Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- 3 World War I and the Revolution in Logistics
- 4 Mass Warfare and the Impact of Technology
- 5 Total War as a Result of New Weapons?
- 6 Planning Total War? Falkenhayn and the Battle of Verdun, 1916
- 7 “The Most Extensive Experiment that the Imagination Can Conceive”
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- Index
3 - World War I and the Revolution in Logistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- 3 World War I and the Revolution in Logistics
- 4 Mass Warfare and the Impact of Technology
- 5 Total War as a Result of New Weapons?
- 6 Planning Total War? Falkenhayn and the Battle of Verdun, 1916
- 7 “The Most Extensive Experiment that the Imagination Can Conceive”
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- Index
Summary
Back in the days when it had not yet occurred to people that the term “modern” should always be preceded by the prefix “post,” the origins of “modern” war were hotly debated. To some it was represented by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the event that determined that subsequent wars should be waged not by monarchs seeking to promote their own dynastic interests but by governments and regular armed forces acting on behalf of their respective states. Others thought they could find it in the French Revolution, which, having introduced the levée en masse for the first time since the Barbarian invasions, was able to wage war with the full resources of the state; in the campaigns of Napoleon, which at some point between 1796 and 1809 gave birth to strategy in its modern, Clausewitzian sense; in the American Civil War, waged on a vast scale with the aid of a comparatively well-developed railway network and also known as the first “industrial” war; and in the German Wars of Unification in 1864-71 as the first armed conflicts to be waged and directed by that all-important modern institution, the general staff. Depending on which of these factors one considers most important, obviously each of the above propositions contains a considerable element of truth. Taken together, they suggest that in the military field, as in others, the transition from the “traditional” to the “modern” was not accomplished in a single stroke. Instead, it constituted a prolonged process with numerous interlinked, interwoven strands.
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- Information
- Great War, Total WarCombat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, pp. 57 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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