Army

I

Introduction

Army, military land forces of a nation, assembled, drilled, disciplined, and equipped for offensive and defensive manoeuvres in warfare. The term may refer to the entire body of military personnel in a nation, or to a specific unit under a military commander. In peacetime an army can sometimes be called upon to provide emergency aid for civilians.

The composition of armies often reflects the attitudes towards war of the civilizations and societies they represent. In ancient Greece, for example, men up to the age of 60 were expected to serve in the army; more importance was attached to military than to civil office. In ancient Rome, the citizen-soldier army of the Republic changed to a professional force as social conditions changed and the Republic gave way to the Empire.

For conquest of territory, an army may invade using tanks, with planes and artillery in support, helicopter forces, and mechanized infantry. Some army units are trained for defence only, as infantry, artillery fortifications, and mobile units. An army can also be used to control or put down civilian unrest in its own or other countries, as when Soviet troops put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising, as when British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s; and as seen, in a situation of all-out war in the Russian Army’s action against the revolt in Chechnya in 1995.

The world’s biggest army is the Chinese army; in 2002 it comprised 2 million personnel, of whom almost 1.3 million were conscripts, and was supported by a national militia of some 12 million and by a security force of some 800,000. Other significant armies include those of India, Russia, and the United States. However, an army’s striking power is not only dependent on its size, but also on the efficiency of its weapons.

II

British Army

The British Army has around 100,000 troops. All are volunteers, as are the Australian and New Zealand armies (26,600- and 4,430-strong respectively). The British Army underwent major changes after World War II. Forces were withdrawn from former colonies and re-stationed in Europe. The Territorial Army was reduced and in 1960 conscription was phased out. The modern British Army has been restructured since the ending of the Cold War. Its main defence roles are the protection of the United Kingdom’s civil power (such as operations in Northern Ireland); North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operations (such as the Gulf War in 1991); and operations elsewhere in the world (“out-of-area” operations) to support international order and lend support to humanitarian aid.

III

United States Army

The US Army numbers around 500,000 personnel, of which about 70,000 are women. It includes the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, and administers the civil engineering works of the Army Corps of Engineers. At the time when the US army entered World War II in December 1941, the army had increased from 190,000 to more than 1.6 million, reaching a peak in 1942 of 8,260,000 serving personnel.

The Vietnam War, waged during the 1960s, cost some 56,000 American lives. At its height in 1969, before troop withdrawal, US military strength in South Vietnam had peaked at over 541,000. Since the ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s, there have been substantial cuts in US land forces in Europe. In 1992 the US army was the main conventional force in the United Nations (UN) coalition against Iraq during the Gulf War; it repeated this leading role in 2003 during the War on Iraq.

IV

Russian Army

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s several of the former Soviet republics formed national armies. The Russian Army, by far the largest, comprised about 960,600 personnel in 2002, of which 330,000 were conscripts.