No money. No change of clothes. 4400 miles from home. Teller has been in Paris for 128 minutes.

Drawing heavily from candid interviews conducted with cadets and trainers of the Gamecock Battalion at the University of South Carolina, Army 101 traces the experiences of a representative mix of students--freshmen to seniors of both sexes and many races--essentially minoring in the military while also pursuing regular undergraduate degrees in diverse fields. Axe invites us along to witness the quagmire of confusion in a nighttime training exercise, the immersion into procedures and jargon of the classroom, and the high aspirations of candidates at Airborne School. Replete with a vivid...

In 2001, the Pentagon had just 200 robotic aircraft. In 2008 it had more than 5,000. The number of military ground robots jumped from 160 in 2004 to around 4,000 in 2006. Only underwater robots lagged: so far just a few dozen systems have entered service. Under the water is, after all, the toughest environment for robots. But even undersea bots will see a boost in coming years. The Pentagon has plans to spend at least $4 billion a year for the foreseeable future designing and building robots.

The spread of robots in our armies, navies and air forces has greatly advanced the science,...

Read David Axe's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.
The war memoir as graphic novel-an utterly unforgettable and highly original look at war in the 21st century.
Street battles with spears and arrows in sweltering East Timor. Bone- jarring artillery duels in Afghanistan's mountains. Long patrols on the sandy wastes of southern Iraq. For four years, war was life for David Axe. He was alternately bored out of his mind and completely terrified. It was strangely addictive.
As a correspondent for The Washington Times, C-SPAN and BBC Radio, Axe...

Logistics includes the planning and practice of moving -stuff---raw materials, tools, finished products, and even people--from one place to another. It carried American settlers over the sparsely populated Great Plains to connect the East Coast to the West Coast and has underpinned our domestic prosperity ever since. Logistics also solidified the global power and influence of the United States by guaranteeing our ability to rapidly reinforce Europe in the world wars, by helping us win the Cold War, and by enabling the current U.S. military to fight two wars at once. Further, logistics...

Warfare's evolution, especially since 2001, has irrevocably changed the meaning of war. In the twentieth century--humankind's bloodiest--231 million people died in armed conflicts. Battlefield deaths since then have been steadily declining, despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by 2012 less than 1 person in a million dies in war every year. This drastic change has led some academics to label our era one of peace, recalling the erroneously named -Hundred Years' Peace- or -Pax Britannica- of the nineteenth century, which nonetheless saw many violent conflicts. But war hasn't gone...