Incredibly enough, in the third century BC, Rome expanded simultaneously eastwards against the Greeks and Macedonians and west and south against Carthage, the great commercial and military power that had grown out of a Phoenician colony in present-day Tunisia. The three Punic wars (264–241 BC, for Sicily; 218–201 BC, for Italy and Spain; and 149–146 BC, for Carthage itself) were a struggle for the central Mediterranean which culminated in the abject destruction of Carthage. Throughout these conflicts, superior Roman military organization and infrastructure repeatedly demonstrated that the smallholders who made up the legions – as long as they fought in or near Italy – could overcome poor generalship and poor tactics, winning wars even when they lost major battles.

The speed of the Coalition forces’ victory in Operation ‘Desert Storm’ – less than four days of ground combat sufficed to drive the Iraqis into headlong retreat from Kuwait – seems to have taken the American administration by surprise: it had not yet decided when and how to terminate the war. On 27 February 1991 President George H. W. Bush, apparently without directly consulting his theatre commanders, declared that a ceasefire would take effect at midnight – allegedly because the ground war would by then have lasted exactly 100 hours. It proved a catastrophic decision for three reasons. First, contrary to early reports, Coalition forces had not yet sealed the border between Kuwait and Iraq, allowing many of Saddam Hussein's troops to escape; second, the elite Republican Guard units had largely extricated themselves and remained ready and able to protect the regime against domestic opposition; third, although Kuwait was now free, the war had done nothing to improve ‘the security and stability of the Persian Gulf’ – one of the president's stated war aims. In the armistice arranged shortly afterwards, the Americans handed their vanquished adversaries another priceless asset: the continued use of their helicopters. So when the Kurds in the north and the Shi‘a population of southern Iraq, trusting in earlier American promises of support, rebelled against Saddam Hussein, he easily crushed them, using chemical as well as conventional weapons to massacre tens of thousands – some of them before the eyes of outraged American troops.

When Ernst Jünger looked back on his experience as a young infantry lieutenant on the Western Front during the bloody summer of 1918, he combined the entries in his war diary with broader reflections. Not surprisingly, he contemplated the rise and fall of nations throughout history, a particularly pressing topic for him given that his beloved Germany stood at the precipice

Between 1763 and 1815 revolution and war changed the face and the heart of the Western world. When the Seven Years War ended in 1763, the British settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America were still colonies, dependent upon Britain. Across the sea in France, a monarchy that could trace its roots back more than eight hundred years ruled over a privileged aristocratic society, while serfs still worked the fields of their lords. The American and French Revolutions not only stand out as paramount events in the history of those two countries, but also went on to influence every corner of the Western world. The revolutionary tide that began in the United States eventually swept through Latin America as well. The transformation of French society that followed the fall of the Bastille to a Parisian crowd in 1789 changed not only France but Europe forever.

The end of World War II ushered in forty-five years of uneasy peace known as the ‘Cold War’. In the wreckage of the Axis collapse, two superpowers emerged to contest worldwide hegemony, their forms of government representing vastly different political and economic systems. In any other period, such differences and suspicions would have resulted in another great war; but over this contest hung the shadow of nuclear weapons whose destructive potential was such that in the end neither side dared resort to a direct military challenge to its opponent. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some predicted that nuclear deterrence would eliminate war and, in the sense that the United States and the Soviet Union never directly engaged each other in war, they were right. Hostilities still occurred, but for the most part they reflected the collapse of the colonial empires of the West in the aftermath of the world wars; and, while both the United States and the Soviet Union dabbled in these conflicts, they remained peripheral to the larger interests of the superpowers. In retrospect, one of the Cold War's great ironies was that it brought an unparalleled time of stability during which the contestants deterred each other from going over the brink.

In Robert Barret's military treatise of 1598, The Theory and Practice of Modern Wars, ‘a gentleman’ pointed out to ‘a captain’ that Englishmen in the past had performed wonders with longbows rather than firearms; to which the captain witheringly replied, ‘Sir, then was then, and now is now. The wars are much altered since the fiery weapons first came up.’ Most professional soldiers of the day agreed. According to Sir Roger Williams, another English veteran writing in 1590: ‘We must confess Alexander, Caesar, Scipio and Hannibal, to be the worthiest and most famous warriors that ever were; notwithstanding, assure yourself … they would never have … conquered countries so easily, had they been fortified as Germany, France, and the Low Countries, with others, have been since their days.’

After victory over Spain in 1659, France became the pre-eminent land power in Europe and transformed the face of Mars. The Bourbons expanded wartime forces, improved military administration, and created a powerful standing army, and in doing so set a new pattern for Europe. Prussia and Russia imported this design and found that it required governmental as well as military reform. Through warfare, these two new powers carved out a place beside the other European states. At sea the British dominated, shouldering aside the Spanish, Dutch, and French to expand British colonial holdings. Finally, Western powers put warfare on a truly global stage in the Seven Years War, as they contested dominion in Europe, the Americas, and India. The period from 1661 to 1763 provided a historical theatre for the ambitions of powerful statesmen who both refashioned their military instruments and wielded them in a series of wars for glory and empire.

At the beginning of the third millennium BC, the success of intensive, irrigated agriculture on the plains of Egypt and the Near East changed the culture of organized war-making, which had previously consisted of small skirmishes between rival groups of nomadic tribesmen. Hydraulic projects, enhanced agronomic techniques, and planned economies at Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Assur, Nimrud, and Egypt created the necessary capital to support armies, logistics, and fortifications.

The epilogue analyzes the CCP’s shift away from the Maoist developmental model behind the Third Front in the wake of Sino-American rapprochement. With the warming of Sino-American relations, Party leaders no longer thought that China had to undertake a big industrialization drive in preparation for war. Beijing, however, vacillated about how close it should become to Washington until Mao died in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping placed China firmly on the American side in the Cold War. In this new international climate, CCP leaders felt secure enough to publicly mention the Third Front for the first time. The Chinese people were also no longer required to be developmental soldiers who disregarded personal comfort and participated in militaristic campaigns to shore up Chinese industry. At peace with the United States, the Chinese Communist Party drew down its Cold War ramparts and made China into a nation of civilians.

Chapter 1 places the Third Front in the climate of post-Great Leap Forward policy making. When the Great Leap failed, a group of leaders centered on Liu Shaoqi reaffirmed top-down control and promoted higher consumption, lower growth targets, and coastal development. Mao Zedong viewed these policies as being dangerously close to Soviet “revisionism” and wanted to push China onto a different economic path. I argue that Mao utilized growing American and Soviet animosity to tar post-Great Leap policies as a threat to national security and launch a new Maoist approach to building socialism in China in the Third Front campaign. Mao and his colleagues set up the Third Front to be different from the Great Leap Forward, which had relied on bottom–up mass mobilization and simple technologies. In contrast, the Third Front fused low– and high–tech methods in a centrally planned project to covertly industrialize inland areas in anticipation of a future conflict with Cold War rivals.

Chapters 3 discusses how the Third Front was constructed. It shows that the Party militarized the Third Front by hiding projects in secure locations, speeding up construction in the face of military pressures, and requiring participants to emulate the Red Army’s strategy of local self–reliance. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao intensified the militarization of the Third Front when he urged ousting capitalist roaders who ostensibly supported changing China into a Soviet–style revisionist state. I maintain that this last form of militarization transformed enmity towards Cold War foes into a struggle against domestic forces, a strategy Mao had successfully deployed in previous instances. Assaults on capitalist roaders were undertaken to attain numerous political objectives. Some workers aired grievances about poor living conditions. Others demanded the right to go home. As for Party leaders, they claimed that critics of the Third Front were allied with foreign agents. The CCP made use of this latter assertion to restore political discipline and revitalize the Third Front when the Soviets appeared poised to attack in 1969. The same Maoist discourse created obstacles to the Third Front’s success by attacking experts and slow development.