It was the Assyrians who were the first to organize and exploit the first standing army in history. A standing army being a professional and permanent one, the Assyrians employed their army, as many as 100,000 strong according to one text, for ruthless extermination of those who opposed them. They carved out an enormous empire [...]

By the 4th century BC, it was a very different Greek army that took the fight to the Persians. The Macedonian army of Alexander the Great resolved the fundamental weakness of the hoplite force: its lack of a mounted striking arm. Alexander’s "Companions," an elite cavalry unit, was trained to fight in a wedge-shaped formation [...]

A German Infantry Regiment of World War II consisted of three infantry battalions, one 180-men infantry gun company, one 170-strong anti-tank (Panzerjäger) company, one regimental intelligence platoon, and one regimental supply train, totaling approximately 3150 troops. The regiment included 75 officers, 7 administrators, and 493 non-commissioned officers. A battalion of 860 men had three rifle [...]

When they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans planned for a swift victory—completely underrating the endurance and resilience of the Soviet conscript soldier. The Soviet way of making war was immensely wasteful of men’s lives, thrown away in ill-considered offensives or committed to "no retreat" when on the defensive. Yet the Red [...]

The German Infantry Battalion of World War II was the smallest tactical battle group. It was composed of 3 rifle companies, 1 machine gun company, 1 infantry engineer platoon, 1 intelligence unit. The German infantry battalion included one commander, 13 officers, 1 official and 846 non-commissioned officers. The battalion commander, an Oberstleutnant (Major), was responsible [...]

At the outbreak of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands volunteered to fight. Later, conscription was successfully introduced in the Confederate South; it was less effective in the Union states of the North, where the wealthy often evaded service by paying others to fight in their place. Both Confederate and Union troops were hard-bitten characters [...]