A military or military force (n., from Latin militarius, miles
"soldier") has seen many different incarnations throughout time.
Early armies were most likely men with sharpened sticks and
rocks; through time they have included advancements such as men
mounting horses, men wielding swords and other metallic weapons,
the bow and arrow, siege weapons, the stirrup, to the advance of
the musket which form the roots of the armed forces of most
nations we know today. In modern times people use motorized
vehicles and firearms.
While military can refer to any armed force, it generally refers
to a permanent, professional force of soldiers or
guerrillas—trained exclusively for the purpose of warfare and
should be distinguished from a sanctioned militia or a levy,
which are temporary forces— citizen soldiers with less training,
who may be "called up" as a reserve force, when a nation
mobilizes for total war, or to defend against invasion. The term
military is often used to mean an army.
The doctrine that asserts the primacy of a military within a
society is called militarism.
Meaning of the word
Also see: Armed forces
As an adjective, "military" is a descriptive property of things
related to soldiers and warfare. It also refers to such context
dependent terms such as military reserves which may indicate an
actual unit deployable on command or the general sense, of a
Nation States reserve troops available to or eligible for duty
in its armed forces.
In formal British English, "military" as an adjective refers
more particularly to matters relating to an army (land forces),
as opposed to the naval and air force matters of the other two
services.
In American English, "military" as an adjective is more widely
used for regulations pertaining to and between military
procurement, military transport, military justice, military
strength, and military force.
Military procurement
Military procurement refers to common regulations and
requirements for a ship or a detached unit to requisistion and
draw on a base's facilies (housing, pay, and rations for
detached personnel), supplies (most commonly food stocks or
materials, and vehicles) by the service running a primary base;
e.g. Army units detached to or staging through an air base, a
vessel calling at a port near an army or air base, an army unit
drawing supplies from a naval base.
Military transport
Military transport would pertain to an equipment trans-shipped
via a sister service, or an individual detached for a technical
school operated by a sister service, or the travel orders and
authorization of such an individual to proceed via a sister
services vehicles, as well as the drawing (loan of)
transportation assets (staff cars, Hum-Vees, military trucks)
operating from the primary base command.
Military Justice
Military Justice, as in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Most nations have a separate code of law which regulates both
certain activities allowed only in war, as well as provides a
code of law applicable only to a soldier in war (or 'in uniform'
during peacetime).
The statutory laws set down by the United States Congress to
apply to the individual conduct within any military force of the
United States— these are the specific articles under which a
soldier or sailor would be tried for infractions ranging from
minor (Late Return, petty theft) to severe (Rape, Murder); this
code is usually referred to by the acronym UCMJ.
Military strength
Military strength is a term that describes a quantification or
reference to a nation's standing military forces or the capacity
for fulfillment of that military's role. For example, the
military strength of a given country could be interpreted as the
number of individuals in its armed forces, the destructive
potential of its arsenal, or both. For example, while China and
India maintain the largest armed forces in the world, the U.S.
Military is considered to be the world's strongest, although the
certainty of such a claim cannot be ascertained without a
detailed analysis of opposing military forces in relation to one
another as well as taking into account the field(s) of battle
and tactics used in such a conflict.
Military force
Military force is a term that might refer to a particular unit,
a regiment or gunboat deployed in a particular locale, or as an
aggregate of such forces (e.g. "In the Gulf War the United
States Central Command controlled military forces (units) of
each of the five military services of the United States."). |
