The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050
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The Dynamics of Military Revolution bridges a major gap in the emerging literature on revolutions in military affairs. It suggests that two very different phenomena have been at work over the past centuries: “military revolutions,” which are driven by vast social and political changes, and “revolutions in military affairs,” which military institutions have directed, although usually with fantastic difficulty and ambiguous results. MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray provide a conceptual framework and past context for understanding the patterns of change, innovation, and adaptation that have marked war in the Western world since the fourteenth century–beginning with Edward III’s revolution in medieval warfare, through the development of modern military institutions in seventeenth-century France, to the military impact of mass politics in the French Revolution, the cataclysmic military-manufacturing struggle of 1914-1918, and the German Blitzkrieg victories of 1940. Case studies and a conceptual overview offer an indispensible introduction to revolutionary military change,–which is as inevitable as it is hard to predict. Macgregor Knox is the Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the leader of Common Destiny (Cambridge, 2000) and Hitler’s Italian Allies (Cambridge, 2000). Knox and Murray are co-editors of Building of Strategy (Cambridge, 1996). Willamson Murray is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defense Analysis. He is the co-editor of Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge, 1996) and leader of A War to Be Won (Harvard University Press, 2000).
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This book is the volume one should buy if he or she is searching for the best, consise overvue of the history and processes involved in the military innovations of the Western world.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is a well written book by two ex- military officers who share their insights and research on the theme of Military Revolutions and how they have affected the different countries of the world. It is a excellent read for military history and just persons who like military type subjects. This book is to some extent detailed with excellent past examples.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
… a book that is both required reading AND appealing!
The Dynamics of Military Revolution looks at the evolution of military power and does it very well. This book looks at Military Revolutions (which had wide-ranging impacts on social and political matters as well as military) and Revolutions in Military Affairs (which are characterized by new weapons, tactics and additional military innovations and which can contribute to Military Revolutions).
If you’re looking for a theory that clarifies why new weapons systems aren’t permanently revolutionary, or how something as simple as paying your troops for a change can result in a major shift in military power, then this is a book you want to read. It includes a lot of excellent writing and the reasoning behind it is impeccable. I cannot recommend this book fervently enough.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book contains an dreadful lot of wisdom for such a slim volume (it clocks in at just under 200 pages).
The authors examine the natures of military revolutions and RMA (a very hot topic that has arguably produced more hot air than substance) and provide a number of case studies examining the issues and hard the authors’ views through history.
The case studies are;
- The English in the 14th century
- 17th century France
- The French Revolution
- The American Civil War
- The Prussian RMA, 1840-1871
- The Battlefleet Revolution
- The First World War
- Blitzkrieg 1940
The various case studies are backed up by an extremely satisfying introduction and a thorough, well argued conclusion which fires one or two shots across the bows of persons residents of the Pentagon who may be suffering from equipment-centric tunnel vision. The authors (very distinguished bunch, it should be said) warn against the thought that Clausewitzian truths regarding such issues as friction can be discounted thanks to the wonders of equipment and indeed make clear that they are as vital as ever.
The various case studies work extremely well as concise stand-alone works on their various past periods, even if RMA is not your hot topic. Especially excellent are the chapters on the English in the 14th century and on the Battlefleet Revolution (and the inner workings of the Imperial German Navy and the Royal Navy during this period).
This is a well written, appealing book which should annoy all the right people.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is the only serious book I have been able to find that addresses revolutions in military affairs with useful case studies, a point focus on whether asymmetric advantages do or do not result, and a very satisfactory executive conclusion. This book is fervently recommended for both military professionals, and the executive and congressional authorities who persist in sharing the fiction that equipment is of itself an asymmetric advantage.
It merits emphasis that the leader’s first conclusion, spanning a diversity of case studies, is that equipment may be a catalyst but it rarely drives a revolution in military affairs–concepts are revolutionary, it is thoughts that break out of the box.
Their second conclusion is both counter-intuitive (but based on case studies) and in perfect alignment with Peter Drucker’s conclusions on successful entrepreneurship: the best revolutions are incremental (evolutionary) and based on solutions to actual opponents and actual conditions, rather than hypothetical and delusional scenarios of what we reflect the future will bring us. In this the authors mesh well with Andrew Gordon’s masterpiece on the rules of the game and Jutland: we may be best drawing down on our funds in peacetime, emphasizing the education of our future warfighters, and then be prepared for massive rapid agile funds in scaling up experimental initiatives as they prove successful in actual battle.
The book is noteworthy for its assault on fictional scenarios and its emphasis on realism in preparation–especially valuable is the authors’ staunch insistence that only honesty, open discussion among all ranks, and the wide dissemination of lessons learned, will lead to improvements.
Finally, the authors are in whole-hearted agreement with Colin Gray, leader of Modern Strategy, in stating out-right that revolutions in military affairs are not a substitute for strategy as so regularly assumed by utopian planners, but merely an operational or tactical means.
This is a brilliant, carefully documented work that should scare the daylights out of every taxpayer–it is nothing fleeting of an indictment of our entire current approach to military spending and organization. As the leader’s quaintly note in their understated way, in the last paragraph of the book, “the present trend is far from promising, as the American government and armed forces procure enormous arsenals only abstractedly related to point strategic needs and operational and tactical employment concepts, while continu[ing], in the immortal words of Kiffin Rockwell, a pilot in the legendary First World War Lafayette Escadrille, to ‘glide along, blissfully ignorant, hoping for the best.’”
Lest the above be greeted with some skepticism, let us note the 26 October 2001 award of $200 billion to Lockheed for the new Joint Strike Fighter calls into serious question whether the leadership in the Pentagon understands the real world–the real world conflicts of today–all 282 of them (counting 178 internal conflicts) will require the Joint Strike Fighter only 10% of the time–the additional 90% of our challenges demand capabilities and insights the Pentagon is not only not capable of fielding, it simply refuses to consider them to be “real war.” Omar Bin Laden beat the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and he (and others who follow in his footsteps) will continue to do so until we find a military leadership that can lead a real-world revolution in military affairs…. rather than a continuing fantasy in which the military-manufacturing complex lives on regardless of how many homeland attacks we suffer.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5