November 6, 2006
War Made New Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:50 PM EST I have just finished reading War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot, and I recommend it to all American Heritage Blog readers. I would be especially interested in Fredric Smoler’s opinion of it. While of substantial length (624 pages), it is so well written and so full of information and insight that was new to me that it didn’t seem long enough.
The book covers the technological revolutions that have swept through military history in the last 500 years, beginning with the gunpowder revolution at the end of the Middle Ages that concentrated military power in the hands of kings, as the nobility largely could afford neither cannon nor the rebuilding that was necessary to keep medieval castles from being sitting ducks for those cannon.
The first industrial revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, brought far larger armies, thanks to much more rapid economic growth; more rapid movement and better command and control, thanks to railroads and the telegraph; more potent arms such as the Maxim and Gatling guns, and far more powerful battleships.
The second industrial revolution brought tanks, aircraft carriers, and heavy bombers.
The information revolution of our own time brought smart bombs, stealth aircraft, and vastly improved communications.
Each of these revolutions altered the balance of power in favor of those countries that were the first to exploit them effectively, such as the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 or the blitzkrieg tactics that overwhelmed France in 1940.
American mastery of information technology allowed the 1991 Gulf War to be a cakewalk and yet 15 years later, what is militarily the only significant country in the world is struggling mightily against enemies in Iraq that are not even nation-states, for the new information technology and electronics can be exploited effectively and cheaply by them. And the United States military, especially the elephantine Pentagon bureaucracy, has been reluctant to develop the needed skills and expertise in counterinsurgency warfare. The military wants to fight tank battles when there are no more tanks left to fight.
One of the lessons that Boot draws in this book is that, over and over again, the losers in the last war and inferior powers are far quicker to exploit the possibilities of new technology than are the victors and dominant powers. The English mastery of the new cannon-dominated naval warfare helped doom the Armada. The Germans after 1918 developed the new offensive capabilities provided by closely integrated armor and air power, while France assumed that defense, as it had been in World War I, was still king. And the United States, after Vietnam, profoundly changed its military culture for the better (John Kerry, please note).
Boot uses several battles as examples. Some of these, such as the Spanish Armada, are known to every school child. Others, such as the Battle of Königgratz (1866), which established Prussian dominance of the German-speaking world at the expense of Austria, have been largely forgotten.
War Made New is one of those books that had me saying, “Ah hah, now I understand,” over and over again.
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