Thesis (Master of Military Art and Science)-Army Command and General Staff College, 2007. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Jan 12, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

This diplomatic and military history offers a new interpretation of the origins of the three fighting fronts during the final phase of the Cold War in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan. Vaguely remembered today as proxy wars on the periphery, in fact, these were protracted revolutionary civil wars and regional contests for the balance of power in which millions died, while at the same time they were central to global superpower confrontation. Analysis focuses on the strategy and policy of the United States. The chronology from 1975 to 1982 covers the Ford administration's covert action intervention in the Angolan Civil War, which came to grief at the hands of Cuban troops; Jimmy Carter's effort to conduct foreign policy based on principles, which ran foul of power considerations in Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Afghanistan; and Ronald Reagan's embrace of these wars early in his first term as part of the revival of U.S. strength in its competition with the Soviet Union. The principal argument is that, while generally undervalued as controversial small wars of dubious significance, these wars were in fact integral to U.S. experience of limited war during the Cold War following victory in World War II. In strategic terms, the main conclusion is that the U.S. restricted itself to conducting economy of force contingency operations in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan as a result of its costly struggles in Korea and Vietnam. Despite declaring these peripheral wars to be central to the Cold War, avoiding the costs of involving U.S forces directly in Third World conflicts and minimizing the risks of escalation with the Soviet Union were overriding political and military imperatives.

La guerre de Succession d'Espagne, dernière guerre du règne de Louis XIV, est marquée par une série de défaites retentissantes : Blenheim (1704, Bavière), Ramillies et Turin (1706, Brabant et Piémont), Audenarde (1708, Flandre). L’approche qualifiée de « nouvelle histoire-bataille » permet de relativiser la vision traditionnelle qui explique ces défaites par le talent supérieur de John Churchill, duc de Marlborough, et du prince Eugène de Savoie, affrontant des généraux français courtisans et incompétents. Cette approche met l’événement-bataille au centre de l’étude et en aborde tous les aspects : dimensions politique, stratégique et tactique ; logistique ; techniques du combat et expériences ressenties sur le champ de bataille ; onde de choc.On constate que la guerre au début du XVIIIe siècle est à bien des égards limitée : les armées dépendent de leurs sources d’approvisionnement. Eugène et Marlborough, par leur audace et leur talent, accélèrent le rythme des opérations, mais sans renverser cet état de fait : aucune bataille n’est individuellement « décisive » et la guerre de Succession d'Espagne reste une guerre d’attrition. Les batailles sont le lieu d’une expérience du combat singulière, où se voient portées à leur paroxysme l’ensemble des formes d’affrontement et de violence que comporte la guerre de l’époque. Enfin, l’image d’une bataille se dégage lentement. Les courtisans doivent comparer nouvelles officielles, correspondances privées et gazettes pour comprendre ce qui s’est passé. Le roi mène des enquêtes pour déterminer qui a bien agi et qui a démérité. En définitive, c’est aux écrivains et aux artistes de fixer l’image que la postérité aura de ces batailles. / The war of the Spanish Succession is the last war fought by Louis XIV. It begins with a succession of astonishing defeats: Blenheim (Bavaria, 1704), Ramillies and Turin (Brabant and Piedmont, 1706), Audenarde (Flanders, 1708). The method known as “new battle-history” lets us temper the traditional vision, which claims that French have been defeated because their armies where led by courtiers that faced two military geniuses: John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. This historiographic approach focuses on the battle as an event, and seeks to treat it in all its dimensions: political, strategic and tactical aspects; logistics; how soldiers fight and what they feel; shock wave.Early eighteenth-century warfare is in many ways limited: armies highly rely on their supply sources. Eugene and Marlborough, thanks to their audacity and their talent, are able to speed up the operations, but without changing the way war is fought. There is no single “decisive” battle: the war of the Spanish Succession remains as a war of attrition. Battles are rare and formidable events where a singular fighting experience takes place; all contemporary kinds of combat and violence are to be observed. The importance of a battle is not immediately obvious. Its image takes time to come out. Versailles’ courtiers need to compare official news, private letters, French or foreign gazettes, in order to understand what happened. The king conducts investigations to identify the generals and units that have served well, and those that have not. In the end, it is writers and artists who are in charge of fixing what image of these battles will be left for posterity.

This thesis shall identify the date origin of the composite bow within Mesopotamia and Elam. and both identify and quantify the design factors which lead to increased performance possible with composite construction. To accomplish this, the thesis begins by summarizing the problems and flaws that currently exist in the field of history as it applies specifically to archery and bow use. With problems identified, the thesis will then introduce the reader to the basics of bow mechanics, thereby laying the basis for physical testing. This in turn will empirically demonstrate flaws in the current iconographical method of bow identification. The thesis will then devise a new method for iconographic identification of composite construction that has greater proven accuracy, based upon proportional length, which will link extant artifacts with both physical test results and iconographic evidence. The reader shall then be led through a complete reevaluation of iconographical evidence for Mesopotamia and Elam starting at the beginning of the second millennium BCE and working backwards using this new method of iconographic evaluation to determine the point at which composite bow technology first appears in the ancient Near East. The thesis will finish with an overview of the above accomplishments and their potential impact on the study of ancient and military history. / Classics and World Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Classical Studies)

This study examines the five American Legion battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force formed in 1915 specifically to recruit American volunteers for the Canadian overseas contingent of the First World War. This study reviews the organization of Canada's militia and Anglo-American relations before examining the formation of the American Legion, the background of its men, and the diplomatic repercussions it sparked. This study is based largely on material in the Public Archives of Canada including war records and the personal papers of several participants. During its brief existence, the American Legion precipitated constitutional, diplomatic, and political problems. The issues the American Legion raised were mostly solved by America's entry in the war. The episode hastened the maturity of Canada as a nation.

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to preserve that institution. Yet, not all of Beall’s white neighbors decided that secession was an appropriate idea worth pursuing. Typical of other areas in the Upper South, these unionists existed in large numbers due to the survival of a strong, two-party political system built from an increasingly diversifying local economy. These white unionists shared a complicated relationship with local blacks, who also sought to defeat the Confederacy in order to claim freedom and citizenship rights in the United States. This paper, hence, traces the path to disunion in Jefferson County and the troubled attempts to reunify during the immediate aftermath of the war from the perspective of the largest population demographic in the county—albeit smaller than elsewhere in the South—the cultural conservatives like Beall. Beall’s words serve as some of the best surviving evidence of how most local whites felt toward the attempts to shatter slavery and how difficult it was for those whites to prevent its destruction.

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(in English): This master's thesis is focusing on the issue of military ranks in the armed forces of contemporary Arab states. In the thesis, the terms for military ranks of all branches of the armed forces (ground force, navy, air force) of Arab armies are being discussed. At the same time, the proposed thesis is dealing with the historical and political context of development of military ranks in the region; therefore, there is a focus on early developments of military ranks in the Middle Ages, reform efforts in the Ottoman military of Sultan Mahmut II., and the creation of Egyptian army during the rule of Muḥammad ʿAlīʼs dynasty. In the thesis itself, military traditions of European colonial powers together with the political developments in the second half of the 20th century are also taken into consideration while discussing the ranks and terminology. The rank system of the Armed Forces of the Egyptian Arab Republic serves as a reference for other states throughout the thesis. The thesis is based on analysis of scholarly literature and relevant legislation of Arab countries.

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This dissertation considers how gendered discourses shaped the US Army’s culture during the Second Seminole War of 1835-1842 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Historians have increasingly understood these years as the regular army’s formative era but focus on officers. Yet, while native-born West Pointers came to dominate the officer corps, foreign-born recruits filled the enlisted ranks. Little scholarship considers what it meant for the army to be increasingly led by West Pointers and manned by foreign-born soldiers. Officers left the military academy with deeply held beliefs regarding what it meant to be an officer in the army family—a stern father to enlisted men and the Native peoples whom the army considered its wards, and a committed protector of supposedly harmless women. Their paternalistic ideals encountered the complexities of war in Florida and Mexico, where officers both sought to accomplish their missions and condition enlisted men to their authority. Through these wartime experiences, a shared army culture emerged. It was animated by the figure of the soldier as a protector of women and tested in interactions between the army and enemy—Native and Mexican—women. This previously unacknowledged development lent army culture an internal coherence that guaranteed officers’ control over soldiers and an external coherence characterized by a reputation for paternalism. This enabled the army to secure a respected position as an American institution. One consequence was that soldiers were unable, or unwilling, to understand women as enemies. As a result, such authors largely erased or ignored female combatancy from their records—a process typical of many wars. The key to uncovering women’s contributions is to look more critically at official military documents. Methodologically, this project proposes a feminist approach to military history that considers how army leaders constructed women’s presence in, and absence from, military records in specific, deliberate ways. Grasping that process matters—it legitimized the regular army and its officers. Attention to discourses about women, the prototypical outsiders in histories of war, can help historians consider the discursive processes at work within the genre of army writing. The army’s erasure of women’s wartime activities succeeded so well that according to most accounts of the 1830s and 1840s, women—whether Mexican, Native, or American—had no military history. Yet, the army’s relationships with enemy women shaped it in meaningful ways. The regular army's paternalism, well developed by 1848, used men’s control over and obligations to women to reify the superiority of regular soldiers to other men and of officers to enlisted men. The protection of women sometimes served as a common language between officers and enlisted men, sometimes as a path for enlisted men to challenge officers’ claims to moral superiority, and sometimes as a justification for changes to military policy. By 1848, these workings cohered into an engine of army paternalism, a deep-seated logic whose machinations were sometimes overt, sometimes submerged, and underlay the army’s choices. I call this the logic of protection.