History

Our usual image of Homeric warriors is of men who loved the battlefield but we overlook the big role played in Homeric warfare by sacking cities for fun and profit. The first warriors of the western tradition were less soldiers and more pirates than we generally care to admit. Chivalry and battle-lust are elements in Homer but so are greed and the glory brought by material goods. And Homeric warriors thought nothing of making war on unarmed civilian cattleherders while treating women as so much war loot. If we are all Greeks than we may all be more Vikings than we care to admit.

W hen it comes to war, I have been sheltered from the storm. Too young to have faced the draft, which was last used in the United States in 1973, I did not volunteer for the military. My father, by contrast, was conscripted into the US Army during World War II and saw action in Italy. His father was conscripted into the US Army during World War I and saw action in France. My grandfather's outfit was gassed; my father dodged shells in the Tuscan hills. One of my father's cousins fought in the French Resistance; another survived Nazi concentration camps, airplane factories, and a death march, to be liberated by Patton's Third Army. In my generation, American cousins have served in the US military, foreign cousins served in the French and Israeli armies, and another American cousin was a civilian casualty of the war on terror: He died in New York City in the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. As a student of military history, I knew well before 9/11 that I owed my freedom to the sacrifices of others. But the events of that day and the year and more since have underlined that lesson. As a student of the Classics, I also know that republican theory teaches that unless the citizens of a republic serve in their own defense, they risk losing their freedom. In the United States today, citizens of the republic do serve in their own defense. Yet only a small proportion of us do so, and a smaller proportion than in the generations that preceded us. Between 1940 and 1973, a large proportion of American males were conscripted to serve in the military. Since 1973, conscription has been replaced by recruitment of an all-volunteer force. A professional military of American men and, increasingly, women, defends the nation. On the whole, the move from conscription to volunteering is excellent news. No one is forced into service, nor is the nation burdened with an overly 66 Parameters Summer 2003 67 Barry Strauss is professor of history and classics at Cornell University. He writes on war, politics, and sports from ancient to modern times. Strauss is currently at work on a book on the battle of Salamis (Simon & Schuster, forthcoming, 2004). He also has a work in progress on the history of his family at war, from which this article is drawn. He has written or edited seven books and is the author of numerous scholarly papers and reviews.

The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

At a recent academic conference on ancient history and modern politics, a copy of Robert D. Kaplan's Warrior Politics was held up by a speaker as an example of the current influence of the classics on Washington policymakers, as if the horseman shown on the cover was riding straight from the Library of Congress to the Capitol.* One of the attendees was unimpressed. He denounced Kaplan as a pseudo-intellectual who does more harm than good. But not so fast: it is possible to be skeptical of the first claim without accepting the second. Yes, our politicians may quote Kaplan more than they actually read him, but if they do indeed study what he has to say, then they will be that much the better for it. Kaplan is not a scholar, as he admits, but there is nothing "pseudo" about his wise and pithy book. Kaplan is a journalist with long experience of living in and writing about the parts of the world that have exploded in recent decades: such places as Bosnia,

v major departure. For her, the new strategy "really encapsulates the consensual view of America's proper role abroad since the end of the Cold War" and is the "result of the unparalleled military strength and economic influence that the country possesses and how it chooses to use them." Although she did not explicitly say so, her analysis implied that even a unilateral military attack against Iraq, justified on preventive-war grounds, would not be an unprecedented action in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Given the potential importance of the new U.S. doctrine (however familiar some of its elements) and the valuable and diverse insights of our roundtable panelists, the Peace Studies Program decided to publish their views in this occasional paper. I have also included a related article of mine, first published in the November 2002 issue of The Bookpress, Ithaca's newspaper of the literary arts, with kind permission of its editor, Jack Goldman. 1 In it, I discuss the problem that Iraq poses for U.S. peace activists, given that many of the methods they had championed during the Cold War-from conflict resolution to economic sanctions as an alternative to war-have demonstrated limited success in eliminating the Iraqi threat. I highlight the role of the United Nations and adherence to international law as providing the best means for dealing with the current crisis. The complete text of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Iraq situation, the contributions gathered here should prove of enduring interest as analyses of an important statement of U.S. foreign and security policy at the dawn of the 21 st century.

: Currently, few sources exist to assist US Government policymakers in understanding the dynamics of enduring strategic rivalries. One such rivalry is the emerging Sino-US strategic competition, which remains a matter of predictive guesses based on unreliable trend lines. To help fill this intellectual void, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) asked IDA to develop an historical study of the most important strategic rivalries from ancient Greece to the end of the Cold War (1991). IDA, in turn, asked a small number of historians and international political scientists, leaders in their fields, to write structured essays on the most important enduring strategic rivalries. This collection of essays identifies the most important and enduring strategic rivalries, and examines the pitfalls and opportunities for ONA to use in its planning and presentations to US government policymakers.

This article explores one often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War: the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort, despite the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. Wartime destruction and the birth of "war millionaires" were two sides of the same coin. Through following the rapid wartime expansion of the Renner tannery in Kolozsvár/ Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, the article explores the repercussions of wartime prosperity, including the takeover of the family business by large corporations and increasing dependence on army commissions. Whereas 1918 is often portrayed as a radical break in the history of East-Central Europe, this article explores why the Renner corporation, owned by ethnic Germans and Magyars, managed to remain prosperous even after Romania annexed Transylvania in December 1918. The increasing ethnic mobilization and hostilities between Magyar and Romanian nationalist elites did not directly impact Transylvania's business life during and after the First World War. The author investigates why Magyar, Hungarian Jewish and German bankers and industrialists were successful at cementing their prewar and wartime social positions and economic influence in Greater Romania.

The detective figure, literary and real, emerged in Siam between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring clarity to increasingly complex social and political situations. In early detective fiction including the Seup saphakan [ | Investigating it All] (1892-97) and Nithan Thorngin [ | The Tales of Thorng-in] (1904-05) series this was certainly the case -mysteries were solved, secrets revealed. In real life, however, the state's deployment of an army of detectives did not so much clarify as codify mysteries. This paper examines the links between the literary and the real detective, arguing that the appearance of detective fiction provided the vocabulary for understanding and dealing with social and political change in early twentieth century Siam.

This article examines the introduction of two technologies, photography and paper currency, in Siam (Thailand after 1939) during the early twentieth century and their roles in shaping the development of the modern Thai political economy. It does so through a historical study of a counterfeit crisis that plagued the kingdom immediately after the introduction of paper money in 1902. By analyzing the crisis, it shows how the formation of class and development of capitalism both depended on technologically reproduced symbols of the state and social status. As such, policing the distinction between genuine and fake became critical to both the identity of the new bourgeoisie and the operation of the new economy. The resulting fixation on authenticity, in turn, reflects the underlying anxiety on the part of the new elite over the basis of their authority and wealth in a rapidly changing society.

Visitors to the city of Bangkok are often struck by the sight of exposed, dangling, and dangerous electrical wires and a multitude of inconveniently placed utility posts that impede pedestrian circulation. This article argues that the city's seemingly dysfunctional electric power infrastructure is not a failure of modernisation but the outcome, or 'style', of a socio-technological system built by and operated for a narrow set of interests. To demonstrate this, the article presents a history of the electric power system that shows how its initial development in the early twentieth century produced new forms of privilege and disenfranchisement that are now the basis of social division in the city. By approaching the study of Bangkok's electric power system in terms of equity, the article offers a framework for evaluating how infrastructure shapes cultural practice, social relations, and political authority.