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Drawing on theories of problems in warfare being ‘tame’ or ‘wicked’, this article explores continuity and changes in British and German doctrine through examination of wording, emphasis, and approach in field service manuals. This reveals significant continuities in German doctrine, especially the emphasis on initiative, but growing focus on rapid decision-making, coupled with forward command, to achieve surprise. British doctrine also displayed continuity, focused on controlling the battle and reluctance to allow subordinates to exercise initiative. A shift in British doctrine, from one similar to the German model towards a more restrictive approach, is identified between 1905 and 1909. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable scholarly attention to the issue, there remains considerable controversy regarding the meaning of the term miles in pre-Crusade Europe, with many historians asserting that milites were knights, who dominated warfare through the practice of equestrian combat. This study seeks to examine the ways in which the main narrative sources for the German kingdom in the second half of the eleventh century use the term miles (plural milites). The two goals of this study are to determine the meaning that authors assign to the term, and the role that these authors attribute to milites in the conduct of war during this half-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether a military revolution took place in the German lands during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with the potential to transform institutions and to alter contemporaries’ attitudes not merely to war, but to politics and diplomacy. The scholarly debate about a metamorphosis of warfare during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods involves three connected controversies: the meaning and timing of any ‘revolution’ in the conduct of war, the existence of a ‘total war’ in or after 1792, and the continuation of ‘cabinet warfare’ by the majority of the German states. Recently, historians have argued that the geographical and political diversity of the German states, in conjunction with popular criticism of the burdens and sacrifices of conflict in southern and western Germany, militated against a broad military revolution. This study contends that such reactions were themselves indicative of the transformation wrought by the conscription of more mobile and destructive mass armies in a seemingly unending series of wars, which ensured that military conflicts impinged more fully on civilian life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The developments global politics has experienced over the past twenty years have altered the conditions for being a soldier in Germany like in many other countries as well. The way in which national defense had been understood lost plausibility with the end of the Cold War. Conflict and threat scenarios changed and the missions of the armed forces were largely reconceptualized to include multinational crisis management. The effects of this redefinition of tasks and of the unconventional military engagements are as yet underexplored. In particular, there are gaps in our knowledge of how institutional regulations and the formulation of the norms which inform social practices in society and the armed forces relate to one another under the changed political circumstances of contemporary military missions. The article addresses the related changes with particular consideration of the ways in which soldiers in Germany make new sense of their contemporary tasks and roles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In October 1917 the German army and navy were able to mount a successful joint operation to seize the Baltic islands in the Gulf of Riga. Although undertaken by each service for motives of its own, and against disintegrating Russian resistance, Operation Albion was the kind of improvised operation at which the German army in particular excelled. The operation featured an interesting employment of aircraft, and marked about the only time in the First World War where the German army and navy were able to co-operate successfully. The landings secured the islands of Oesel, Moon and Dagö, thus giving the Germans the ability to use the port facilities at Riga. After the war, however, the German military establishment quickly forgot about this operation, and paid little if any attention to it in both its professional military publications and in the Kriegsakademie. Thus Albion was an unlearned lesson for the Germans in the interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the consequences of the military mobilization of the German economy between 1914 and 1916. The author states that German industrialists often clashed with the German War Ministry over issues such as manpower, steel allocations and compensation rates for materials provided to the military. The author notes that German industrialists systematically secured their own profits at the expense of national interests, ultimately crippling the war effort and contributing to Germany's defeat.