Search Results

A historical analysis of early modern Western Europe demonstrates that it was the interests of princes and kings, and the forms of government, that mainly determined whether there was economic growth or stagnation—and that these even partly explain the Industrial Revolution. The different parts of the chapter discuss prince‐ and merchant‐dominated city states in pre‐industrial Europe, the military revolution (with sections on the decline of Spain, and the stagnation of the Dutch Republic), and the anomaly of Britain as the only nation state that continued to grow its economy under the burden of maintaining the military effort required of an early modern European great power.

This chapter traces the prolonged military conflict of 1641-53. It examines the elaborate system of government, with headquarters at Kilkenny, established by the Confederate Catholics, as well as the importation into Ireland of the tactics of the European military revolution. It examines the divisions between Royalist and Parliamentarian among Irish Protestants, the former commanded by the earl of Ormond, as well as the shifting allegiances of the Scottish army established in the north east. The arrival in 1649 of a parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell, and the controversial massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, initiated the last phase of the war. The victorious parliamentary regime initiated a massive scheme of social engineering, transplanting Catholic proprietors to a small western region while redistributing other lands among English settlers.

This chapter discusses wartime spending and the rise of the fiscal-military state. The need to borrow was intimately related to the cost of war. After 1500, a “military revolution” transformed warfare in Europe. The invention of gunpowder meant that old medieval city walls no longer offered protection. The increasing use of cannon therefore required an entirely new set of protective walls. These new fortifications meant that wars became longer, with many sieges lasting more than a year. Then, the rise of firearms translated into a need to train soldiers. All these changes—the arms used, the rise of permanent, large armies and navies, new fortifications, and high frequency and great length of conflict—made wars vastly more expensive. Success in war therefore depended in the early modern period on financial resources. Eventually, states run by a successful military-fiscal complex dominated the map of Europe.

In the forty years between 1520 and 1559, the Habsburg and Valois dynasties were at war for twenty years. This struggle for hegemony in Europe entailed not just recurring warfare along the Franco‐Netherlandish frontier, but also a leapfrogging competition in military technology (artillery, and fortresses built to withstand bombardment) and military organization (building mercenary armies from specialized units recruited in different nations). In the 1540s and especially the 1550s, French attacks came by sea as well as by land, forcing the Netherlands government, for the first time, to think about how to control the North Sea. At sea and on land, commanders who acquired up‐to‐date military skills by fighting for the Habsburgs in the 1550s would in the 1570s fight one another.

This chapter defines peripheral conquest and describes some of the reasons why peripheral conquest differs from the cases of European interstate conquest that attract most attention from international relations scholars. It also surveys existing explanations for peripheral conquest, including those that emphasize the role of the “military revolution” in creating imbalances in military technology and skill between European militaries and their non-European opponents. These existing explanations are found to be incomplete. They fail to explain variations in conquest outcomes within specific geographic regions or time periods. They also have limited utility in the context of peripheral conquest—where challenges in projecting power across vast distances and the organization of resistance on the part of targeted societies can frustrate the ambitions of aspiring conquerors.

Discussion about the nature of warfare in Afghanistan is related with several bigger inter-related debates in the field of military history. First, is the world witnessing a Military Revolution, or a Military Technical Revolution/Revolution in Military Affairs at the dawn of the new millennium? Second, is conventional warfare dead? Third, are we witnessing a new form of insurgency and is it part of the so-called Eastern Way of Warfare? Fourth, does it mean that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is part of the West’s ongoing Global War on Terror? Last, is the paradigm of war culled from the Afghan experience the only possible paradigm of war for the future or are other alternatives also possible? The author explores these questions in the chapter.

This chapter highlights the orientalist roots of assumptions about European military superiority in South Asia and questions the extent to which Europeans in fact enjoyed any decisive technological or organizational edge. It suggests that any attempt to attribute the British conquest to inherent military superiority is not sustainable for a continent even when it might account for particular local successes. Especially when defined in technological or organizational terms, military superiority often had a relatively minor role. Instead, there is a need to look at a more complex matrix of economic and political factors to explain the British success, rather than at the more conventionally understood referents of military organization and technology. The discussion then turns to the case of India, arguing that it is a mistake to view Indian infantry at the outset of colonial rule as little more than an armed rabble. In fact, there was a vast pool of potential soldiers who could be tapped by ambitious nobles eager to assert their authority in the very fluid conditions of eighteenth-century India.

Chapter 7 addresses the advent of gunpowder technology in the Deccan generally, and in Raichur in particular, since that city happened to witness the earliest recorded deployment of firearms anywhere in India’s interior. The chapter first examines the Battle of Raichur (1520), in which Krishna Raya of Vijayanagara, using conventional infantry and cavalry, crushed the army of Isma`il `Adil Khan of Bijapur and captured the city of Raichur, notwithstanding that Isma`il had already pioneered the use of firearms. The consequences of the battle were momentous. Whereas the complacent victors failed to incorporate gunpowder technology into their military system, the losing Bijapuris made revolutionary innovations both in cannon technology and in military architecture. These changes led indirectly to major shifts in the Deccan’s geopolitics that culminated in the beheading of Rama Raya and the destruction of the great metropolis of Vijayanagara in 1565. They also force a re-examination of the validity of the ‘military revolution’ thesis in contexts beyond Europe.

This chapter examines the consequences of introducing new technologies and techniques to Native American warfare and whether their introduction changed their way of war and thereby changed their social and political organization. It asks: Did Native Americans experience a military revolution, with its accompanying social and political implications, based on technology introduced from Europe? It argues that the dependence on Europeans for guns, gun repair, and gun powder had two related impacts on Native American polities. First, it emphasized maintaining diplomatic ties with Europeans in situations in which the response might otherwise have been hostility or even just simple disregard. As a corollary effect of this emphasis on diplomacy, many Native American polities experienced a shift in the relative power of war chiefs over peace chiefs and, in many societies, over the council of women. The Native American military revolution also shifted settlement patterns. The failure of even improved fortress systems eventually led some native peoples either to ask that European forts and garrisons be placed in their midst or to relocate nearer to European forts. For some Amerindian groups, Europeans and access to their weapons represented opportunity. The specific histories of certain groups provide evidence that early access to the Europeans (and thus early participation in the Native American military revolution) provided a military advantage that these groups parlayed into greater power and influence over their neighbors.

On May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys landed on a small peninsula in the Chesapeake and established Jamestown. The colonists sailed not for themselves but for the Virginia Company, whose shareholders were financing this foray into the New World. The colony was established as a military outpost. The Virginia Company purposely outfitted the early colony like an army unit due to concerns over the extraction of resources and fears of a hostile native population. At the moment when Jamestown was settled, the English military was undergoing a profound transition. Dubbed the “military revolution” by scholars, the change reordered the weapons, organization, and ideas of war. The constructions of manhood in early Jamestown reflected these changing ideas. This chapter explores how conflicting ideas of manhood arising from changes in the military led to conflict among the settlers. It argues that Anglo-American masculinity was being defined on the ground at the same time that definitions of masculinity were threatening the cohesion of the fledgling colony.

This chapter examines the development of the Western way of war. Since the seventeenth century, Western military superiority has rested on the ability of states and peoples to stay ahead of the game in developing cutting-edge military technology, both in wars between European powers and in European expansion into the wider world. However, a study of the military history also shows that in cases where there has been a great leap forward in pure military potential and effectiveness, many transformations have little to do with a single, or even a combination of, technological innovations. Many war-transforming developments were about organization and resources, not technology.

A recurring theme of post-World War II US military history is the fixation of American policy-makers on technological solutions to strategic challenges. In the wake of the 1991 victory in the Gulf War, American military leaders embraced a Revolution in Military Affairs combining guided munitions with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems to provide war-winning capabilities for US forces. Although Army experimentation in the 1990s and early 2000s had much to commend it, senior Army leaders lost sight of the connection between strategy and military operations and virtually ignored any type of war other than the one for which the Army's powerful conventional forces were designed. In the aftermath of regime change in Iraq in 2003, US commanders struggled to develop concepts suitable to achieve the nation's strategic goals. Having all but ignored other types of conflict, Army leaders proved incredibly resistant to embracing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq until defeat stared them in the face. In the future, the US Army needs to integrate information networks, ISR systems, and guided munitions into a broader warfighting framework that military leaders can adapt to whatever type of enemies they may face, rather than counting on fighting a mirror-imaged enemy.

This chapter describes the rise of military transformation in detail. It specifically reviews the rise of Military Transformation in both the United States and European contexts. Desert Storm can be regarded as the spark plug of much of the debate on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). It was taken to represent a new age of warfare. It also showed that advanced air power capabilities present the option to open a flank in a third dimension. The ability to plan and conduct effects-based operations is implied on a task force operating along the principles of the Network-Centric Warfare concept. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Transformation has achieved a specific political content. It called for expeditionary capabilities. In addition, US “Transformation” developed from a series of interconnected conceptual and technological growths over the past twenty years, displaying the interaction of experience, debate, technological developments, and policy development.

Using British author Daniel Defoe and his novel Colonial Jack as a guide to the transition to the large integrated plantation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, this chapter insists that there was a connection between the military revolution of this period and what historians have considered to be a plantation revolution, in which white men moved to become overseers and plantation employees. This transition happened first in Barbados in the 1650s. It was slow to happen elsewhere, mainly because ordinary white men had other options they preferred to do rather than do the difficult work of disciplining slaves. Jamaica provides a case study of how this process worked. Before 1700, ordinary white men liked to be privateers or working in Port Royal rather than be plantation employees. But as other options declined, they became prepared to be overseers of employed in gang labor. At the same time, white men stopped being servants and the majority of plantation labor started to be done by slaves. Unlike previous interpretations of this transition, economic rather than racial reasons are advanced for why white men became willing to become overseers.

For two decades, scholars and practitioners have argued that the world is experiencing a revolution in military affairs (RMA) brought on by the development and diffusion of precision-strike and related capabilities, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; precision navigation and tracking; and robustly improved command and control. The United States took an early lead in exploiting the promise of precision-strike systems, and the use of precision weaponry has given the United States a battlefield edge for some twenty years. However, precision-strike systems are now spreading: other countries, and non-state actors, are acquiring them and developing countermeasures against them. As the precision-strike regime matures, the United States will see its edge erode. The ability of the United States to project power will diminish considerably. In addition, U.S. forces, and eventually the United States itself, will be increasingly vulnerable to precision weapons in the hands of our adversaries.

This chapter examines how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s quest for ‘transformation’ of the US defense establishment affected Army approaches to counterinsurgency and what was now known as stability operations, and how these considerations informed the planning and execution of what was to be to be the largest stability operation attempted since Vietnam – the invasion of Iraq. By examining both the doctrine in place prior to the war and the specific planning and execution of the war, we can see how thirty years of accumulated doctrinal neglect of counterinsurgency in Iraq in the spring of 2003. This chapter first outlinez some of the intellectual origins of ‘the Revolution in Military Affairs’ and examine how Rumsfeld’s related vision of defense ‘transformation’ interacted with the Army’s ideas on war before considering how the tension between these two ideas manifested itself in the planning for the invasion of Iraq.

This chapter returns to the problem of crown finance from a broader perspective, reviewing the extent of the problem faced by the Crown, the need for high levels of expenditure to reward servants and integrate the Scots, and the disputes caused by the ‘privatization’ of revenue collection in this period. It concludes that James's extravagance is only part of the explanation for his consistent financial shortfall and that the problem was rooted in a low taxation philosophy and the reluctance of early modern representative assemblies to address problems created by inflation and the ‘Military Revolution’ except under extreme duress.

This chapter appraises the debates about the significance of European military revolutions for the rise of nation states. Outlining military-political models (by Charles Tilly and Michael Mann) that suggest that nations and the international system are a product of martial state-building, it argues that a much more dynamic approach is required in which nations and nationalism arise independently of states and shape warfare and state-building. Although undoubtedly encouraging state centralization, war is a potential destabilizer of states, so that periods of crisis of the state are catalysts of nation crystallization. At such times, nationalists may offer alternative and competing models of state development. State and nation formation are often in tension. It also argues that warfare characterized by mass conscription does not necessarily lead to democratization but can also legitimate dictatorial conceptions of the nation.

The scholarly debate about a metamorphosis of warfare during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods rests on two connected controversies: one concerning a ‘military revolution’ and the other, ‘total war’. This chapter re-examines these claims, together with opposing arguments which have been put forward recently by German historians. It contends that wars involving German states became broader in scope after 1792, with mass armies requiring more money and men. Military conflicts had also become more intense, with a greater number of battles and higher rates of killing, compared to the conflicts of the eighteenth century, even in Austria, which remained the most independent of the German states. The chapter investigates the extent and nature of conscription, war articles, tactics, and strategy in the armies of the German states.