“Incurable Megalomania” and “Fantasies of Expansion”: The German Army Reimagines Empire in Occupied Poland, 1915–1918

Plans for a Polish “border strip” are frequently cited to argue that the German army entered the First World War committed to pacifying conquered space through Germanization. This article contends that, in 1914, the German officer corps did not understand national homogeneity as essential for imperial security. Many influential officers insisted that Polish identity was compatible with German imperial loyalty. They supported a multinational imperial model, proposing to trade Poland its cultural and political autonomy for the acceptance of German suzerainty in foreign policy and military command. The army's preference for Germanizing space developed during the occupation of Russian Poland, as officers learned to conflate diversity with imperial fragility. Only a series of political crises after 1916 shifted military opinion against multinational imperialism. Increasingly convinced that Poland would betray the German Empire, some officers abandoned multinationalism. Others revised their plans to contain Poland and fortify Germany by annexing and Germanizing Polish space.

Mauritania

As a Sahelian state, Mauritania is inevitably affected by the insecurity stemming from its geopolitical environment. However, Mauritania’s comparatively less obvious vulnerabilities are to be found more in its own checkered recent history and the resulting fraught political, socioeconomic, and cultural dynamics than in its geographic location. The country’s complex social mosaic is marked by tensions between Moors and Negro-Mauritanians, as well as between beydane and haratine resulting from a legacy of Moorish slavery. Its fragile stability is built on an illusory efficacy against terrorism and a façade of unity among its officer corps, but may be unsustainable in the long run. The insecurities and vulnerabilities have the potential to lead to acute communitarian conflicts, even armed violence, if three persistent, interrelated challenges are not decisively addressed: deciding on the very identity of the country, an end to militarization by definitively extirpating the military from national politics, and genuinely reducing the threat of radicalization and terrorism by ending the related manipulation of Islam by its elites.

Iran: Imperial and Republican Civil–Military Relations

Iran has traditionally been troubled by unstable civil–military relations throughout its history. In the past, even before the emergence of the academic study of civil–military relations, Iranian imperial monarchs attempted, but often failed to ensure complete oversight of their military forces, due to the nature of imperial rule with its multiple power centers, and to the existence of myriad military forces that were often not under the monarch’s control. The rise of a centralized state in the early 20th century under Reza Shah ensured the emergence of stability in civil–military relations by means of carrots and sticks. Under Mohammad Reza Shah (r.1941–1979), early civil–military relations were quite unstable due to political turmoil and the young ruler’s lack of confidence; in subsequent years, he managed to cement his control over the military by means of patronage, insulation from domestic politics, and stringent oversight of the senior officer corps. The Iranian revolution (1978–1979) succeeded, to a large extent, due to the Shah’s own failures and those of the senior officer corps, both of which were paralyzed in the face of massive political and social turmoil. The successor state, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) achieved control over the armed forces through ideological control and oversight and the creation of institutionalized parallel military structures. Nonetheless, the IRI has faced and continues to face instability in civil–military relations due to war, domestic political and socioeconomic crises, and foreign pressures.

The Utility of Janowitz’s Political Awareness in Officer Education

In the pages of this journal, Damon Coletta and Tom Crosbie published a response to our article entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers.” In that article, we argued that Janowitz’s emphasis on the need for political awareness in the U.S. military should receive greater attention in the education of today’s officer corps. Coletta and Crosbie suggest that we are too ready to abandon Samuel Huntington’s classic work, The Soldier and the State. In this continuation of that dialogue, we respond with three clarifications and three substantive disagreements. Huntington and Janowitz offer divergent perspectives on the issues of officer education and “political virtue,” we suggest, and Janowitz’s perspective deserves greater weight that it has traditionally received. Coletta and Crosbie also place greater emphasis on the separability of political and military affairs than is warranted, and Janowitz is more helpful here as well.

Military Sociology

This chapter discusses issues germane to military sociology and focuses on explaining how sociocultural factors sap the effectiveness of Gulf armies. The first portion of the chapter is devoted to the social and regional backgrounds of enlisted members of the armed forces and explores the reasons for the introduction of mandatory military service in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. The following section is dedicated to a comprehensive appraisal of the officer corps from cadets to generals, examining their career trajectories and education at home and abroad. The chapter then explores the age-old practice of Gulf rulers to utilize the services of contract soldiers (aka mercenaries) and foreign advisers. The chapter’s last part focuses on sociocultural issues from education to decision-making and the pervasive influence of tribalism.

LIFE AND WORK OF FORMER RUSSIAN MILITARY SEAMEN IN EXILE (Bookreview: Tolochko, A.V. Longoverseasvoyage (essaysfromthelife of the sea family in emigration, 1929-1930), Perm State University, Perm, Russia, 2020, 408 p.)

Рецензия посвящена монографии А.В. Толочко, рассказывающей о жизни и деятельности бывших российских военных моряков в эмиграции в 1920-1930-е гг. Особое внимание автор уделяет характеристике правового положения моряков-эмигрантов, образованию и эволюции их организаций и объединений, повседневной жизни морской семьи, политическим ориентациям её представителей, участию в политической жизни. Автор рецензии отмечает интересное наблюдение: структура офицерского корпуса СССР и РФ, существовавшая до 2009 г., имела много общего с той, которую предлагали эмигранты. Во многом совпадает с их проектами и современная система переподготовки офицерских кадров. Монография представляет интерес не только для историков Русского зарубежья, военно-морского флота, но и всех, кто интересуется историей России. The monograph by A.V. Tolochko about the life and work of the former Russian naval sailors in exile in the 1920s-1930s is under review in the paper. The author of the book characterizes the legal status of emigrant sailors, their organizations, the daily life of the sea family, the political orientations of its representatives, their participation in political life, etc. The structure of the officer corps of the USSR and the Russian Federation until 2009 had much in common with the one proposed by the emigrants, as well as the modern system of retraining of officers. The monograph is of interest not only to historians of the Russian emigration and the Navy, but to anyone interested in Russian history.

The Fate of Officers-Relatives in the Military-Revolutionary Era of 1914-1922

The article deals with the problem kinship ties of officers in the Imperial Russian Army on the eve of the First World War in the context of protectionism in army relations. The subsequent development of the fates of the participants in our sample during the Great War, the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War is specially considered. The work is based on an electronic database dedicated to the officer corps of the Voronezh, Kursk and Tambov provinces in the period 1914-1922, compiled on the basis of a wide variety of sources of the military revolutionary period. The main task of the work was to identify the influence of kinship ties in the officer environment on the conditions of their service. The author comes to the conclusion that the circumstances of the period of wars and revolution influenced the break in kinship ties. During the First World War, many relative-officers continued to serve in different military units. We haven’t established unambiguous facts of joint service after 1917. The only thing was the fact that both brothers were in the Red Army. Two cases did the brother officers serve with the White Army. We haven’t met a single case that reflects the situation of the brothers' arrival on different sides of the “barricades”. We tried not to make broad generalizations based on dozens of fates. Nevertheless, this gives grounds for the assertion that the fate of the officers-relatives once again showed the crucial and tragic nature of the revolutionary time.

Iraq: Civil-Military Relations from the Monarchy to the Republics

Iraq is a young state, having been founded in 1921 by a colonial power, Britain. Its army was created several months beforehand, with its nucleus being Iraqi Sunni Arab officers of the former Ottoman army. As the mandate power in Iraq, Britain wanted a small internal security establishment while the officer corps and the monarchy wanted a large army that would act as a nation-building institution to make Iraqis out of the disparate ethnic groups who found themselves reluctant subjects of this new entity. As the strongest institution in the fragile state, the army played an important role in the political process and ultimately launched the first coup in the Arab world in 1936. As the older and more pliant senior officer corps retired, younger, more nationalist officers came to the fore; they were discontented with the overbearing presence of the British, the rampant cronyism and corruption in the royal court and among the ruling elite, and by the backwardness of their country. A small group of militant nationalist officers seized power and fought a brief and unsuccessful war against Britain. The power of the ruling elite was seemingly consolidated in the period after World War II. Both Iraq and the rest of the Middle East were in turmoil as colonial powers found themselves facing a rising tide of movements striving for independence. Leading the way were junior and middle-ranking officers, and in Iraq they launched a bloody coup-revolution in 1958 that destroyed the monarchy and established a republic. The Iraqi republic was unstable, due mostly to the inability of elites to establish solid institutions for governing the country and channeling mass politics effectively. The fragility and lack of legitimacy of governments provided ample opportunity for the military—which was riven by factionalism and ideological differences—to intervene regularly in the political process. The seizure of power by the nationalist and socialist Baath Party under Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein effectively put an end to the military’s political role; the Baath Party implemented a series of stringent “coup-proofing” measures between 1968 and 2003 when it was displaced from power by the U.S. invasion. The Baath Party’s measures did not mean that members of the officer corps did not try their hand at overthrowing the Baath regime; many did, but all failed, often at tremendous costs to themselves and their families. The measures of control had a deleterious effect on the professionalism and combat performance in the conventional wars that it fought between 1980 and 2003. The Americans tried to build a new Iraqi army and sought to professionalize it, but their efforts had little success. The removal of the brutal authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein did not change Iraqi politics for the better. Sunni Arab dominance was replaced by Shia Arab dominance. Post-Baath governments were kleptocratic, corrupt, and characterized by ethno-sectarian favoritism and cronyism. These characteristics pervaded the new military itself but the military’s ability to interfere in the political process has been stymied by its focus on fighting the dangerous jihadist fighters of the Islamic State (Daesh), the proliferation of government security services, and by the emergence of heavily armed and motivated pro-government militias. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.