Modern War

Modern War
Modern war is the product of three distinct kinds of change-administrative technical and ideological. Not all of these can be seen in any straightforward was as ‘progress’, though they seem to be irreversible.

Nor have they developed at the same pace.

Military technology has produced the most striking and indeed terrifying symbols of modern war: the machine gun, the rocket, the atomic bomb.

The increased in power and sophistication of weapon system has been exponential.

Between the first general adoption of efficient forearms in these seventeenth century and the production of breech-loading guns and smokeless propellants in the middle of the nineteenth, the pace of change was slow.

Improvements in technique (professionalism, training, and tactics), rather in technology, brought the most substantial results. Later the balance altered.

Technological change may appear to be an independent process, governed only by an extent of scientific knowledge and the limits of science and manufacturing.

But military institutions have tended to be conservative than other social groups. Soldiers have seldom been in the forefront of technological development, and more often reluctant to welcome new weapons.

Tradition has always been important in fostering the esprit de corps of fighting units, and can lead to fossilization.

So can the tendency – actually increased by professionalization, which removed young princes and nobles from high command – for senior officers to be substantially older than their junior.

They are many striking examples of failure to embrace new technology, none perhaps more disastrous than that of the imperial Chinese navy, which could have had the world’s most advanced naval artillery in the early sixteenth century, but rejected it in favor of traditional ramming and boarding tactics.
Modern War