Army Development Research Articles

The Red Army in the Second World War by Alexander Hill

Reviewed by: The Red Army in the Second World War by Alexander Hill Brandon Schechter (bio) Alexander Hill. The Red Army in the Second World War. 754 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-107-02079-5 (hardback); 978-1-68815-5 (paperback). Part of a multivolume history of armies in the Second World War, this book offers an up-to-date treatment of the Red Army from an operational, economic, and political standpoint. It is a very useful reference book for military historians, and anyone writing on Stalinism during the war should probably take a look at it. Building on classics by authors such as John Erickson and David Glantz and more recent works by Mark Edele and Roger Reese, this book offers a state-of-the-field view of the Red Army during the war for military historians. The author takes a long view of the army's development, starting just before the First Five-Year Plan and ending with Victory Day. This is a solid work of old-school military history, very different from much of the current work on the war (including this reviewer's), which approaches the war primarily as a cultural and political event. Hill provides a very good overview and some new interpretations. The book is not shockingly novel; it traces a more-or-less familiar story of how the Red Army became more adept in the course of the war while continuing to suffer staggering losses. However, it is convincingly argued and makes use of sources only recently made available and Hill's prolonged engagement with the subject. Whatever it may lack in novelty, it more than makes up for in thoroughness and nuance. Hill shows mastery of his material and excels at showing how factors at multiple levels—from the most basic small-unit communication to the political culture of Stalinism—impacted the effectiveness of the army. Continuities are just as striking as changes. A shortage of qualified cadres was a chronic problem, whether the result of expansion of the army, purges, or high losses in combat. The Red Army's inability to establish effective communication and coordination of its activities emerges as a major theme of the book, from prewar training until the end of the war. His discussion of Stalin's role as ultimate arbiter and his effect on the general culture of the army is thorough and nuanced. Hill takes us from the rise of politically connected generals before and during the "Great Terror" to the more variegated interactions between Stalin and his subordinates as he came to respect expertise. Nonetheless, Hill joins the chorus of authors in underlining the ruthlessness of Stalin as setting an example and tone that would lead commanders to push forward at all costs from the war's beginning to end. Here as elsewhere, we see not so much a new interpretation of the Red Army and its place in the war as a well-researched and convincingly argued reiteration of where the field has arrived, making use of new sources. [End Page 113] Where Hill's work is perhaps most novel is in his impressive ability to find the devil in the details. He shows a number of instances in which intimate knowledge of Red Army infrastructure make its strengths and weaknesses clear. The reader is frequently privy to how both top-level decision making and on-the-ground details such as the lethality of anti-tank guns and how reliance on telephones and lack of skilled radio operators crippled communication. His discussion of Red Army weapons, threaded throughout the volume, is thorough and accessible to laymen. He does an admirable job elucidating the politics behind the adoption or rejection of different arms for an English-language audience. Finally, Hill allows for cultural factors to play a significant role without resorting to essentialism. For example, he pays heed to issues of patronage and a sort of gung-ho culture of action over careful planning (he refers to it as "nu ladno" and "na avos´") in a thoughtful manner. This book is a major resource for military historians interested in the Red Army and scholars of Russia who need a...

Tracing the online development of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces through the UK web archive

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the method and results of research using web archives to explore the development of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Armed Forces websites. The methodology shows how an initial corpus was created and analysed to establish the purpose of the MoD and Armed Forces websites. Visual hierarchy design, thematic content analysis, and an understanding of website design were used to contextualise online content. Recruitment content is shown to have been a chief concern of the Armed Forces websites throughout the period, particularly for the British Army. Changes in recruitment terminology and the increased employment of interactive content are examined. It is argued that the greater use of content such as videos was not the result of a change in approach towards recruitment but an adoption of the increased capabilities of websites. The importance of the MoD and Armed Forces websites as a means of influencing public opinion is established and the Army's development of its website as a communication channel is explored. Link analysis was used to investigate the central position of the MoD campaign Supporting Britain's Reservists and their Employers in the visualisation of the .mod.uk domain and the Territorial Army's attempts to recruit personnel for the Army Medical Service.

Integrating critical thinking in the U.S. Army: Decision Support Red Teams

AbstractThis chapter examines the U.S. Army's development and implementation of Decision Support Red Teams. We review the education of Red Team members, the structure of the education and use of adult education principles, and how teams use their training to help make sense of complex military environments.

How to rethink war: Conceptual Innovation and AirLand Battle Doctrine1

This article examines the role of ideas in US Army innovation after the Vietnam War. It challenges the view that failure, changes in the strategic environment or technology are the sole drivers of military innovation and analyses the role of ideas and identity in the army's development of AirLand battle doctrine. It highlights how the reform in ideas led to a ‘re-conception’ of the strategic environment, the nature and dynamics of warfare and a change in self-understanding. The organisational reforms embodied these ideas and led to a new way of war practised in the first Gulf War.

New Fourth Army: communist resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941

This study looks at the first three years of the Chinese Communists' New Fourth Army, between the late spring of 1938 and January 1941. The New Fourth Army was no outgrowth or faithful copy of the senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and with original features that make it highly interesting for historians. This distinctiveness derived mainly from the background in the Three-Year War (1934-1937) of the Communist guerrillas left behind in the south who set up the army, but it also owed much to the unique political, military, and social environment that the army encountered in the lower Yangtze region, where it first joined battle with the Japanese. After the Wannan Incident of January 1941, in which its headquarters were destroyed, the New Fourth Army began to look increasingly like the Eighth Route Army, its more typically Maoist elder brother in the north. The Wannan Incident led to a radical reorganisation of its detachments and the definitive realignment of its politics. Thus transformed, the older New Fourth Army engages less for its own intrinsic and distinctive nature than as a division (subject only to circumstantial variation) of the general movement of Chinese communism at war. The Wannan Incident represented a turning-point and, in some respects, a decisive break in the army's development, and therefore forms a natural climax and finale to this study.

Flight‐Testing and Frequency‐Domain Analysis for Rotorcraft Handling Qualities

A demonstration of frequency-domain flight-testing techniques and analysis was performed on a U.S. Army OH-58D helicopter in support of the OH-58D Airworthiness and Flight Characteristics Evaluation and of the Army's development and ongoing review of Aeronautical Design Standard 33C, Handling Qualities Requirements for Military Rotorcraft. Hover and forward flight (60 kn) tests were conducted in 1 flight hour by Army experimental test pilots. Further processing of the hover data generated a complete database of velocity, angular-rate, and acceleration-frequency responses to control inputs. A joint effort was then undertaken by the Airworthiness Qualification Test Dirtectorate and the U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate to derive handling-quality information from the frequency-domain database using a variety of approaches. This report documents numerous results that have been obtained from the simple frequency-domain tests; in many areas, these results provide more insight into the aircraft dynmamics that affect handling qualities than do traditional flight tests. The handling-quality results include ADS-33C bandwidth and phase-delay calculations, vibration spectral determinations, transfer-function models to examine single-axis results, and a six-degree-of-freedom fully coupled state-space model. The ability of this model to accurately predict responses was verified using data from pulse inputs. This report also documents the frequency-sweep flight-test technique and data analysis used to support the tests.

The Republic of Korea Army and Its Role in National Development

he Republic of Korea has achieved remarkable national development T since its independence in 1948. Since the Korean War, which devastated the country from 1950-1953, the nation has recovered from its unbearable destruction, achieving phenomenal social and economic development. Having been transformed from a traditional to a modern society in a mere three decades, the Republic of Korea has now emerged as a strong nation in the world community. During this period the Republic of Korea has also maintained a highly modernized army of over one-half million. The Republic of Korea Army (ROK Army) has successfully performed its primary function as the nation's main defense force. It has proven itself highly capable of conventional war in Korea and unconventional combat in Vietnam. The ROK Army is now providing an effective deterrent against possible resumption of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. From its inception the ROK Army was patterned after the U.S. Army, not only in its organization and equipment, but also in other important aspects, including doctrine, training, logistics, and administration. The ROK Army has, in fact, been one of the most highly developed institutions in the society and a powerful modernizing agent in the early stage of nation building and national development. It is argued that the process of national development in the Republic of Korea has generally progressed through three stages, and that the ROK Army's development has paralleled these stages. With this perspective, the paper