cruise missiles,

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

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

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

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

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

satellite navigation systems, and stealth planes

Technology itself, it may plausibly be argued, is often not a prime mover but a second-order consequence of food surpluses, urbanization, secularism, political stability, strong patent laws, and other conditions that create a fertile climate for innovation.

For the Industrial Revolution (which includes the democratization of warfare associated with the French Revolution), I have chosen to look at the Battles of Königgrätz (1866), Omdurman (1898), and Tsushima (1905). At Königgrätz (also known as the Battle of Sadowa), one of the most important stepping-stones toward the creation of the German Reich,