It took Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw only 14 days to secure his place in Indian history. The career officer, who died June 27 at 94, had a mystique as thick as his silvered mustache, after fighting heroically against the Japanese in World War II. But his defining moment came with the Indian army's decisive victory in the two-week 1971 war against Pakistan. For a country that had been mired in seemingly endless battles on its borders for most of ...

This is the tale of the enmity of three women: the first is perhaps the richest in Argentina; the second is the President of the country; the third, a grandmother in search of the children of desaparecidos, the 30,000 or so mostly young people who disappeared in the military junta's death camps from 1976 to 1983. The objects of their contention are two adopted children, a brother and sister, who stand to inherit an immense fortune — ...

Nelson Mandela didn't know how to fire a rifle when he formed the underground military movement of the African National Congress in the 1950s. For help, he called on Arthur Goldreich, a Jewish South African artist who despised apartheid and had fought in the 1948 war that achieved Israeli independence. He became Mandela's military tutor and landlord, sheltering a fugitive Mandela on Liliesleaf Farm in Johannesburg. And like Mandela, he was captured in the famous 1963 police raid on that ...

It could be argued that the world does not need a new science, but Laurence J. Peter, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, has invented one. He calls it hierarchiology, or the study of hierarchies in modern organizations. According to a satiric new book called The Peter Principle , which he wrote with the help of Canadian Freelancer Raymond Hull, the basic premise of hierarchiology is that "with few exceptions men bungle their affairs." The proof? Look at any large bureaucracy.The ...

The Tahrir Square slogan proclaiming that "The army and the people are one hand" will seem like so much wishful thinking to many of Egypt's youthful democracy activists now that they find themselves increasingly at odds with the transitional military government that replaced President Hosni Mubarak. This week's crackdown on media criticism of the military as an institution is but the latest indication of a parting of ways on Egypt's future: the military authorities called in a ...

The ringing of the telephone awakened Douglas MacArthur just after 3:30 a.m. in his air-conditioned six-room penthouse atop the Manila Hotel. Japanese bombers had just ravaged Pearl Harbor, the caller said. "Pearl Harbor!" echoed MacArthur. "It should be our strongest point!" The 61-year-old "Field Marshal" asked his wife Jean to bring him his Bible, and he read in it, as he did every morning, for about 10 minutes. It brought him little comfort. At this moment of crisis, facing a ...

On Friday, before an audience of military officers from around the world, Russia's top generals made a startling admission of weakness. After 2015, they said, Russia may no longer be able to launch a nuclear strike against the West, because the planned U.S. missile shield over Europe would by then be advanced enough to blow Russian rockets out of the sky. This eventuality, which Russia's top brass have never admitted before, would finally dislodge the Cold War ...

Updated: May 23, 2011. 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time Filty water sloshed through the streets of Sana'a on Monday as a fierce rainstorm swept over the capital. But the rolling of thunder was soon competing with the booming of heavy artillery and the rat-tat-tat of machine gun-fire as security forces in the east of the capital battled with fighters from Yemen's most powerful tribe. The prospect of civil war seemed to rear its head even more insistently as the republican ...

The military policeman tightly clasps his weapon. His eyes, though wearied by an obvious lack of sleep, still dart around intently. Standing guard on the edge of Karachi's Mehran naval base, he and others have been positioned to maintain a firm security cordon. With a mere tilt of his gun, he quickly dissuades anyone tempted to draw nearer to the base. But as even the policeman concedes, this new vigilance has come too late. For the previous 17 ...

There was more bad news on Sunday for a Pakistani military already reeling from the fallout of the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden: suspected Islamist militants launched a brazen large-scale attack on a Pakistani naval base in the southern port city of Karachi. As many as 15 fighters carrying guns, grenades and rocket-propelled grenades stormed into the Pakistan naval station Mehran on Sunday in the most dramatic attack in years on a Pakistani military ...