Since its inception in Leicester in 2006, the symposium on the social history of military technology organized by Bart Hacker assisted by Margaret Vining has become a regular and expanding feature of ICOHTEC’s annual meeting. Academic and public interest in the history of military technology has always been substantial, but has usually been expressed in terms of weaponry, warships, fortifications, or other physical manifestations of warfare, with emphasis mainly on how they were made or how they worked, often in antiquarian detail. Historians have also tended to assume a strictly utilitarian and rational basis for military technological invention and innovation. However indispensable such approaches may be, however valid such assumptions, they largely ignore some very important questions. What are the contexts of social values, attitudes, and interests, non-military as well as military, that shape and support (or oppose) these technologies? What are the consequences of gender, race, class, and other aspects of the social order for the nature and use of military technology? Or, more generally: How do social and cultural environments within the military itself or in the larger society affect military technological change? And the indispensable corollary: How does changing military technology affect other aspects of society and culture? In brief, how does military technology serve as both agent and object of social change? These and related questions have informed well over a hundred papers presented in past symposia. Selected papers from the first three symposia provided the basis for a special issue of ICOHTEC’s journal, ICON. They have also inspired a new journal. In 2013 Brill, the Dutch publisher will launch Vulcan: The Social History of Military Technology. The first volume will include papers from the 2009 symposium in Budapest and the 2010 symposium in Tampere, as well as several outside contributions. Subsequent volumes will draw on later symposia, even as the pool of outside submissions expands.