Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of figures and tables
- 1 Thinking about revolutions in warfare
- 2 “As if a new sun had arisen”: England's fourteenth-century RMA
- 3 Forging the Western army in seventeenth-century France
- 4 Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after
- 5 Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War
- 6 The Prusso-German RMA, 1840–1871
- 7 The battlefleet revolution, 1885–1914
- 8 The First World War and the birth of modern warfare
- 9 May 1940: Contingency and fragility of the German RMA
- 10 Conclusion: The future behind us
- Index
5 - Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of figures and tables
- 1 Thinking about revolutions in warfare
- 2 “As if a new sun had arisen”: England's fourteenth-century RMA
- 3 Forging the Western army in seventeenth-century France
- 4 Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after
- 5 Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War
- 6 The Prusso-German RMA, 1840–1871
- 7 The battlefleet revolution, 1885–1914
- 8 The First World War and the birth of modern warfare
- 9 May 1940: Contingency and fragility of the German RMA
- 10 Conclusion: The future behind us
- Index
Summary
Commanders seek control, the more absolute the better. The best way to achieve it is to obtain a crushing, unanswerable advantage. Clausewitz put it with his habitual pithiness: “The best strategy,” he wrote, “is always to be very strong.” Warring states greedily seize and ruthlessly exploit any weapon, method, or technology that offers crushing advantage. Supremacy is the Holy Grail of warfare.
Yet despite ceaseless search, advantages that produce lasting victory have appeared only rarely in the history of war. When they have, their most cherished attribute, asymmetry – the fact that one side has them while the other does not – has been fleeting. Belligerents adopt innovations with a conviction proportionate to their fear; new developments spread so swiftly that battlefield imbalances are usually brief. Genuine earthquakes in warfare are of a different nature entirely, and are largely independent of purely military factors. It is rather political, social, and economic changes, like the movement of vast tectonic plates, that most readily revolutionize war in all its aspects, from weapons and tactics, to methods of raising manpower, to the fundamental purposes the state pursues through war. Changes of that magnitude are truly military revolutions, and have little in common with the predictable, domesticated technological asymmetries that Pentagon commentators, with some conceptual help from Soviet theorists, have designated as “revolutions in military affairs.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 , pp. 74 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
- 2
- Cited by