Volume 75, Number 1 · January 2011

The disastrous defeat of the Franks and their Syrian allies at the battle of Forbie in 1244 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Second Kingdom of Jerusalem. Forbie spelled the end of the Frankish capacity to launch a full-scale campaign with their own forces, leaving their kingdom’s survival dependent on the support of its Western allies and the power politics of its Muslim neighbours. This paper examines the battle and the armies of the Franko-Syrian coalition. The campaign’s events and the size of the Christian contingent demonstrate the prominent political and military role played by the Second Kingdom in Near Eastern politics up to 1244.

This article discusses the serial efforts made by Afghan rulers and governments, between the early nineteenth century and the present, to build modern regular armies and analyzes the reasons for the repeated failure of these efforts. Its context is the urgency of the current army reform programme being undertaken by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Afghanistan, which constitutes a key exit strategy for Western forces. The article situates the historical failure of military reform within the framework of a broader failure of state-building, and locates a central difficulty in successive Afghan governments’ strategies towards tribal power.

Countless writers have speculated on Robert E. Lee’s motivations for the Gettysburg campaign during the American Civil War. One significant factor has received less attention than others: the need to clear the Shenandoah Valley of occupying Union forces. This essay argues that the situation in the Shenandoah Valley was a key part of Lee’s conceptualization of the campaign and his analysis of its results. This perspective illuminates the issues of logistics and home front discontent that confronted Lee and made him begin planning his operation well before April 1863. It supports and broadens recent work highlighting the importance of logistics in the campaign.

This essay explores the U.S. military forces’ treatment of civilians in 1944 during the battle for Saipan, the first central Pacific island on which American forces encountered large numbers of civilians. Thousands of civilians, including Japanese and Korean migrants and “native” islander Chamorro and Carolinian peoples, died during the battle. The Pacific war literature overlooks the impact of the war on noncombatant island populations, preferring to focus on the actual fighting. This article extends the boundaries of the Pacific campaign’s military history to include the experience of civilians, contextualizing the debate within what John Dower has described as “war without mercy.”

This article addresses the reasons behind the rapid escalation of French security force and vigilante violence employed to suppress the Sétif uprising that broke out in colonial Algeria on VE-Day, 8 May 1945. Recourse to overwhelming military force to put down the uprising illustrated French capacity to terrorize Algerian civilians, but it should not conceal the structural weakness of the colonial state. Political initiative passed inexorably to France’s anticolonial opponents, precisely the outcome that state coercion was intended to avoid. Algeria’s nationalists may have lost the battle in May 1945, but, thanks to colonial authorities’ failings, they were already winning the war.

During 2008 and 2010 at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel, archaeologists excavating a stratigraphical layer that should have been filled solely with artifacts almost 3,000 years old unexpectedly recovered more than 213 spent cartridge cases, most likely dating from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Finding themselves unintentionally involved in the relatively new field of “battlefield archaeology” more usually conducted in the United States and Europe, the archaeologists analyzed the cartridge cases, attempted to reconstruct what had happened, and contributed additional information to historical accounts of the modern battle and of the Czechoslovakian arms deals with the Israelis in early 1948.

The Dacian wars of Domitian (84–89) and Trajan (101–102, 105–106) are here set within the strategic context of Roman involvement with the Lower Danubian region. A survey of developments from the late first century B.C. through the reign of Hadrian (117–138 A.D.) identifies this area as a real frontier problem that required (and received) planning, contrary to the views of deniers of Roman strategy. Roman failures on occasion are not a basis for denial of strategy. Roman geographical ignorance, a favorite tenet of the “no strategy” school, is shown for this frontier to be a false argument.