Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces

Abstract

The Austro-Hungarian armed forces were bookended by devastating military defeats. Born from the Austrian Empire’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, it passed in 1918 with the Central Powers’ defeat in the Great War, the only major conflict in which the Dual Monarchy’s armed forces participated. For this reason, the vast majority of scholarly literature on the Austro-Hungarian armed forces focuses on World War I and various facets of its operations and the experiences of its soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Institutional studies of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces have detailed the organizational, multiethnic, and political complexities which consistently hindered their ability to keep pace with Europe’s other “Great Powers.” Campaign studies reveal as much, offering a seemingly endless supply of military catastrophes due to all manner of ineptitude and implacability: the indecisiveness of its leadership, “Schlamperei” (carelessness), ill-conceived and/or poorly executed military operations, ethnic antagonisms within, and poor relations between officers and their men (Offizierhass). These deficiencies, during World War I, forced their German ally to intervene on an ever-greater scale to keep the army reasonably functional and intact. In the process, it placed the Habsburg Monarchy in an increasingly subservient role. The more recent turn of literature toward the experiences of Austro-Hungarian soldiers in the field has revealed the very real consequences of the debacles of the Habsburg high command. No soldiers among Europe’s Great Powers suffered more than did those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.