Political factions at Carthage cannot be identified beyond a simple polarity: supporters and opponents of Hannibal’s family, ‘Barcids’ and ‘anti-Barcids’. At Rome, the richer naming system has encouraged prosopographic studies, conjectures about political alliances based on kinship, marriage ties, and shared local origins. But more than temporary existence of such ‘groups’ is doubtful. It is also disputed whether Republican Rome was any sort of democracy: Polybius controversially claimed that tribunes of the plebs were there to do the people’s will. In the second Punic war, where we rely on Livy, elections do not look very democratic, but there is a special and temporary reason for this: demography. Casualties in the 218−216 disasters produced a top-heavy senate for years to come. The trials of the Scipios (180s) do not support the idea of groups but rather exemplify the ruling class’s concern to prevent ambitious individuals from upsetting a competitive equilibrium.

The preceding chapters reveal that a looming sense of crisis emerged in the BEF during and after the Battle of Passchendaele. Later, these weary men were faced with a major acute crisis – the spring offensives. Infantrymen were practically and psychologically ill-equipped to overcome this challenge. Using the concept of sensemaking, this chapter uses the records of a mix of regular, territorial, and New Army battalions drawn from six regiments to trace why men’s perceptions of battle may have changed and transformed. It charts their experiences during the optimistic days of early 1917, on the saturated battlefields around Ypres, amidst the chaos of Cambrai, in the tiring and demoralising winter of 1917–1918, and whilst facing the German onslaught after 21 March 1918. In early 1917, battle remained the imagined pathway to victorious peace. Yet, by the summer, the weather and Third Ypres left men’s hope of peace – and faith in battle – in tatters. The slow progress, casualties, and trying conditions convinced many that the war had become irreversibly static. These fears were confirmed as the BEF shifted to a defensive strategy. At the same time, esprit de corps was shaken by the BEF’s reorganisation in the new year. The work required to prepare the lines for defence was at the cost of effective training and the BEF retreated in the face of the German attacks. However, whilst the military outcome was sometimes in question, the spring offensives signalled a change in the character of the war in Belgium and France. Heavy casualties were inflicted upon the enemy, the army learnt on the job, and it appeared the conflict had entered a new phase. Somewhat counterintuitively, retreat and withdrawal rekindled soldiers’ faith in battle as the pathway to peace.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

Chapter 5 deals with the years 1942 and 1943, as the Germans reached the peak of their military success and then began to decline. Chaplains were part of the brutal regimes of occupation that characterized Nazi German domination of territories and people. The chapter uses the concept of "genocidal culture" to analyze how Christianity, embodied in the chaplains and symbolized by the cross, helped the Germans construct a story of justification that erased their victims and presented themselves as suffering heroes. Examples from France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union are presented, and personal accounts from Jewish survivors reverse the gaze, to provide a look at the Germans and their religious practices from outside the group. Amidst the extreme yet everyday brutality of German occupation, the Wehrmacht chaplains turned inward to focus on providing comfort to the men they served and interpreting the war and their role as the ultimate sacrifice. They faced disinterest and at times hostility from soldiers and officers but insisted they were effective “handmaids of the troop leadership.” Chaplains who died or were killed became important figures in a redemptive story of the war.

Final command task: winning, by preventing a breakthrough and inflicting maximum casualties while preserving German forces. German view of combat value (fighting power); assessment of divisions’ intrinsic (long-term) and current (short-term) combat value. Nearly half the army was unfit for major combat.

The army fulfilled both parts of this command task in spring 1917, but suffered as much damage as during the Somme over the same period, and more than at Verdun or Third Ypres. The system for assessing current combat value helped overcome this potential crisis. Nevertheless, reserves were running out, field strength fell and the army displayed increasing distress.

Section on why the offensive failed from the Entente side: shortcomings in grand strategy, strategy, operations and tactics. But it was not doomed to failure: counterfactual on how it could have gone better. German commanders took it very seriously, rightly as the great damage suffered by the army shows.

More than six decades after Sputnik, most rocket bodies used for space launches are still abandoned in orbit. In 2020, over 60 per cent of all launches to low Earth orbit resulted in at least one rocket body being abandoned in orbit. If that orbit has a sufficiently low perigee, drag from gas in the tenuous, uppermost regions of the atmosphere will gradually reduce the rocket body’s altitude and cause it to re-enter the denser, lower atmosphere in an uncontrolled way. This can occur at any point under its flight path, creating dangers for people on the surface and in aeroplanes. Moreover, many uncontrolled re-entries occur near the equator due to the trajectories of many of the abandoned rocket bodies. As a result, the cumulative risk from rocket body re-entries is higher in the states of the global South, as compared to the major spacefaring states. Yet launch providers have access to technologies and mission designs today that could eliminate the need for most uncontrolled re-entries, albeit at increased financial cost.

Description: Disasters come in different forms and shapes. Some are sudden and generally localized, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and some volcanic eruptions. Some are less sudden and may cover wider areas, and can do damage for longer periods. These include famines, pandemics, some volcanic eruptions, and climate changes. <break>The impact on lives and on property can be minor or enormous. It may be easier to deal with some disasters than with others. Generally, disasters have been considered “Acts of God,” acts against which people feel incapable of protection. Because of that, often there are, perhaps irrational, reactions that ignore their possible coming. The institutional organization of the world (in many countries and in national governments) often increases the difficulties of dealing with damaging events that are global in their impact.

The study begins with the formation mechanisms of a social group that were created almost ex nihilo by the war. Men became disabled by suffering an irremediable loss over the course of three conflicts of varying intensity between 1904 and 1921. We must first assess the scope of the loss, which is difficult to do, for in Russia, and then in the USSR, the tallies always provided approximate totals that were never definitive. This incredibly massive number was in fact a compilation of individual cases. In order to adopt the best way of approaching this experience, we have to detail the physical and moral ordeals that the soldiers endured from the time they were wounded until they ended up as disabled veterans: this process of transition weighed heavily on their ability to cope successfully. The army lost fighting forces, the men lost a part of themselves along with certain physical or mental capacities, and society lost its future workforce. The rhetoric of defeat, decline, and deficit heavily influenced the conception of the strikingly sudden, widespread phenomenon that exposed the moral fragility of the Russian nation. During the war, attitudes toward repairing bodies were polarised, torn between moralising suspicion (of self-inflicted wounds or simulation) and scientific uncertainties, military verifications and independent assessments of experts.

We set out an array of initial conditions for both sides of a conflict that form their levels of public support. These initial conditions result in selection effects; most wars whose initial conditions are not favorable to public support never occur and are nonevents. Miscalculations occur, and some wars whose opposition was underestimated are almost immediately unpopular. Leaders can attempt to persuade the public and shift the cost and benefit perceptions. But the selection effect is strong and as a result, support for a conflict, at least initially, is generally high. We also identified a set of factors that might vary as the war is fought. Changes in strategy, alliances (on either side), and news from the battlefield can alter the expectation of costs and the values assigned to the aims of the conflict. The war’s aims can change as well. Each of these wartime factors can shape opinion by shifting costs (ETC) and value (RP) higher or lower. We can thus identify the factors that influence individuals and consequently the aggregate shape of society’s value of a conflict ex ante within and across conflicts and that predict its impact on support given a war’s estimated costs.

The Reservation Point — RP — captures the value of achieving a set of war aims and Expected Total Costs — ETC — captures a war’s anticipated costs. Both vary across persons and conflicts and together determine the relationship between military casualties and opinion. Not achieving the aims makes costs unacceptable, endogenizing winning and losing. Variations in casualty expectations over time and space lead the political consequences of war to differ temporally and geographically. The role of casualties grows over the duration of the conflict. Marginal casualties will have a proportionally greater effect on the population’s estimates of total expected casualties (ETC) at the start and cumulative casualties over the duration of a conflict. Individuals’ values of wars and their aims fluctuate, which means that opposition will be triggered at different levels of expected and observed costs. The distribution of beliefs about the value of a conflict’s war aims and the distribution of ETC — both of which may change within a specific conflict, and clearly vary across them — are the primary (although not unique) factors that shape elite and mass approval.

The personal costs of war — military dead and injured—are the most salient measure of war costs and the primary instrument through which war affects domestic politics. We posit a framework for understanding war initiation, war policy, and war termination in democratic polities, and for understanding the role that citizens and their deaths through conflict play in those policy choices. We believe that war support derives from individuals’ calculations of a war’s value and cost. High-value conflicts are more likely to be supported than low-value conflicts. Conversely, low-cost conflicts are more likely to occur andtohave durable support, while high-cost conflicts are likely to see rapid erosion of support when they are fought. We develop a comprehensive theoretical approach and examine these arguments with a variety of empirical methods in multiple wars, conducting analyses of tens of thousands of citizens across a wide variety of historical and hypothetical conditions. We also analyze the ways that military casualty information travels from distant battlefields to the homefront and address policy implications.

The local information environment reflects a community’s experience with a war’s local casualties. As this experience varies across communities, so too does the information environment. The intensity of the experience is also reflected in the information environment. When a community has suffered more wartime losses, those deaths receive more coverage, even when we control for community-specific factors and size. While national media are more likely to report on international stories in general, specific local media give more attention to an international story if it includes local casualties. These local news stories include powerful elements, most notably military funerals and flag-draped coffins that make the stories vivid and highly influential. These scripted events represent standard, well-known symbols of loss that clearly and powerfully convey the cost of combat, directly affect ETC, and therefore significantly dampen public support for fighting a war. Social networks also contribute to individuals having varied levels of information about a war’s costs that in turn influence their variation in predictions of a war’s ETC and powerfully alters their views.

People with extreme views appear to have fixed positions, but actually reflect calculations unlikely to be swayed by wartime information. The Evaluative Public, whose valuations are not in the tails, use wartime information to form their conflict approval. Evaluators are sensitive to changes in beliefs about observed casualty levels and expectations of likely future casualties. The Evaluative Public represents those who change positions in war, from support to opposition, depending on their ETC and RP. Using historical data and innovative experiments, we demonstrate that people’s personal experience with war drives their estimates of total casualties. Holding goals constant, higher costs yield higher opposition while lower costs increase support. Holding costs constant and allowing goals to change leads to opinion change. Geographically and temporally proximate casualties strongly influence estimates of a war’s total costs. Thus, we see that casualty patterns affect people’s estimates of a war’s costs and that these costs, when contextualized with the value of a conflict and expected costs, shape wartime support, even in the face of strong individual-level characteristics.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.

In the summer of 1914 it had been more than forty years since the last major European war. That period had witnessed unprecedented economic growth and the flourishing of culture. Lasting peace was conducive to prosperity, technological progress, and social change. Between the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 trams appeared on the streets of European cities, and the bigger capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Budapest – acquired underground metro lines. New factories were built and the urban proletariat grew so rapidly that politicians began to vie for its support. Although the European powers pursued overseas campaigns, the latter’s impact on the daily life of Europeans was limited to articles in the morning press. Nor were peace and development the sole preserve of the West. In Central and Eastern Europe, too, war was not within living memory for the vast majority of citizens.

Chapter 6 analyzes the impact of casualties on elections during the war. Statewide elections were staggered throughout the calendar in ways that make those election returns function like a tracking poll of partisan support. Contrary to modern war studies, I find Republican vote shares did not deteriorate in response to national casualties. I validate my analytical approach with evidence of highly nationalized and synchronized elections linking party votes for House, governor, and president both before and during the war. However, local deaths moved voters on the margins, with disparate impacts based on the balance of local partisanship. Local deaths depressed Republican vote share in prewar Democratic bastions but not in Republican strongholds. Recent deaths were especially potent. It suggests that the combination of partisan identities, local partisan leaders, and local social environments shaped local interpretations of the war – including its unprecedented human costs. Local casualties did change the electoral behavior of some voters, while most stood pat. Partisan mechanisms guided who responded and how.

Scholars up until the middle of the twentieth century saw Roman warfare as restrained and disciplined. At that point the consensus changed to one that viewed it as fierce and bellicose. This view, in turn, has been challenged in the early twenty-first century, with the argument that Roman conflict was typical for ancient states. Rome’s rise from city-state to empire certainly involved considerable violence, but the available evidence cannot conclusive demonstrate either that it was particularly brutal and aggressive or that its military actions were ordinary for the period. Sources report that Roman battle was especially bloody, but this can be interpreted as a result of culture or of weaponry. We read of large numbers of civilians killed and enslaved, but such accounts need to be viewed critically and compared to the ancient norm. Additionally, the reality and nature of the imperial Pax Romana continues to be debated. The apparent decline in uprisings against Roman rule is worthy of note, but there may have been revolts and wars we do not know about. At this point in time historians are not in a position to definitively state what the nature of Roman military violence was.