Volume 86, Number 2 · April 2022

Ancient authors frequently refer to Roman victories as bloodless or as having been achieved without the loss of a single Roman soldier. Modern scholars have tended to dismiss such claims as propaganda or have not fully explored the history or consequences of such celebration. This article considers the history of Rome’s promotion of bloodless victories, concern over war losses, and the consequences for Rome’s army and imperial endeavors.

Where scholars have emphasized the regimental fraternity in Britain’s late eighteenth-century army, this article shifts attention to soldiers’ civilian attachments. It points out that army regulation restricting servicemen’s ability to visit and provide for their kin can be seen as an attempt to erase their former civilian identities. The article’s goal is to demonstrate how the rank and file resisted these policies. They continued to desire marriage and male provisioning roles in violation of century-long regulations. They persisted in asserting their connections to the communities they left, and they forced the army to recognize their civilian identities and explore policies that ran counter to its “social death” strategy.

During the War of 1812, the British Royal Navy attempted to transport four prefabricated warships in pieces from England to be reassembled for service on Lake Ontario. Of the four, only the 56-gun frigate HMS Psyche completed its journey. This paper explores the historical and technical background of this project and reconstructs how British and Canadian seamen, militia, and private contractors hauled a deconstructed warship up the St. Lawrence River, often within cannon range of the American shore. Once regarded as an example of the imbecility of the British Admiralty, a closer look reveals a clearer picture of the capabilities and institutional limitations of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Era.

This essay looks at the activities of the Bavarian, Saxon, and Württemberg military plenipotentiaries stationed at German General Headquarters during the First World War. Prior to unification, Germany’s most powerful monarchs signed a series of agreements that created a contingent-based army. Managing relations between the army’s contingents thereafter became the responsibility of the military plenipotentiaries. Examining their activities reveals that the wartime German army, despite the centralizing pressures created by a multi-front war of attrition, remained a federal institution in which sub-national interests could at times be marginalized, but never altogether ignored. Germany’s military federalism remained alive and well, at least until the empire’s “de-crowning” in the autumn of 1918.

The 1916–1917 Punitive Expedition by the United States into Mexico had two initial goals: dispersing the bands of Pancho Villa and improving border security. While historians have debated the outcome of the campaign, this article argues that the expedition failed, primarily because of President Woodrow Wilson’s conduct of civil-military relations. Throughout the Punitive Expedition, Wilson deferred too much to his military commanders, namely Major General Frederick Funston and Brigadier General John J. Pershing. He needlessly extended the U.S. presence in Mexico and failed to link policy aims to the use of military force.

During the ten years following the armistice in Korea, the U.S. Army described its basic training for enlisted male soldiers as a process that transformed civilians into men tough enough to withstand the rigors of a war with the Soviet Union. There was, however, during these years great dissatisfaction with this program. Critics both inside and outside the service found a variety of faults, but the one most frequently cited was the quality of officers and sergeants assigned to shepherd recruits through the transition from civilian to soldier. Despite frequently praising the drill instructor concept used in Marine Corps basic training, senior army officers refused to adapt it for use in their service’s training centers. Effective change, in the form of the drill sergeant program, would come only after intervention into a core military function by Cyrus R. Vance and Stephen Ailes, successive secretaries of the army.