This archive covers progress in military affairs: veterans’ care, conflict prevention, peacekeeping efforts, and reforms that reduce harm and improve accountability. Stories here look at what’s working — from policy changes to community support — for service members, families, and societies navigating the realities of defense and security.
The Art of War appeared in China sometime between 500 and 430 BCE, thirteen short chapters that reframed warfare as a costly last resort rather than a path to glory. Its author, known only as Sun Tzu, may never have existed as a single person. Twenty-five centuries later, it remains the most widely read strategy text ever written.
Chariots first appear in the archaeological record around 2000 BCE, when people of the Sintashta culture buried two-wheeled vehicles alongside horses and bronze weapons on the steppes of what is now Russia and Kazakhstan. Their breakthrough was the spoked wheel, light enough for a horse to pull at speed. Within centuries, the design had spread across the ancient world.
The Migration Period, roughly 300 to 568 C.E., set hundreds of thousands of people moving across Eurasia — Goths, Vandals, Franks, Slavs, and more crossing rivers and old Roman frontiers. In 406 alone, a coalition of some 200,000 forded the frozen Rhine. From that churn emerged the rough outlines of modern Europe.
The fire lance, the world’s earliest known gunpowder weapon, first appeared on Chinese battlefields around 950 C.E., and Song troops famously wielded it during the 1132 siege of De’an. A bamboo tube packed with powder and shrapnel, it marked the quiet beginning of a lineage that would eventually lead to the rifle.
