In modern armoured warfare, armoured units equipped with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles serve the historic role of both the battle cavalry, light cavalry and dragoons, and belong to the armoured branch.

The light tanks that were the last descendants of the light cavalry during the Second World War have almost completely disappeared from the world's militaries due to increased lethality of the weapons available to the vehicle-mounted infantry.

In many modern armies, the term cavalry is still often used to refer to units that are a combat arm of the armed forces which in the past filled the traditional horse-borne land combat light cavalry roles.

Before the Iron Age, the role of cavalry on the battlefield was largely performed by light chariots.

Three types of cavalry became common: light cavalry, whose riders, armed with javelins, could harass and skirmish ; heavy cavalry, whose troopers, using lances, had the ability to close with their opponents ; and finally those whose equipment allowed them to fight either on horseback or foot.

In addition to these heavy cavalry, the Macedonian army also employed lighter horsemen called prodromoi for scouting and screening, as well as the Macedonian pike phalanx and various kinds of light infantry.

Early organized Arab mounted forces under the Rashidun caliphate comprised a light cavalry armed with lance and sword.

Ironically, the rise of infantry in the early 16th century coincided with the " golden age " of heavy cavalry ; a French or Spanish army at the beginning of the century could have up to half its numbers made up of various kinds of light and heavy cavalry, whereas in earlier medieval and later 17th century armies the proportion of cavalry was seldom more than a quarter.

Even then light cavalry remained an indispensable tool for scouting, screening the army's movements, and harassing the enemy's supply lines until military aircraft supplanted them in this role in the early stages of World War I.

* Hussars, light cavalry

* Lancers or Uhlans, light cavalry armed with lances

The British and French armies dismounted many of their cavalry regiments and used them in infantry and other roles: the Life Guards for example spent the last months of the War as a machine gun corps ; and the Australian Light Horse served as light infantry during the Gallipoli campaign.

By the end of 1940 all of the Indian cavalry had been mechanised, receiving light tanks, armoured cars or 15cwt trucks.

Dragoon regiments were converted to motorised infantry ( trucks and motor cycles ), and cuirassiers to armoured units ; while light cavalry ( Chasseurs a ' Cheval, Hussars and Spahis ) remained as mounted sabre squadrons.

Moreover, the Polish cavalry brigade order of battle of 1939 included, apart from the mounted soldiers themselves, light and heavy machine guns ( wheeled ), Anti-tank rifle, model 35, anti-aircraft weapon, artillery like Bofors 37 mm anti tank gun or light and scout tanks, etc.

Historically, cavalry was divided into light and armoured cavalry and horse archers.

A grapnel is often quite light, and may have additional uses as a tool to recover gear lost overboard.

Housman wrote most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire ( about thirty miles from his home ), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his ' land of lost content '.

This argument has lost much force as recent insight into Greek influence on Judea at the time has come to light.

The lost energy is converted into alternative forms such as heat, emission of low-energy secondary electrons and high-energy backscattered electrons, light emission ( cathodoluminescence ) or X-ray emission, which provide signals carrying information about the properties of the specimen surface, such as its topography and composition.

The reflection of light back into space — largely by clouds — does not much affect the basic mechanism ; this light, effectively, is lost to the system.

The fate of the Galatian people is a subject of some uncertainty, but they seem ultimately to have been absorbed into the Greek-speaking populations of west-central Anatolia thereby giving a fresh transmission of light skin, blue eyed, and fair haired ethno-types into the Greek population which by then had highly intermarried with darker ethnotypes and lost their earlier appearances.

The greatest extent of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse, c. 500, showing Territory lost after Battle of Vouillé | Vouillé in light orange.

Dark pink area represents Poland at end of rule of Mieszko I of Poland | Mieszko I ( 992 ); light pink area added ( northwest lost ) during reign of Bolesław I the Brave | Bolesław I ( died 1025 ).

The light striking the painting in these sections would be lost and absorbed into the painting ground.

The resonator typically consists of two mirrors between which a coherent beam of light travels in both directions, reflecting back on itself so that an average photon will pass through the gain medium repeatedly before it is emitted from the output aperture or lost to diffraction or absorption.

In this case the light can not escape and is lost as waste heat in the crystal.

As light signals travel down a fibre optic cable, it undergoes total internal reflection allowing for essentially no light lost over the length of the cable.

American naval losses during the war were light, with only one armed U. S. Navy vessel lost to enemy action.

It is important to note that ancient precedent existed for alternative theories and developments which prefigured later discoveries in the area of physics and mechanics ; but in the absence of a strong empirical tradition, dominance of the Aristotelian school, and in light of the limited number of works to survive translation in an era when many books were lost to warfare, such developments remained obscure for centuries and are traditionally held to have had little effect on the re-discovery of such phenomena ; whereas the invention of the printing press made the wide dissemination of such incremental advances of knowledge commonplace.

They also did the navy blue jerseys with the light blue pants against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but they lost that game.

This text sheds light on aspects of Jan van Eyck's production now lost, citing a bathing scene owned by a prominent Italian, but mistakenly attributing to van Eyck a world map painted by another.

where ( for ) is the energy lost as recoil, is the energy of the gamma ray ( for ), ( for ) is the mass of the emitting or absorbing body, and c is the speed of light.

He lost his world light heavyweight title and his European heavyweight and light heavyweight titles the following year, on September 24, 1922, in a controversial bout with Senegalese fighter Battling Siki.

But one stormy winter night, the waves tossed Leander in the sea and the breezes blew out Hero's light, and Leander lost his way, and was drowned.

In light of its gains in the three 2005 elections and government appointments, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council became one of Iraq's most powerful political parties and was the largest party in the Iraqi Council of Representatives until the 2010 Iraqi elections, where it lost support due to Nuri Al-Maliki's political party rise.

Anti-reflective coatings reduce light lost at every optical surface through reflection at each surface.

It was, I felt, possible that they were men who, having received no tickets for that day, had remained in the hall, to sleep perhaps, in the corners farthest removed from the counter with its overhead light.

`` Gladius Dei '' ( 1902 ) resembles `` The Way To The Churchyard '' in its representation of a conflict between light and dark, between `` Life '' and a spirit of criticism, negation, melancholy, but it goes considerably further in characterizing the elements of this conflict.

The cliche loses its talismanic virtue in the light of a little history.

During the discharge the magnetic forces set up by the passage of current cause the edges of the foil to roll inward toward its center line, thus allowing light to pass into the camera.

Then pour water or light oil from a graduated beaker into the chamber to fill the chamber to its gasket surface.

The Deerstalker points with the ease, speed and precision of a fine imported double shotgun, and its trigger pull is light and sharp.

This material fluoresces under ultraviolet light which facilitates its sampling and assessment.

Rather he weighs each phonologic fact in the light of its orthographic usefulness.

Geometric pottery has not yet received the thorough, detailed study which it deserves, partly because the task is a mammoth one and partly because some of its local manifestations, as at Argos, are only now coming to light.

A `` mental image '' subconsciously impressing us from beneath its language symbols in wakeful thought, or consciously in light sleep, is actually not an image at all but is comprised of realities, viewed not in the concurrent sensory stream, but within the depths of the fourth dimension.

The second walk through the heart of Rome should be taken after lunch, so that you will reach the Pincian Hill when the soft light of the late afternoon is at its best.

That meant that something between the light and its reflection on the wall was moving closer to the source of the light -- in this case, the window.

But, up to now, no one has attempted to analyze its inherent mathematical properties, or the numerical significance of its numbers -- singly or in combination -- and then tried to consider these in the light of Old Chinese cosmological concepts.

Owing to its strong radioactivity, actinium glows in the dark with a pale blue light, which originates from the surrounding air ionized by the emitted energetic particles.

Its small 37 mm gun and light armor was seen as a flaw, but was produced in such a large volume and, coupled with its off-road capability, that this shortcoming was largely overlooked.

Without the contrast of light, the figures would blend in with its surrounding environment.

** Spherical aberration, which occurs when light rays strike a lens or mirror near its edge

It was discovered in 1725 and later explained by the third Astronomer Royal, James Bradley, who attributed it to the finite speed of light and the motion of Earth in its orbit around the Sun.

At the instant of any observation of an object, the apparent position of the object is displaced from its true position by an amount which depends solely upon the transverse component of the velocity of the observer, with respect to the vector of the incoming beam of light ( i. e., the line actually taken by the light on its path to the observer ).

Another way to state this is that the emitting object may have a transverse velocity with respect to the observer, but any light beam emitted from it which reaches the observer, cannot, for it must have been previously emitted in such a direction that its transverse component has been " corrected " for.