War Made New

The most obvious impact of the Information Revolution has been felt on the economy, where it has been reshaping one industry after another, much as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions did. Boeing offers a good example. In 1962, it unveiled the Boeing 727 after almost seven years of work by five thousand engineers. Thirty-two years later, in

And, fifth, that innovation has been speeding up. It took at least two hundred years for the Gunpowder Revolution to come to fruition (c. 1500–1700); one hundred and fifty years for the First Industrial Revolution (c. 1750–1900); forty years for the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1900–1940); and just thirty years for the Information Revolution (c

Fourth, that even with the best strategy, tactics, and technology in the world, no military revolution has ever conferred an indefinite advantage upon its early innovators. Rivals inevitably copy what they can and come up with tactics or technologies to blunt the effectiveness of what they cannot produce or acquire.

Second, that countries able to take advantage of these shifts have been history’s winners while those that have fallen behind in harnessing military innovations have usually been consigned to irrelevance or oblivion. Thus, each revolution has been accompanied by a shift in the international balance of power. Third, that even if a country figures ou

FIVE THEMES As this book explores four military revolutions, five major themes will emerge:

First, that technology alone rarely confers an insurmountable military edge; tactics, organization, training, leadership, and other products of an effective bureaucracy are necessary to realize the full potential of new inventions. For this reason, ever since the rise of modern nation-states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shifts in mil

highly trained commandos and precision weaponry—a high-low mix of technologies—could

precision-guided munitions

satellite navigation systems, and stealth planes