were not only military measures to end the war but strategic instruments for securing American dominance in the postwar world. At the Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman leveraged the atomic monopoly to strengthen the American negotiating position and move away from compromise with the Soviet Union. Arold contends that the bombings forced Japan’s surrender before Soviet forces could gain a significant foothold, while General Order Number 1 secured unilateral American control over occupied Japan and confined Soviet influence in the Pacific. He then traces how confidence in the atomic monopoly allowed the rapid demobilization of conventional forces and made nuclear deterrence the bedrock of U.S. national security. The bomb, he concludes, reshaped the global balance of power and ushered in a new era of strategy.

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A history of the Allied struggle to capture or contain German-held Atlantic and Channel ports after D-Day, from Cherbourg to the isolated fortress garrisons.

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Bill Wilson examines the Fulda Gap, the corridor in central West Germany where the U.S. Army expected the first battle of a Third World War to be fought. He opens with “Lariat Advance,” the alert code that sent American soldiers racing to their units in the early hours, never knowing whether the threat was real. Wilson explains the geography that made the gap a natural invasion route toward Frankfurt and the Rhine, and the responsibilities of the U.S. V Corps and its armored cavalry regiments, including the 11th and 14th, which watched the border from posts such as Observation Point Alpha, while VII Corps in Bavaria focused on the Hof Gap. He details the Soviet forces arrayed against them, including the 8th Guards Army, and the forces each side could bring to bear. Wilson then considers how such a battle might have unfolded. Whatever the outcome, he concludes, the battlefield would have been littered with thousands of destroyed armored vehicles, carnage suggested on a smaller scale by the 1973 battle in Israel’s Valley of Tears.

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The story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, sunk by Soviet submarine S-13 in January 1945 while carrying thousands of German refugees across the Baltic Sea.

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LtCol Richard Beil applies the doctrine of just war to the decision to invade Okinawa in 1945. He begins by setting out the just war tradition, which occupies the ground between pacifism and the realist view that anything is permitted in war, tracing it from Thucydides and Saint Augustine to modern Christian teaching. Beil explains the tradition’s criteria, including just cause, proportionality, the protection of noncombatants, and the requirement that all other means of ending a conflict be shown to be impractical or ineffective. He then examines the strategic debates that led to the Okinawa campaign, the presence of a large civilian population on the island, and the immense human cost of the battle. Beil gives particular attention to Admiral Chester Nimitz, questioning whether rivalry with MacArthur or a need to appear active drove an operation of doubtful necessity. Since Operation Starvation, the aerial mining campaign against Japanese shipping, was already underway, he argues the invasion should at least have been postponed.

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Paul S. Teague examines the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 and the collapse of Japan’s Kwangtung Army. He traces the Japanese garrison in Manchuria from its origins after the Russo-Japanese War through the creation of the Kwangtung Army in 1919, whose officers saw themselves as guardians of Japan’s frontier against Russia. Led by figures such as Ishiwara Kanji, they engineered the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and created the puppet state of Manchukuo, bringing Japan face to face with the Soviet Union in a series of border clashes that culminated at Nomonhan in 1939. As the Pacific War drained the Kwangtung Army of its best units, it became a hollow force. When the Soviet Union declared war on 9 August 1945, Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky’s three fronts overwhelmed its poorly trained and equipped defenders. Teague shows how Tokyo’s leaders came to realize the army was hopeless and concludes that the invasion and the Kwangtung Army’s defeat at least contributed to Japan’s decision to surrender.

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An operational history of the U.S. Third Army's 1945 border, liberation, and occupation missions in western Czechoslovakia, including the advance to Plzen.

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Part one of a day-by-day Korean War chronology covering 1950, from North Korea's invasion through the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, and Chinese intervention.

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The end of World War II led to a dramatic reduction of American military forces worldwide. While requirements to sustain soldiers in occupied countries existed, the offensive campaigns of World War II had ended, and America wanted its soldiers home. Post-World War II demobilization left the United States with a total of 590,000 soldiers, down from 1.9 million soldiers in 1946 (Longabaugh, 2014). Executive leaders continued to deliver poor strategic decisions in the Far East theater in hopes of preventing another conflict. False confidence in U.S. air superiority and nuclear deterrence led executive leaders to believe South Korea was safe from the North Korean invasion. As a result, force readiness deteriorated rapidly, and the South Korean Army and American forces with Task Force Smith were no match for the initial onslaught of North Korean and Chinese soldiers during the beginning of the Korean War. The article places the division’s difficulties within the broader choices made after the Second World War, when reconstruction, occupation duties, domestic priorities, and budget pressures competed with military readiness.

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An analysis of how MacArthur's overconfidence, dismissal of Chinese intervention warnings, and advance toward the Yalu shaped the Korean War and modern LSCO lessons.

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An analysis of how demobilization, inadequate training, weak equipment, and strategic misjudgment left U.S. forces unprepared when the Korean War began.

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"Mission command is the Army's approach to command and control that empowers subordinate decision making and decentralized execution appropriate to the situation" (Department of the Army [DA], 2019, p. 1-3). Army doctrine publication (ADP) 6-0 states that mission command relies on critical and creative thinking from subordinates that seize the initiative to develop plans and concepts to accomplish the mission (DA, 2019). Additionally, the mission command process requires leaders who understand and assume the appropriate risk levels to operations, not risk-averse or risk-tolerant. The Battle of Chosin Reservoir highlights some positive and negative takeaways of mission command from both the Chinese and American sides. The battle also spotlights where mission command and other components of mission command did not occur, causing blind spots leading to the withdrawal of United Nations (UN) forces from northern Korea. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Battle of Chosin Reservoir and analyze the successes and failures United States (US) Army's approach to mission command principles, the elements of command and control (C2), and the C2 warfighting function.

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Perceptions of Victory: Differing Views of Success by Nations and Echelons at the Chosin Reservoir

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An examination of artillery and forward observers in the Korean War, explaining how observation, communications, and fire direction supported infantry operations.

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Part two of a detailed Korean War chronology recording U.S. deaths and major operations throughout 1951 as the conflict shifted toward stalemate.

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A history of Egypt's Liberation Battalions and auxiliary police in their 1951–54 guerrilla struggle against British forces in the Suez Canal Zone.

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An account of the October 1952 Battle of White Horse Mountain, where South Korea's 9th Division repeatedly contested Hill 395 against China's 38th Army.

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Edward J. Langer reexamines the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and asks whether Nikita Khrushchev was bluffing about Soviet nuclear strength. The crisis began when a U-2 reconnaissance flight over Cuba photographed launch sites under construction for offensive missiles. Langer explains that Khrushchev feared the United States held a commanding lead in nuclear-armed missiles aimed at the Soviet Union and sought to even the odds by placing intermediate-range missiles and support troops in Cuba, shipping them under false cargo documents. He describes the backdoor talks between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that resolved the crisis, with the Soviets removing their missiles in return for the later removal of American Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey. Langer notes that Khrushchev seemed to give up his position too easily, and he examines the Soviet missiles available at the time, the R-7, R-12, and R-14, including the limitations of the R-7, which required nearly a full day to prepare and could not remain on the launch pad for long.

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David Pennington assesses the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, fought from November 1953 to May 1954, which the writer Jules Roy called one of the greatest disasters in Western history. Pennington argues that the French had no clear objective, ignored conventional theories of warfare, relied too heavily on air power, and underestimated their adversary. He traces the Navarre Plan, in which General Henri Navarre chose the remote valley as a “mooring point” for offensive operations that would engage Vietminh units, cut General Vo Nguyen Giap’s supply routes, and bar the road to Laos. Pennington shows how the Vietminh placed artillery in concealed, fortified positions on the surrounding heights, shattered the strongpoint at Beatrice in the first moments of their attack, and soon made the airstrip unusable. He also questions Navarre’s choice of Colonel de Castries as commander. Although the Vietminh suffered far heavier casualties, the French lost the battle and the war; as Ho Chi Minh had predicted, the conflict was decided politically.

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Mike Nastasi examines the role of air power in the Vietnam War, a conflict that served as a testing ground for new technology, weapons, and tactics. American involvement in the air war lasted more than fifteen years, from training and advising the South Vietnamese Air Force to the Christmas bombing of 1972, and drew on the air components of all four services. Nastasi follows the Rolling Thunder campaign against North Vietnam and the effort to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the use of aircraft such as the F-4 Phantom, A-6 Intruder, F-105 Thunderchief, and B-52 Stratofortress, and the arrival of the attack helicopter as a vital new weapon. He then turns to the Linebacker campaigns under President Richard Nixon and their role in bringing North Vietnam to negotiate. Nastasi weighs the arguments over the air war’s effectiveness against its cost: more than 8,500 aircraft lost and hundreds of pilots and aircrews killed. Ironically, the last American aircraft over Vietnam was a Marine helicopter evacuating the embassy guards from Saigon in 1975.

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Sergeants Major Clayton Dos Santos and Dale J. Dukes, with James Perdue, examine the Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965, considered by many the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese Army. In October 1965, Major General Harry W. O. Kinnard of the 1st Cavalry Division saw North Vietnamese forces moving west toward the Cambodian border and identified the rugged Chu Pong Massif as likely enemy territory. The authors follow the airmobile assault ordered by Colonel Tim Brown, in which Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore Jr.’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, landed by helicopter at Landing Zone X-Ray in the face of a large, well-trained enemy who knew the terrain. They trace the key decisions and actions of the fighting, the American reliance on fire support and close air support, and the battle’s cost: 79 Americans killed and 121 wounded in less than 72 hours, against far heavier North Vietnamese losses. The battle’s lesson, they conclude, is that technology and training must be matched by a refusal to underestimate the enemy.

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Mike Nastasi tells the story of the Wild Weasels, the American aircrews whose job was to find and destroy North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites. Early in the war the U.S. Air Force enjoyed almost complete freedom in the skies over Vietnam, until Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline missiles abruptly challenged that dominance. The Air Force responded by dedicating aircraft and men to the SAM threat. Often the only way to locate a missile site was to draw its fire, so Weasel missions were among the most dangerous of the war. Nastasi traces the evolution from F-100F Super Sabres fitted with radar warning equipment to the F-105 Thunderchief, armed with AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation missiles and eventually developed into the dedicated F-105G. He profiles aviators such as Colonel George Acree, who flew more than 200 missions over North Vietnam, and Major Leo Thorsness, who received the Medal of Honor. The Weasels’ tactics and equipment, he concludes, paved the way for the modern suppression of enemy air defenses.

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MSG Jeremy C. Sims analyzes Operation Junction City through the lens of joint planning and the elements of operational art and design. One of the largest operations of the Vietnam War, it was conducted by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from February 22 to May 14, 1967, in Tay Ninh Province near the Cambodian border. More than 20,000 troops took part, including four U.S. infantry divisions and two airborne brigades, and the operation opened with the Army’s largest airborne assault since the Korean War. Its aim was to dismantle Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces and disrupt the supply lines and communications that fed them through Cambodia and Laos. Sims examines how planners defined the operation’s ends, ways, and means, identified friendly and enemy centers of gravity, and organized lines of operation and lines of effort, including the logistical bases that sustained the force. He concludes that sound joint planning synchronized U.S. and host-nation capabilities and proved invaluable to the operation’s success.

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John M. Rincon analyzes the effects of Vietnamization, the program begun in 1969 to withdraw American combat troops and transfer the war to the armed forces of South Vietnam. He argues that the plan was disjointed and ill-conceived, and tests its results through three pivotal operations: the combined U.S.-ARVN incursion into Cambodia in 1970, the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in February 1971, and the Communist Easter Offensive of 1972. Each, he shows, exposed weaknesses the program never repaired: inadequate training, the lack of basic military criteria for promoting officers and noncommissioned officers, and morale that never matched the enemy’s. By 1972 congressional limits allowed U.S. forces only to help the South Vietnamese react. Vietnamization achieved its single goal of removing American combat troops, Rincon concludes, but failed the South Vietnamese army where it most needed leadership, training, and morale.

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Terry McIntosh offers a firsthand perspective on the Green Beret Affair from his service with Special Forces Detachment A-414 at Thanh Tri in the Mekong Delta in 1968–1969. His camp, a stone’s throw from the Cambodian border, also hosted a secret intelligence network operating “over the fence” into Cambodia as part of Project Gamma, run by three men from the B-57 intelligence office under cover names. One of them, “Captain Martin,” was Robert Marasco, who later became the central figure in the affair. McIntosh describes the camp, the men who ran the network, and how the Vietnamese agent Thai Khac Chuyen, suspected of being a double agent, came to work there after the team’s translators had been killed or wounded. He follows the events that led to Chuyen’s execution and the murder charges brought against Marasco, Colonel Robert Rheault, and six other officers. Reflecting on the affair, McIntosh argues that soldiers must make real-time decisions in war and that the American presence in Vietnam accomplished more good than it is often given credit for.

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Bob Seals introduces the “Green Beret Affair” of 1969, one of the most controversial and least understood episodes of the Vietnam War. Seals explains how U.S. Army Special Forces working with the Central Intelligence Agency came to suspect that Thai Khac Chuyen, a Vietnamese agent in the intelligence effort known as Project GAMMA, was a Communist double agent, and how Chuyen was executed in the summer of 1969. He profiles Colonel Robert B. Rheault, the respected commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, who was arrested with other officers on charges of premeditated murder. Seals follows the investigation and legal proceedings until Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor dropped all charges after the CIA, citing national security, refused to make its personnel available. Whether Chuyen was truly a traitor may never be known, Seals concludes, but the affair illustrates the moral ambiguity of unconventional warfare and the principle that even elite forces remain subject to military justice.

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Major Jeremiah S. Boenisch argues that the 1970 Cambodian Incursion, often portrayed as a strategic failure, was in fact a success. On 1 May 1970, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces launched a ground and air offensive into neutral Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries used for raids into South Vietnam. The American ground operation lasted sixty days, overlapped by Allied air strikes and a longer South Vietnamese incursion. Boenisch sets the scene: stalled peace talks, Henry Kissinger’s deadlocked secret negotiations, and the ouster of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by Lon Nol. He follows President Richard Nixon’s decision to authorize General Creighton Abrams to strike the sanctuaries, operations into the Parrot’s Beak, and the political restrictions imposed after the Kent State shootings. The incursion killed thousands of enemy soldiers and captured unprecedented quantities of materiel. Boenisch concludes that it severed enemy supply lines, supported the withdrawal of American troops, restored U.S. credibility, and demonstrated the progress of Vietnamization.

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Bryan Dickerson, a Navy veteran who served at Al Asad Air Base in 2005 and again in 2009–2010, traces the base’s history and its role in Operation Desert Storm. From 2004 until 2011, Al Asad, in Iraq’s western Al Anbar Province, was one of the most important coalition air bases of Operation Iraqi Freedom, operated mainly by the U.S. Marine Corps. Its story began in the mid-1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s government had Yugoslav contractors build the base, originally named Al Qadisiyah, drawing on lessons learned in the Iran-Iraq War. Dickerson describes its design, including hardened aircraft shelters that were among the most resilient in any air force, and the squadrons of MiG-25 and MiG-29 fighters based there. He then follows the coalition air campaign of 1991, in which aircraft braved concentrated anti-aircraft fire to strike the base with precision-guided bombs and missiles, demolishing its shelters within a few days and knocking its Iraqi Air Force units out of the war. Concrete and steel, he concludes, proved no match for precision-guided munitions.

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Sergeant Major Clayton Dos Santos examines the Battle of 73 Easting, one of the most important tank battles of the 1991 Gulf War, in which the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment engaged the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. He first sets the battle in context, tracing the events of July 1990 that preceded Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2 and the coalition buildup of Operation Desert Shield. Dos Santos then follows the regiment’s Ghost, Eagle, and Iron Troops as they advanced through sandstorms and high winds into Iraqi defenses arrayed along the map grid line that gave the battle its name. Thermal sights and other advanced equipment allowed American crews to detect and destroy the enemy in poor visibility, navigate without landmarks, and seize the initiative. Drawing on accounts such as H. R. McMaster’s, he concludes that realistic training, confident soldiers, mission command, and technological superiority combined to make 73 Easting an enduring example of best practices in military operations.

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MSG Garrett D. Roberson Jr. examines the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, one of the most intense urban battles of modern times, through the principles of mission command and the elements of command and control. Mission command rests on decentralized execution, empowering subordinates to exercise disciplined initiative within the commander’s intent. Roberson shows how Major General William F. Garrison set a clear intent for the raid to capture two key lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and how the operation was transformed when the MH-60 Black Hawk Super 61 was shot down over the city, followed by Super 64. He examines how leaders on the ground adapted to the chaos that followed, as well as the failures that compounded the danger, including a ground convoy that lacked clear directions to the target and relied on observers overhead to guide it through roadblocks and ambushes. The battle, he concludes, shows both the power of mission command and the need for continuous assessment and adjustment.

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Alexandros Boufesis examines Operation Deliberate Force, NATO’s 1995 air campaign that helped end the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After Bosnia declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić besieged Sarajevo, and the UN-designated “safe areas” proved anything but safe while NATO aircraft enforced Operation Deny Flight. The fall of Srebrenica and Žepa in July 1995, and the massacre at Srebrenica, became a wake-up call for leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Boufesis traces how NATO expanded its mission into a sustained air campaign that began on August 30, 1995, using aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles against Bosnian Serb targets. He shows how this military pressure, combined with the diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke, lifted the siege of Sarajevo and produced the Dayton Accords. Boufesis also considers the campaign’s wider consequences, presenting it as a prelude to Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999 and as a moment that reshaped NATO’s role after the Cold War.

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Jorge A. Rivera examines the tension between national sovereignty and the international responsibility to protect civilians, using NATO’s intervention in Kosovo as his case study. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, he notes, raise the question of when other nations may legally and morally intervene in a sovereign state. Rivera traces the historical roots of conflict in the Balkans and the rise of Slobodan Milošević, whose Serbian forces cracked down on the ethnic Albanian population and the Kosovo Liberation Army. He follows the escalating violence, including the massacre at Račak, the failed negotiations at Rambouillet, and the launch of Operation Allied Force on 24 March 1999. Rivera then examines the legal arguments for intervention, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, and applies an ethical decision framework using three different moral lenses. He concludes that international law mattered, but moral obligation played a major part, and that the United States and NATO were justified in acting to stop the persecution of Kosovo’s Albanians.

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MSG James F. Seifert Jr. examines how the contemporary operational environment of Afghanistan shaped the U.S. military and how those years may affect its readiness for future large-scale combat operations. For more than twenty years, American and NATO forces fought there with superior tactics, weapons, and numbers, yet relentless adversaries using primitive means combined with modern weapons were able to match or even overpower them at times. The enemy wore no uniforms and could be a farmer by day and a fighter by night. Seifert describes the conventional, unconventional, regular, and irregular elements of the environment and examines how mission command allowed leaders to adapt and provide real-time feedback to higher echelons. He argues that adversaries used the years America spent in the Middle East to learn, train, and modernize their own armies. The U.S. military, he concludes, must modernize quickly, adapt to new force structures, and apply the principles of war to prepare for the next fight.

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Cregg Cannon examines Operation Anaconda, fought in the Shah-i-Khot Valley of eastern Afghanistan from 2 to 10 March 2002, the first major ground battle of the Afghanistan War and an early test of the Army’s emerging philosophy of mission command. Planners under Major General Franklin Hagenbeck designed a hammer-and-anvil operation in which Afghan forces under commander Zia Lodin would sweep the valley floor and drive a small, demoralized enemy into American blocking positions. Instead, U.S. soldiers met between 700 and 1,000 well-prepared al-Qaeda fighters dug into the surrounding heights. Unreliable partner forces, flawed intelligence, and poor joint coordination caused the plan to collapse almost at once. Cannon shows how leaders at every level relied on commander’s intent, shared understanding, prudent risk, and disciplined initiative to adapt under fire, while special operations teams on Takur Ghar helped rebuild situational awareness. Their adaptability, he concludes, turned a near-disaster into a hard-won victory and helped embed mission command in Army culture.

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Jeff Blanchard examines Operation Vigilant Resolve, the First Battle of Fallujah in April and May 2004, and argues that it was a turning point in the Iraq War. Launched hastily in response to the murder of four American security contractors, the operation went ahead even though commanders on the ground considered it inappropriate. Blanchard traces the background factors that hampered American planning and preparation, and the difficult street fighting in which Marines and Iraqi forces achieved real tactical successes. He shows how the coalition lost the information battle as Arab news outlets, including Al Jazeera, broadcast images of civilian casualties and destruction, and how that pressure led to a cease-fire and to Lieutenant General James Conway’s plan for a local Fallujah Brigade. The result was a strategic and political failure that fed instability across Iraq until forces launched Operation Phantom Fury against the city later that year. Blanchard closes by honoring the Marines and Fallujah’s suffering civilians.

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SGM Rene O. Aleman recounts a lesson in adaptability from his deployments to Iraq, where he was occasionally attached to a Military Transition Team, one of the small teams of U.S. advisors embedded with Iraqi security forces. As a Power Generation Equipment Repairer, Aleman had been trained to rebuild the Army’s standard generators in his sleep, and his task was to keep the generators at Iraqi Police checkpoints running. At the very first checkpoint, he found an aging French generator, and at the next, a German-made unit. Their control panels looked like the cockpits of 1920s aircraft, and he had neither the manuals nor the parts for such equipment. Aleman describes how he set aside the Army’s instructions, relied on the fundamental physics of engines, improvised repairs with whatever parts were at hand, and built trust with his Iraqi counterparts over cups of tea. The experience, he concludes, taught him that common ground and calm problem-solving can overcome barriers of language, culture, and training.

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Cregg Cannon examines the Battle of Wanat on July 13, 2008, one of the most scrutinized small-unit engagements of the Afghanistan War. That morning, soldiers of Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, fought off an intense, coordinated insurgent attack on Combat Outpost Kahler in the Waygal Valley. Cannon analyzes the battle through the principles of mission command. He shows how the outpost’s construction exposed structural vulnerabilities, including unfinished defenses, limited resources, incomplete intelligence, and terrain that favored the attackers. These systemic failures accumulated quietly, Cannon argues, and brought the outpost close to being overrun. Yet the battle is also a story of what went right. The paratroopers fought with courage, trusted one another, and acted on their own initiative, holding the position when everything around them seemed to fail at once. Wanat, he concludes, stands as both a warning about accumulated risk and a tribute to its defenders.

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SGM Lucas W. Pedigo tells how his distribution platoon in Afghanistan solved a problem that was crippling its supply runs. In the winter of 2010–2011, Distro Platoon of Company E, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, ran combat logistics patrols across Paktika Province to infantry companies on distant outposts. On the unimproved roads linking Forward Operating Base Sharana to Khushamand and Waza K’wah, covering fifty miles in twelve hours was normal, and the worst obstacles were the wadis, dry riverbeds whose loose sand swallowed heavy vehicles. A single crossing could take eight hours, leaving convoys exposed to insurgent attack. As the platoon sergeant, Pedigo noticed rolls of woven access mats lying unused near the airfield at Sharana and recognized their potential. The platoon practiced a repeatable method, assigned clear roles, and laid the mats across the worst crossing, cutting the crossing time to just over an hour. The episode, he concludes, shows how doctrine’s planning tools can help small units out-think the terrain and the enemy.

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LtCol Richard Beil argues that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was the “patient zero” of the current conflict in Ukraine. Borrowing the epidemiological term for the first carrier of a disease, Beil contends that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Brzezinski was the most strident anti-Russian voice in the American foreign policy establishment, louder even than Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski, he writes, saw Russia’s problem not as one leader but as a permanent tendency toward expansionism and insecurity rooted in its history. Beil traces the influence of Sir Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory on Brzezinski’s thinking and the strategy set out in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard , which Beil reads as a plan to encircle Russia, weaken it economically, and gain access to its natural resources through NATO enlargement. Beil concludes that the war in Ukraine must be understood through this thirty-year strategy, and that any national leader has an obligation to protect his country.

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William E. Butler II explains how the Army Design Methodology can help leaders understand complex situations, using the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as his example. The methodology is a systematic approach to understanding, visualizing, and describing problems, and it begins with framing the operational environment by identifying the key actors, relationships, and dynamics that could affect a mission. Butler describes the operational variables planners use to build that picture and argues that framing the environment carefully before any American or European intervention is essential to success in large-scale combat operations. He contends that Russian planners failed to apply these principles before invading Ukraine, placing little faith in their tactical leaders and suffering a protracted war and heavy losses. The U.S. Army, Butler concludes, should learn from these mistakes, and senior enlisted leaders in particular must understand the methodology to help commanders anticipate challenges and integrate design into planning and training.

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Dr. Robert Nelson and SGM Benjamin Pingel analyze Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, launched on August 6, 2024, the first conventional ground invasion and sustained occupation of Russian territory by a foreign military since the Second World War. Many analysts had believed drones, sensors, minefields, and precision fires had locked the war into positional deadlock. Yet Ukraine’s 80th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades and 22nd and 61st Mechanized Brigades breached the border defenses and seized more than a thousand square kilometers, including the gas metering hub of Sudzha, within two weeks. The authors examine the campaign through the Army’s warfighting functions, tracing how command, maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection shaped its course. Russia’s response, including glide-bomb attacks, North Korean troops, and fiber-optic drones that could not be jammed, gradually reversed the gains. The lesson, they conclude, is that surprise and tactical skill cannot permanently overcome shortfalls in mass, logistics, protection, and air defense.

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An exploration of Douglas MacArthur's lifelong connection to baseball and how the game's strategy offers insight into his island-hopping approach to warfare.

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Walter S. Zapotoczny uses Carl von Clausewitz’s “paradoxical trinity” to compare American experience in the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Clausewitz described war as driven by three tendencies: primordial violence, hatred, and hostility, associated mainly with the people; the subordination of war to policy, associated with the government; and the play of chance and probability, associated with the commander and the army. Drawing on Michael Handel’s idea that the nature of war is the “vector” produced by these shifting forces, Zapotoczny shows how they shaped each conflict. After Pearl Harbor, the people, government, and military were closely united, creating a national spirit of confidence. In Vietnam, rising troop levels, conscription, and television images that brought the war into American homes pulled the vector toward the passions of the people and away from the government and military. The result, he argues, was a national spirit that questioned government and retreated from engagement in foreign affairs.

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A survey of Constantinople's strategic geography and evolving fortifications, from ancient defensive walls to the Byzantine capital's role between Europe and Asia.

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Jeff Lillard examines one of the oldest strategies for controlling contested territory: building networks of fortified posts embedded among civilian populations. He compares three examples. Roman frontier forts, including those along Hadrian’s Wall, served as surveillance and patrol hubs and contributed to centuries of relative stability on imperial borders. The Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam sought to concentrate rural populations in fortified villages to deny the Viet Cong support, but it collapsed after the 1963 coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Lillard shows that the 2007 surge in Iraq succeeded in part because Sunni tribal leaders aligned with coalition forces, while Afghanistan lacked strong local institutions to sustain decentralized security. His conclusion is that fortifications can produce local security, but durable stability depends on the political relationships that connect them to the societies they serve.

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A history of combat trauma from shell shock and battle fatigue to the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder among service members and veterans.

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An exploration of contingency in military history showing how individual decisions, accidents, and small events altered battles, empires, and civilizations.

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HD Bedell offers a wide-ranging study of geopolitics and its enduring relevance. In the twentieth century, he observes, geography was an essential element of national security, alongside industrial technology and strategic resources. Yet the qualitative factors of territorial integrity, social and political systems, historical perspective, and religion were the real determinants of vital interests, and statisticians did not make good strategists. Bedell traces the development of geopolitical thought, from early political geographers who saw the state as a living organism and the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel, through Sir Halford Mackinder’s Heartland theory and its critics such as Nicholas Spykman, to the German school of Geopolitik associated with Karl Haushofer. He then applies these ideas to the late twentieth century, examining Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing influence of its defense-industrial interests. Bedell concludes that geography and history still shape how states, Russia above all, perceive their security and ambitions.

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An analysis of logistics as a defining element of the Western way of war, examining how supply, transport, organization, and resources enable military dominance.

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SGM Antonio V. M. Pires, SGM Fabio Lusiani, and Mr. Robert Shawlinski of the Sergeants Major Academy offer a practical guide to the Correlation of Forces for senior leaders. In the military decision-making process, planners developing courses of action must assess relative combat power by comparing the strength, capability, and effectiveness of friendly and enemy forces. Doctrine treats this assessment as a starting point, but the authors argue that a fuller Correlation of Forces analysis produces better plans. They explain the Army’s methodology as a blend of measurable science and the art of experience and judgment. Using the calculator in the MDMP Trainer app, they show how Force Equivalents adjust raw ratios for unit capability and how scenario-specific loss estimation models refine the picture, in one example revealing that an apparently superior attacking force is actually outmatched. Artificial intelligence and decision-support tools can assist, they conclude, but senior leaders must understand the principles behind the numbers to interpret the results and make sound, timely decisions.

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A history of Puerto Rico's 65th Infantry Regiment, the Borinqueneers, from the island's military traditions through distinguished service in the Korean War.

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Addison Hart follows the political and military struggles that ended Rome’s republican order and brought Octavian to power. Individual personalities drive much of the narrative, from Caesar’s early career through the rivalries that followed his assassination. Alliances offered temporary advantages but also created new conflicts, while victories in the field changed the balance of influence within Roman politics. Hart examines the roles of Antony, Lepidus, Octavian, and their associates in a contest where personal survival and control of the state became inseparable. The account culminates in Octavian’s defeat of his remaining rivals and the establishment of imperial authority. Its central subject is therefore the collapse of the Republic and the rise of a new political system. Readers receive a narrative of ambition, war, and shifting loyalties that explains how military success could remove opponents while also transforming the institutions through which Rome had previously been governed.

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MSG Christopher S. Patel examines the South China Sea as a regional struggle with global consequences. The Chinese Communist Party, he argues, faces a containment problem: physical and geopolitical barriers, beginning with the First Island Chain running from Southeast Asia through the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, stand in the way of its ambitions to become a global economic superpower and the preeminent military power in Asia. No issue captures this better than the South China Sea, where China’s Nine-Dash Line claim conflicts with the maritime claims of six other governments. Patel traces how China has pressed that claim through small-scale military clashes, the intimidation of foreign fishing vessels, and the creation of military bases on artificial islands built on reefs and atolls while ignoring an international tribunal ruling against it. He weighs the responses of other powers and warns that adding more military force may increase volatility. Patel concludes that China will not abandon its claim and is prepared to push challengers to the brink of war.

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A history of pioneering women who nursed soldiers before Clara Barton, tracing the long development of battlefield medicine and organized wartime care.

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Part one of a history of the New York Naval Militia, tracing its conceptual roots to Benedict Arnold's Lake Champlain fleet and modern homeland security.

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Part two of the New York Naval Militia's history, covering its 1891 founding, Spanish-American War service, legal status, and homeland-security mission.

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Part three of the New York Naval Militia series, tracing militia traditions from medieval Europe through colonial America and George Washington's service.

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Total war refers to a type of warfare in which there are no limitations on the methods or means employed to ensure victory. The foundation of this concept of competition are the disregards of traditional boundaries, involving unrestricted use of weapons, targeting of territories, and engagement of combatants without distinction. In total war, the pursuit of strategic objectives often takes precedence over adherence to the established rules and conventions governing warfare, including the laws of war. The scale of destruction extends beyond military targets to impact civilian populations, infrastructure, and resources, reflecting a comprehensive mobilization of all available societal, economic, and military assets toward the war effort. This peculiar form of war has accompanied the history of humankind from the ancient times into the present day (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.). Ancient civilizations began the process of turning war into a thorough social undertaking, with significant improvements during the Middle Ages, and further refinement during the global conflicts of the 20th century.

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