Military Engineering

Military engineering is the art, science and practice of designing and building military works and maintaining the lines of transport and communication an army depends on, and it stands as the historical predecessor from which civil engineering itself later split off. Ancient Rome fielded the first dedicated corps of military engineering specialists, capable of feats such as building a thirty-mile fortification around the city of Alesia in six weeks; the discipline then stagnated for roughly six centuries after Rome's decline before reviving in the Middle Ages around siege warfare. Gunpowder reshaped the field again, forcing fortification design to withstand cannon fire and producing the trace italienne fortress design of sixteenth-century Europe, and by the eighteenth century most major armies had incorporated pioneer detachments handling construction, bridge-building and terrain preparation as standing units. Modern military engineering covers three primary functions, combat engineering in direct battlefield support, strategic support such as building airfields and ports, and ancillary support such as mapping and ordnance disposal, and now draws on mechanical and electrical engineering alongside its older core of construction and demolition, including specialized areas such as explosives engineering and defense against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.