The activities of Military Missions of the Leading European States in the Allied Armies during the First World War, 1914-1918: Generalization of the Problem

The most recent scientific achievements in the field of military history are related to the use of new methods developed by leading historians of the late XX - early XXI centuries. This allowed expanding the understanding of an important scientific area of military history – the borrowing of the latest army technologies and methods using foreign military missions. Scholars who studied the evolution of military affairs during the First World War did not actively use the method of generalization and comparativism when analyzing the activities of foreign military missions in 1914 to 1918. As a rule, only specific military missions to individual countries were studied, which led to fragmented knowledge about the history of missions. For example, a number of studies have focused on the activities of German and French military missions in the armies of their allies during the First World War. However, no generalizing work has yet been created that would focus on such a complex phenomenon as the adoption of various areas of military innovation with the help of foreign military experts. As a rule, scholars have focused their attention on the impact of foreign military professionals on armies in which officers performed their duties as part of missions. The activities of the missions themselves remained only a part of the general problem of studying the First World War during 1914 to 1918. The study is devoted to generalizing the problems of military missions in the context of large-scale hostilities of 1914-1918, in particular, the attention is focused primarily on comparing the activities of the German military mission (in the Ottoman Empirein 1913 to 1918) and the French military mission (in Romania in 1916 to 1918). The activities of other French, German, and Russian military missions, as well as Italian, Dutch, and Swedish gendarmerie missions in the armed forces of the Allied powers during the 1914 to 1918 war are analyzed. The method of comparison and generalization of vast military experience, which is relevant for the modern military history space, is involved in the scientific discourse.