Volume 89, Number 3 · July 2025

This article investigates the disputed location of the Battle of Cynoscephalae, fought between the Romans and the Macedonians in 197 BCE, to suggest that the battle took place on a type of middle ground between flat plains and rugged heights. This middle ground, consisting of rolling hills and parallel ridges of modest height and steepness, proved to be the ideal terrain on which the flexible manipular legion could defeat the dense Macedonian phalanx. While the ancient literary sources suggest that the battle developed out of a chance encounter between the two forces, this article argues that the Roman commander, Titus Flamininus, deliberately chose the spot because of its topographical characteristics.

This study analyzes the process of creating military intelligence in the ninth century under King Louis the German of East Francia. Louis was constantly at war, both in civil wars against Carolingian relatives and against numerous peoples across his long eastern frontier. The king therefore needed to keep abreast of political and military situations in several theaters at once, and he devoted substantial effort to collecting as much intelligence as possible to facilitate military preparedness. In the absence of many dedicated intelligence documents, this study relies on annals, chronicles, charters, and more to elucidate what can be discerned about the functions of a long-past intelligence system.

In Kentucky during the Civil War, African Americans served as coerced laborers in the U.S. Army before they were embraced as free people or soldiers. Authorities impressed over 1,900 Black people to conduct hard labor for the military in direct opposition to the hopes and pursuits of African Americans seeking emancipation, civil rights, and racial equality. Kentucky thus demonstrates the army’s conflicting roles as liberator and racially oppressive. The U.S. Army made use of Black Kentuckians throughout the Civil War, but whether these men found themselves impressed enslaved laborers or free soldiers was shaped by the shifting calculus of military necessity.

During the Korean War, a doctrinal interservice debate within the armed forces over “close air support [CAS]”—the use of aircraft closely coordinated with ground personnel to attack enemy forces in close contact with friendly troops—spilled over into the popular press and congressional debates. While the U.S. Marine Corps emphasized CAS during World War II and the postwar period, the army and army air forces considered it far less important. Between 1945 and the end of the Korean War, this debate played out amidst the much larger “unification” struggle, in which the marine corps faced the very real threat of being reduced to a tiny branch of regimental-sized units with no combined arms capability. The public and Congress showed only a vague awareness of the differences between the marines’ and the air force’s use of airpower until they read frontline reporters’ praise for the marines’ use of CAS during the Korean War. The marines’ alleged prowess in this use of airpower entered congressional debates and bolstered efforts by the corps’ supporters to guarantee a minimum force structure for the marine corps in the Douglas Mansfield Act of 1952, making the U.S. Marine Corps the world’s only marine corps with substantial organic air forces.

Traditional accounts of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu focused on the clash of French and Vietnamese forces at the close of the Indochina War. They emphasize the local learning by the two combatants. This article examines the neglected role of the two great power sponsors of the Indochina War, the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Both sought to transfer operational concepts developed while fighting in Korea. While the French and the Viet Minh adopted much of the hardware and doctrine, the terms of this technology transfer and the local conditions favored the Vietnamese. Chinese advisors offered the Vietnamese a more effective combination of advice and assistance than the U.S. offered to the French.

Following the rise of an insurgency in Iraq, a struggling U.S. military eventually turned to counterinsurgency. In doing so, it focused on cultural awareness as one of the tools necessary for soldiers and marines to achieve their mission more effectively. To develop such cultural awareness, the military sought the insight and expertise of anthropologists, unwittingly lighting a spark that set the whole discipline ablaze and triggered the field’s most volatile controversy since the 1970s. While many anthropologists believed that they had moved beyond their previous—and what most of them considered questionable—association with the national security establishment, issues that had been put to rest since the end of the Vietnam War suddenly resurfaced, more contentious than ever, revealing a deep academic-military gap.