This chapter turns to the accounts of the campaigns of the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 BC), followed by those of the Warring States Period (475–221 BC) that ended with the creation of the first imperial state in China in 221 BCE, and finally the campaigns that created, maintained, lost, restored and then permanently lost the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). War for rulers, generals and statesmen required them to devise and execute strategies that were not ideal, often failed, and seldom accommodated higher moral values. This reality was portrayed clearly in most of the histories, even in the stylised and moralised anecdotes that are often all that is left to us.

Napoleon is widely admired as a military strategist who embraced the violence of modern war and understood the potential of mass armies. Yet he wrote little about the practice of strategy beyond a few rather bland maxims, claiming to rely on offence and opportunism on the battlefield. But these offensive tactics had a strategic purpose. He sought to crush his opponents in decisive battles, not just to destroy enemy armies but to impose his will in the peace talks that followed. As First Consul and later as Emperor he channelled the resources of the state to the cause of military success and imperial expansion. His goal was political as much as it was military, mobilising all the resources of the Empire in its pursuit. Napoleon conscripted mass armies in the lands he conquered, imposed French-style administrative systems, and imposed taxes and customs duties. He was focused on Europe, where the other powers developed their own strategies to counter him, repeatedly forging alliances to defend their sovereignty and to thwart his imperial ambitions. Each country had its own war aims. Russia looked to expand into the Balkans, Prussia to conquer Poland, and Britain to consolidate its colonial presence overseas.

The Mansfeld Regiment was raised in Dresden in early 1625, traveled to northern Italy later that year, and collapsed in 1627. The conflict that brought it to Italy was one part of the wider Thirty Years War, as well as an ongoing struggle between Spain and France over the Valtelline.

After the US Civil War, technology, expertise, and surplus materiel flowed out into the Pacific World where it was adopted by “self-strengthening” movements in Peru, Chile, China, and Japan. As leaders in the Pacific faced the threat of North Atlantic maritime power, they sought to leverage technological and tactical advances pioneered in the US Civil War. In doing so, these four states transformed in a matter of years from “navies to construct” into “newly made navies”: industrial fleets, built from little or no naval infrastructure, leveraging recent technological innovations. This chapter also explores how newly made Pacific navies performed in the War against Spain (1864–1866), the Boshin War (1868–1869), and the Japanese Expedition to Taiwan (1874). Contemporaneously, US postwar demobilization created moments of parity between the US “Old Steam Navy” and Pacific states. Most histories frame the post-Civil War period as one of US naval retrenchment and stagnation, but when framed in a transwar context, the Pacific becomes a laboratory of US-inspired innovation.

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

Chapter 2 relates the shocking death of Elmer Ellsworth, the effect it had on his men, and the regiment’s first battle experience at Bull Run. Conflicting accounts emerged in the aftermath of the fight: some positive, heralding the Fire Zouaves’ reckless bravery; but many others were damning, painting a portrait of the men’s panic and fear.

Chapter 1 sets up the founding of the 11th New York and the heightened expectations put upon them from the start. It introduces their famed colonel, Elmer E. Ellsworth, who had dreams of reinventing the citizen soldiery with his Zouave drill. But he found that converting boisterous firemen into disciplined soldiers was not quite as easy as he had anticipated. Ellsworth struggled with challenges to his authority and harsh public scrutiny. The chapter ends just as the Fire Zouaves receive orders to embark for Alexandria, confident that success on the battlefield beckoned.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the West India Regiments in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean. It then introduces key concepts that will be used throughout the book, especially that of ’military spectacle’ (from Scott Myerly) as well as ’martial hybridity’, which is a take on Homi Bhabha’s formulation. The chapter goes on to argue that the Black soldiers of the regiments are an important but hitherto ignored feature in what Catherine Hall termed the ’war of representation’ that was fought over slavery and the image of people of African descent. It ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

Chapter 1 explores vessel-naming practices in the Imperial Japanese Navy and their connections to classical Japanese poetry. This connection linked navy vessels with a past aesthetic rooted linked to the Emperor and rooted in notions of Japan as a divine land.

The first chapter explores the new presence of the military in the city after the start of the war. It analyzes the militarization of civil society and the blend of increased prestige and tensions in civil–military relations characteristic of wartime. During the mobilization days, reactions in Prague resembled scenes in other European cities: streets buzzing with anxious agitation as crowds thronged army barracks and train stations. Increasingly ubiquitous gray uniforms delineated new visible wartime hierarchies. Contacts between soldiers and civilians sometimes led to violent clashes, especially prevalent around cafés and pubs. These locales were also hubs for spreading information in a context of increased censorship and military repression. General suspicion by the military authorities transformed Prague residents’ experience of the rule of law. The different facets of military mobilization and emergency measures in urban space are examined to contribute to the discussion on the nature of the Habsburg military wartime government.

Was the Cold War inevitable, and who is responsible for its outbreak? This chapter argues that, as the Second World War neared its end, Joseph Stalin was shopping for a great bargain with the Allies, in keeping with Russia's realpolitik tradition. While the details of Stalin's vision remain blurry, evidence from internal Soviet deliberations in 1944–45 points to a broadly imperial, nineteenth-century, conceptualization of the Soviet role in Europe. Stalin sought both power and legitimacy, and understood that the Americans could endorse or reject his postwar claims. He could and did measure his appetites in pursuit of legitimate gains—those that had Washington’s imprimatur. Despite his efforts to achieve legitimacy at Yalta, Stalin’s hopes for a Soviet–American agreement to divide the world soon began to run aground, largely owing to his own rapacity and bad faith.

The opening chapter provides the necessary context for both the development of British prize law and how law has, or has not, been treated in maritime strategic thinking. It provides a conceptual analysis of how and why law should be incorporated into maritime strategic thought. The conceptual part of the chapter argues that law and sea power cannot be divorced for two principal reasons. First, sea power is the vehicle through which a state is able to transform domestic maritime law into international maritime law. Second, the maritime strategic considerations of a nation drive negotiations over international maritime law in an attempt to either constrain, or expand, the rights of a sea power. The extent to which maritime nations are able to influence those negotiations depends on the relative qualities of their sea power.

This chapter charts soldiers’ journeys across the Western Front. Drawing on the concept of ‘place attachment’, it explains how men developed an emotional relationship with Belgium and France. Beginning with their arrival by boat, it narrates their experiences in ports, bases, and camps and from there through the countryside and towns to the frontlines. It follows this journey, investigating the processes by which English infantrymen explored and were exposed to the war zone. This allowed them to internalise and reconceptualise Belgium and France. Subtle psychological processes allowed men to familiarise the sights, sounds, and scents that they encountered. These were both conscious and unconscious products of both purposeful action and unconscious psychological mechanisms. Repeated exposure habituated soldiers to the sights, sounds, and scents that confronted them, even in the frontlines. Elsewhere, men made use of language to craft new narratives and to normalise the violence and death that surrounded them. They developed very personal relationships with landscapes, spaces, and places. The Western Front became the locus of important life experiences and memories and was littered with graves that represented personal and collective loss. The landscapes of Belgium and France became a metaphysical space as their features were increasingly associated with ideas of duty, German barbarity, and sacrifice.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Black Rhodesian soldiers’ loyalties – as opposed to motivations for initial enlistment – were premised upon a shared sense of professionalism. Inherent to this ethos was their soldierly prowess, honed through continuous training and operational experience, which was also co-constitutive of a deep, emotive sense of mutual obligation between fellow soldiers. Furthermore, these soldiers were socialised into a distinctive military culture, which created a powerful, emotive regimental loyalty that incorporated traditions to create an accentuated sense of in-group belonging and homogeneity that bound them to their regiment, and thereafter the wider army. professionalism and regimental loyalties of these troops ensured that they remained steadfast during combat and in the face of the surge in popularity of the nationalist challenge to white settler-colonial rule.

The Allied bet that they could reach Tunis ahead of Axis forces fell victim to hesitancy, delay, and confusion at the top of the French command, that communicated downward to subordinates. In a situation that combined uncertainty with pusillanimity in the French leadership, Axis forces flowed into Tunisia. The Allies viewed the resulting campaign as both costly and unnecessary. That said, the decision by the Axis leaders to defend Europe from Tunisia arguably made “Tunisgrad” more consequential than Stalingrad. It also marked an ambiguous entry of the hitherto Vichy French forces into an Allied coalition, that, in the view of French commander in chief Alphonse Juin, “erased the memory of Dunkirk.” Nevertheless, quickly exasperated by infighting between Gaullists and “Giraudists,” the Allies continued to suspect both the loyalty and the military potential of poorly armed French forces.

Chapter 2 provides a historical account of the development of tactical air power during the interwar period and World War II in Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. Air and ground force coordination has largely been ignored in peacetime, and only in combat has a sense of urgency arisen for developing and refining joint doctrine. Even then, the focus has been on defining air and ground command relationships and improving the coordination between an air force’s tactical air control systems (TACS) and the army’s air–ground systems (AAGS). These doctrinal efforts increased the efficiency of allocating and controlling air power to support ground operations. However, largely left unspoken and unwritten has been an understanding of why, how, and when tactical air power works. TAP theory answers these questions by asserting that air power’s asymmetric advantage is its ability to locate and attack massed and maneuvering armies. With air superiority secured, lethal air-to-ground forces threaten armies, causing them to disperse and hide. The enemy’s reaction, in turn, provides friendly ground forces an advantage in conducting both offensive and defensive operations. Unfortunately, a theory explaining the primary impact of air power in modern warfare has been absent until now.

This chapter examines the American War for Independence and the quest for sovereignty during and after the war. It reveals the shifting of American aims from “redress of grievances” to independence, and the shifting nature of George Washington’s strategy of protraction, moving from his “War of Posts” to his Fabian strategy. It also examines Britain’s “divide and conquer” strategy and “Southern strategy,” the global war, and the Southern campaign. It then tackles the Confederation period, the creation of Constitutional government, the economic strategy of America’s first grand strategist, Alexander Hamilton, and the Washington administration, including its Indian wars. The debate over tariffs began here: were they to protect industry or raise revenue? It concludes with the Adams administration and the Quasi-War with France.

This chapter traces the Army’s rehabilitation of its reputation in the wake of the Vietnam War. Two features were central to this transformation: the first was the advent of the All-Volunteer Force and the post-Vietnam reforms to Army training, equipment and doctrine. After a shaky start, the All-Volunteer Force’s success normalised the notion of soldiering as an occupation rather than an obligation, and reforms seemed to create a much more professional and competent force than the one that was wracked by unrest and uncertainty. Second, the Army’s performance in Operation Desert Storm affirmed this narrative of professionalism and competence. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the aftermath of the war. The celebrations that took place to welcome home Gulf War veterans stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II. Representing a crucial moment in the American public’s deepening veneration for US soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.