Many ancient and modern scholars are quick to praise the Etruscans for their art and make note of their religiosity. On the other hand, they are just as quick to view the Etruscans as military pushovers to those powers around them and generally devalue the significance that mili…
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Throughout history, warfare is used as a means to accomplish the goals of a nation or faction. In an ideal situation, the cause for war is to defeat an evil force. Warfare is a means of exacting peace, and each side can have a different definition of peace and the means to obtai…
This dissertation explores the skeletal evidence for violent conflict and social change during the agricultural transition of prehistoric Japan. During the Yayoi period (about 900 BCE to 250 CE), migrants from the Asian mainland brought rice agriculture, metalworking, and new cu…
My dissertation focuses on weaponry in the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BC), with an emphasis on bows and spears. Scholars have long recognized the importance of archery in the ancient Near East generally, and the Achaemenid Empire more specifically, but no thorough st…
This project is a comprehensive military history of East Francia during the reign of King Louis the German (c. 825-876). It interrogates annals and chronicle sources, royal and ecclesiastical charters, Carolingian capitularies, and papal letters to study all aspects of Louis’s m…
Successful terrorist organizations use asymmetric warfare to achieve their goals, and the only way for conventional armies to defeat terrorist organizations is through the use of asymmetric warfare. Asymmetric warfare is not just finding unconventional methods to wage war, but a…
There is an ongoing debate concerning the nature of warfare and violence in the Iron Age of Britain. Interpretations regarding material remains from this period fluctuate between classifying instruments of violence (i.e. swords, spears, hillforts) as functional tools of war and …
This thesis explores the projection of violent direct action in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007 through May 2011. Machine-coded events data from the free, publicly available, on-line Reuters archives was fitted to both regressor and time series models to test the hyp…
Losing By Winning: America's Challenge Waging Counterinsurgency Warfare is an analytical study of America's experience waging counterinsurgency warfare in the Philippine- American, Vietnam and Iraq Wars. In each war, counterinsurgency warfare was applied to achieve the strategic…
My dissertation, "Building Houses and Planting Vineyards: The Inner-biblical Discourse of an Ancient Israelite Wartime Curse," explores the inner-biblical discourse that developed around a prominent ancient Israelite curse. The curse threatens the livelihood of ancient Israel in…
Archaeological human skeletal remains provide one of the most direct and informative sources of evidence on the human life experience in the past. The skeletal remains from the northwestern Iranian site of Hasanlu are of particular interest because of the paucity of remains from…
The general importance of naval warfare in the Bronze Age has never been considered in detail. Its importance cannot be overstressed and such developments should be seen as part of a technological "koine" between the Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, as there is evidence …
This dissertation is about why big states lose small wars. Contrary to prior analyses of asymmetric conflict which hold that actors' relative power best explains outcomes, I argue that relative strategy matters more than relative power. I make my case by focusing on asymmetric c…
In this dissertation, I study a critical transition in the urban development of Tell es-Sweyhat, a large site in Syria occupied from c. 3000-1900 BCE. In the middle of the third millennium, Sweyhat was an open town centered on a fortress. It was ringed with cemeteries and had a …
Archaic and classical Greek infantries fought in a close-order tactical formation known as the hoplite phalanx. As an instrument of military power, the phalanx provided the poleis (city-states) of the classical period (479-323 BCE) with forces that would prove all but invincible…
This dissertation investigates drone warfare, which is the military's use of unmanned planes to strike enemy targets, an integral and relatively new strategy in the 'war on terror'. The dissertation is composed of three unique research papers. The first gets to grips with how th…
New technologies accompany each war. The submarine dove during The Civil War, tanks rolled through World War I, the atom bomb was dropped in World War II and Agent Orange was diffused in Vietnam. Media often refer to today's conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "Obama's Dron…
In 1975, the Vietminh (term used to denote North Vietnamese who held Communist sympathies) won their crusade to unite North Vietnam with the South. It was as much a Civil War as a war of resistance against foreign invasion. In order to understand how the Communist Vietminh won, …
Whenever military operations are non-linear, dispersed, and decentralized, swarming can be an effective tactic. Today insurgents are employing swarming as a form of asymmetric warfare against superior conventional armies from the mountains of Afghanistan to the cities of Iraq. I…