ithin the scope of operationalmatters lie the disposition and marshalling of military units, the selection oftheater objectives, the arrangement of logistical support, and the direction ofground, air, and sea forces.

Ideally, the best strategic course should aim to place strength against criticalweakness

Historically - and certainly in this century — coalitions have conducted asignificant percentage of wars

Although a military organization may possess limited power over the ulti-mate fit between strategic decisions and national goals, it usually has morecontrol over the extent to which its force structure is appropriate to itsanticipated uses

The process of selecting national political goals and strategic objectivesshould be interactive.

strategic objective or course of action may fit desired political goals but stillnot be prudent if the risks and costs of failure are sufficiently great

Political goals no doubt should informstrategy, but the strategic alternatives, enunciated by the military, maysimultaneously shape those goals.

The strategic level of military activity refers to the employment of nationalarmed forces to secure by force national goals defined by political leadership

Especially important for military organizations is the willingcooperation and service of the educated and skilled middle and upper classes.

ocietal resistance or sup-port can influence the effectiveness not only of conscription, but also ofcombat power.

e military may possess the legal right touniversal conscription, but coercion alone cannot provide the personnel, ifthe society, or an elite within it, desires to circumvent the legal structur

Access to manpower involves not only legal power, but also moral andpractical legitimacy.

n anability to articulate its needs more persuasively than its competitors canarticulate theirs

For a military organization to act strategically, operationally, or tactically, itmust consistently secure the resources required to maintain, expand, andreconstitute itself

Military activity takes place at four different levels: political, strategic,operational, and tactical.

ertical dimension involvesthe preparation for and conduct of war at the political, strategic, operational,and tactical levels

orizontal dimension consists in thenumerous, simultaneous, and interdependent tasks that military organiza-tions must execute at each hierarchical level with differing levels of intensityin order to perform with proficiency.

actical systems and their proper utilization on the battlefield.

No amount of operational [or tactical] virtuosity ... redeemed fundamental flawsin political judgment.

Transnational history does not start with one state and move on to others, but takes multiple levels of historical experience as given, levels which are both below and above the national level.

I joined a collective which reached out across national frontiers to create a new kind of museum, one which treated the Great War as a transnational catastrophe.21 This blending of different national viewpoints and emphases suited the new Europe of the 1990s, when it became apparent that to understand the integration of Europe at the end of the 20th century, you had to understand the disintegration of Europe at its beginning.

I term it the “transnational generation”. This generation has a global outlook. The term “global” describes both the tendency to write about the war in more than European terms and to see the conflict as trans-European, trans-Atlantic, and beyond

The demonization of the enemy and the spiritualization of the cause, are themes with clear links to Mosse’s work, and which have constituted a kind of anthropological approach to the history of violence in the two world wars.

rom the 1970s on, European integration was an attempt to move away from the notion of the nation state as that institution which had the right to go to war,

“death imprint”; the knowledge that their survival was a purely arbitrary accident.

Here was a military historian’s book, but one whose starting point was humane and to a degree psychological.

his was the environment in which darker histories of the Great War emerged. There were still scholars who insisted that the Great War was a noble cause, won by those who had right on their side. But there were others who came to portray the Great War as a futile exercise: a tragedy, a stupid, horrendous waste of lives, producing nothing of great value

battle presented men with terrifying challenges. The men who fought at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 could run to the next hill to save their lives. Foot soldiers converging on Waterloo four centuries later could arrive a day late. But in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, there was no escape. Given the industrialization of warfare, the air above the trenches on the Somme was filled with lethal projectiles from which there was no escape

glow of the “just war” of 1939-1945 had faded, and a new generation was more open to a view that war was a catastrophe to both winners and losers alike.

Whatever was wrong with the world seemed to be linked to 1914, to the time when a multitude of decent men went off to fight one war and wound up fighting a much more terrible one.

This second generation of historians wrote in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote not only the history of politics and decision-making at the top, but also the history of social structures and social movements.

he second generation I term the generation “fifty years on”. While much of the first generation of historians wrote official history, which tends to the history of officials, the second generation wrote peoples’ history, or the history of politics and society at war.

This is not an omission; it is a choice as to what matters in recounting the history of the war. The first generation defined history as the story of power and violence – and of those who wielded these weapons in wartime

Many historians saw it as their patriotic duty to justify the peaceful intentions of their nation in the war crisis of 1914. If we believe all of them, no one wanted war in 1914, and no one was responsible for its outbreak.

here were also official histories, many of which were written by former soldiers for the benefit of the various national staff colleges, trying one at a time to frame “lessons” for the future

his first generation was also composed of men whose memoirs went over the ground again for evident purposes of self-justification.

Across the world, the imperial state as a form of territorialgovernance was under attack and in retreat, while the nation-state was on the rise

he crisis of imperial legitimacy ignited by thewar and its aftermath.

It was that the logic of popularrule, which argued that political legitimacy derived not from divine sanction butfrom the people, had finally, after a long and arduous process, achieved near-universal recognition.

Here, as elsewhere, the nation-building pro-cess came at a high price, paid in particular by the minorities of the country

The abrupt break-up of Europe’s land empires and the inability of the successorstates to agree on borders with their neighbors certainly played a prominent role intriggering postwar violence

absence of functioning states, militias of various political persuasions assumed therole of the national army for themselves

in the collision in Eastern and Central Europe of twocurrents of global revolution, the revolutions of national self-determination andthe social revolutions for the redistribution of power, land, and wealth along classlines

fought in the name of these new nation-states sought to determine or defend theirreal or imagined borders through force and strove to create ethnically or religiouslyhomogenous communitie

iolence was particularly intense in thevast territories of the defeated dynastic land empires—the Habsburg, Romanov,and Ottoman empires—whose disappearance from the map provided the space forthe emergence of new and often nervously aggressive nation-states.

The war thus hastened a process of imperial decline that would eventu-ally lead to the collapse of a global order based on territorial empires and replace itby one predicated on the nation-state as the only internationally legitimate form ofpolitical organization

thewar also delivered a severe body blow to the empires on the winning side, gen-erating new forms of upheaval, disorder, and resistance

In many of the colonies, there was a political calculation on the part of thosewho chose to enlist or those who encouraged others to do so

we should see the First World Warnot simply as a war between European nation-states but also, and perhaps primar-ily, as a war among global empires

he end of the Irish Civil War in the same year, the restoration of ameasure of equilibrium in Germany after the end of the Franco-Belgian occupa-tion of the Ruhr, the decisive victory of the Bolshevik regime in Russia in a bloodycivil war, and the reconfiguration of power relations in East Asia at theWashington Conference, were all further signs that the cycle of violence, for thetime being, had run its course

we must examine the war within a frame that is both longer (temporally)and wider (spatially) than the usual one.

That world unraveled dramatically in the twentieth century, beginningwith the cataclysm of the First World War

one that can bring together the agglomer-ation of wars that defined the era to consider how their specific logics, modalities and temporalitiesintersect, how they diverge and what this might tell us about a global history of conflict in the period

xploring the contrasts and commonalities between experiences of conflict in colonialcontexts and the imperial shatterzones will help us better grapple with the dynamics that structuredextreme violence in the period and their relations to the shifting regimes of alterity that were cen-tral to imperial collapse, survival and expansion

critical re-engagement with concepts like POW, internee, veteran and paramil-itary through the prism of colonial experiences in the period has the potential not only to extend thegeographical reach of our scholarship but also to refine our frameworks of analysis so they can bet-ter account for the diversity of experiences of conflict across all of the spaces touched by the GreaterWar.

represented both an evolution of past practices of colonial confinement and a prefiguration of thecounter-insurgency tactics that would shape later wars of decolonisation.

his meant POWs of the inter-imperial conflicts in colonialspheres were not extended the same protections granted to their peers in Europe

some scholars of colonial campaigns of repression during the Greater Warinsist on the use of the term ‘war’ to describe these conflicts.

ere again we see how a continuum of colonial violence that often stretched far beyond even theexpanded chronologies of the Greater War remains vital to understanding the way conflict unfoldedin many colonial contexts

While these conflicts were integral to the Greater War,they were also constitutive of the longer process of colonial conquest and the resistance it provoked.

expansion of the chronology of violence in the period has inevitably shifted focus awayfrom the once-dominant Western Front and towards the complex and multiple conflicts that definedthe war and its aftermath in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as the disintegrat-ing Ottoman Empire.

The rise of the Greater War paradigm, a framework that conceives of ‘imperial survival andexpansion’ as the driving force of violence, has pushed beyond the geographical and chronologi-cal boundaries of traditional narratives of the First World War, tracking conflict across large swathesof the world in the years directly before and after the declarations of war in August 1914 and theArmistice of November 1918.

they remain on the margins of the conceptualisation of conflict in theperiod.

he period of the Centenary of the First World War was marked by the heightened prominenceof the ‘colonial contribution’ to the conflict in commemorative discourse

Indeed, the clash at El Herri had begun as a classic colonial punitive raid defined by the typeof extreme violence against civilians that was a key characteristic of colonial warfare.