My new book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (Gotham Books), tells the story of four Revolutions in Military Affairs over the past 500 years: the Gunpowder Revolution (c.1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (c. 1750-1900), the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1900-1945) and the ongoing Information Revolution (c. 1970 to the present). These are all periods of momentous change when new technologies combined with new tactics and new organizational structures to reshape the face of battle and the global balance of power.

Near the end I examine forthcoming innnovations, such as the spread of nanotechnology, genetically engineered viruses, space war, robotic warfare, and cyberwar, that have the potential to radically change the nature of conflict in the future. While the U.S. has been dominant so far in the Information Age, there is no guarantee that its streak will continue. A challenger, whether a rival state like China or even a non-state group like Al Qaeda, could utilize new ways of war (or, in the case of nuclear weapons, not-so-new) to alter the balance of power. Cheap to produce and easy to disseminate, germs, chemicals, and cyber-viruses are particularly well-suited for the weak to use against the strong. If any of them become common and effective tools of warfare, especially terrorist warfare, the U.S. and its allies could be in deep trouble.

History is full of examples of superpowers failing to take advantage of important Revolutions in Military Affairs: the Mongols missed the Gunpowder Revolution; the Chinese, Turks, and Indians missed the Industrial Revolution; the French and British missed major parts of the Second Industrial Revolution; the Soviets missed the Information Revolution. The warning that appears at the bottom of mutual fund advertisements applies to geopolitics: Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The end can come with shocking suddenness even after a long streak of good fortune.

Perhaps especially after a long streak of good fortune. The longer you are on top, the more natural it seems, and the less thinkable it is that anyone will displace you. Seldom do dominant powers innovate. Typical is the case of the Ottoman Empire, which mastered only one major military revolution—gunpowder—and then only its early years. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Britain, whose Royal Navy stayed No. 1 from the age of sail to the age of steel. But not even the Royal Navy could successfully navigate the next major shift, from battleships to aircraft carriers—a failure that hastened the fall of the British Empire. (Business history is replete with the same story. Not a single maker of minicomputers—not Digital Equipment Corporation, not Data General, not Prime, not Wang: all seen as invincible giants as recently as the 1980s—made a successful transition to personal computers.)

History, alas, does not offer a blueprint of how the process of military innovation occurs. There is no single model that covers all cases, and War Made New book has made no attempt to develop one. As James Q. Wilson noted in his magisterial study of bureaucracies: “Not only do innovations differ so greatly in character that trying to find one theory to explain them all is like trying to find one medical theory to explain all diseases, but innovations are so heavily dependent on executive interests and beliefs as to make the chance appearance of a change-oriented personality enormously important in explaining change. It is not easy to build a useful social science theory out of ‘chance appearances’.”

To the limited extent that we can generalize about 500 years of history, it seems fair to say that the most radical innovations come from outside of formal military structures. There are some recent exceptions, such as the atomic bomb, the satellite, and the stealth airplane, but most of the key inventions that changed the face of battle since the Middle Ages—the cannon, musket, three-masted sailing ship, steam engine, machine gun, rifled breech-loader, telegraph, internal combustion engine, automobile, airplane, radio, microchip, laser, wireless telephone—were the products of individual inventors operating more or less on their own: geniuses such as Robert Fulton, Hiram Maxim, and Guglielmo Marconi. Some had military applications in mind; most did not.

Even where government has played a big role in the development process, as with the Internet and the electronic computer, the key advances were usually made by people not on its payroll: William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain (the transistor); Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce (the microchip); Ted Hoff (the microprocessor); Paul Allen and Bill Gates (MS-DOS and Windows); Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web); Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (the Mosaic browser); and many others.

While government and corporate R&D programs have grown exponentially since World War II, fundamental technological innovation (as opposed to small-scale, incremental improvement) is simply too erratic and mysterious a process to be at the beck and call of any institution. “We can no more ‘explain’ the breakthroughs inside the minds of a Montgolfier or a Westinghouse,” notes economist Joel Mokyr, “than we can explain what went on inside the head of a Beethoven when he wrote the Eroica.”

Because creativity is so unpredictable, no country can count on making all, or even most, major scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Moreover, few if any technologies, much less scientific concepts, will remain the property of one country for long. France matched the Prussian needle gun less than four years after the 1866 Battle of Königgrätz; Germany matched the British Dreadnought three years after its unveiling in 1906; the USSR matched the U.S. atomic bomb four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a truism that new technology, if it proves effective, tends to disseminate quickly. Today, key American inventions such as computers, night-vision goggles, and GPS trackers are rapidly passing into the hands of friends and foes alike.

The way to gain a military advantage, therefore, is not necessarily to be the first to produce a new tool or weapon. It is to figure out better than anyone else how to utilize a widely available tool or weapon. That will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

Thanks to everyone for your interesting responses to my post based on my new book, War Made New, which I've been reading while in Houston today on my book tour. (Tomorrow am off to Dallas followed by Kansas, where I'm speaking at the Army's Command and General Staff College.) My plan is to continue to post excerpts from the concluding chapter all week. You will see that future excerpts will address many of the points raised in today's postings.

For instance, a number of commentators suggest that economic power is more important than military prowess, with the most commonly cited example being World War II: Wasn't the outcome determined by the greater economic and demographic resources of the Allied powers over the Axis? I address this point at length in my book and will address it in very short form in an excerpt planned for Thursday.

But in short the answer is: No, World War II doesn't make the case for economic determinism. In the early stages the Axis had tremendous success against a coalition of states that were much larger in aggregrate but much less prepared for war in the Second Industrial Age. Thanks to their early success, Germany, Italy and Japan overran much of Europe and East Asia, which should have allowed them to compete in a war of resources with the Allies. That they failed is in part because the Soviets and the American exhibited greater skill in mobilizing the resources of their societies.

It was also because, after making terrible tactical blunders early on, the Allies learned their lesson and managed to utilize tanks, aircraft carriers, bombers, submarines, and other important technologies as skillfully as their enemies did. If they hadn't, not even the Allies' superiority in materiel would necessarily have been sufficient to prevail. (For greater elaboration of this point, see Richard Overy's excellent book, Why the Allies Won.)

In War Made New, I chronicle numerous instances of the smaller, poorer power defeating a bigger, richer adversary, starting with the Battle of the Spanish Armada: In 1588 Spain was much bigger and richer than England but lost anyway because it had not yet mastered sail and shot tactics as effectively as the English had. We are seeing a similar story play out in the present day, with ragtag Iraqi insurgents defeating the armed forces of the world's No. 1 economic power. You can argue that what we're suffering in Iraq is a political, not a military, defeat, but what's the difference? The point of military action is to achieve political results and if you don't get the results you want, you've been defeated, even if (as in Vietnam or Iraq) you win every single battle.

Part Two of excerpts from War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot:

Taking advantage of major innovations usually requires what James Q. Wilson calls a “change-oriented personality”--someone like John Hawkins, Gustavus Adolphus, or Curtis LeMay who is not afraid to shake up conventional ways of doing things. Fundamental changes can be preached from the outside but seldom imposed by civilians on a professional military. Consider the lack of success that J.F.C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart had in the 1930s preaching the gospel of armored warfare to the British army.

The most successful innovators have tended to be people like Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke (chief of the Prussian General Staff during the 19th Century Wars of German Unification), Admiral William Moffett (father of American naval aviation in the 1920s), General Hap Arnold (chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II), and General Heinz Guderian (the blitzkrieg pioneer): insiders not outsiders. At best, civilians can play a supporting role in aiding military mavericks against their bureaucratic foes, though popular accounts tend to overstate the influence of flamboyant rebels such as Billy Mitchell.

Western states have been the most successful military innovators over the past 500 years. Having a relatively liberal political and intellectual climate, of the kind that the West developed toward the end of the Middle Ages, helps to create an atmosphere in which innovation can flourish. The Soviet Union’s lack of freedom ultimately sabotaged its attempts to keep pace in the Information Age, just as the lack of freedom in Spain and France made it difficult for them to keep pace in a naval arms race with first the Netherlands and then Britain.

But we should be wary of simple-minded democratic triumphalism. History has offered many examples of autocratic states that proved more adept than their democratic rivals at exploiting military revolutions. The success of the Prussian/German armed forces between 1864-1942 and of the Japanese between 1895-1942 shows how well even autocratic systems can innovate. All that is required is some degree of openness to change, a commitment to meritocracy, and an ability to critically examine one’s own mistakes—all disciplines in which the illiberal German General Staff excelled. In fact, most democracies, which tend to be less militaristic than autocracies, face a disadvantage in taking advantage of military innovations because they are less inclined to be generous to their armed forces in peacetime: a problem that plagued all of the nations of the West during the 1930s.

Nor is there much evidence to suggest that soldiers fight better for a democracy than for a dictatorship. Man for man, the Wehrmacht was probably the most formidable fighting force in the world until at least 1943, if not later. German soldiers were even known for showing more initiative than the soldiers of democratic France, Britain, and America. Meanwhile, Soviet soldiers stoically endured privations and casualties far beyond anything suffered by their Western allies.

But if democracies do not have an advantage in creating formidable war machines, they do seem to have an intrinsic edge in figuring out how to use them. Autocracies tend to run amok because of the lack of internal checks and balances. Philip II, Gustavus Adolphus, Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Wilhelm II, Hitler—they all built superb militaries but ultimately led their nations into ruinous wars. They had no sense of limits, and no other politician was strong enough to stop them. Their tactics may have been superb, but their grand strategy was lousy, the best examples being Napoleon’s and Hitler’s foolhardy invasions of Russia. Democracies sometimes overreach too (witness the Boer, Algerian, and Vietnam Wars), but they tend to avoid the worst traps because they have a more consensual style of decision-making.

The key to successful innovation, whether for a dictatorship or a democracy, is having an effective bureaucracy. This was the chief advantage enjoyed by Elizabeth I over Philip II in the Battle of the Spanish Armada (1588), Emperor Meiji over Czar Nicholas II at the Battle of Tsushima (1905), Adolf Hitler over Édouard Daladier in the Battle of France (1940), and the two George Bushes over Saddam Hussein. Prussia’s secret weapon in the 19th century was not the needle gun or the railroad or the telegraph. It was the general staff, which figured out how to utilize these innovations.

Bureaucracies are so important because, as War Made New has repeatedly stressed, the realization of a Revolution in Military Affairs requires far more than simply revolutionary technology. It also requires revolutions in organization, doctrine, training, and personnel. That is what the Swedes achieved in the early 17th century when they crafted mixed-arms formations made up of pikemen and musketeers, what the Prussians achieved in the mid-19th century when they figured out how to rapidly mobilize and move large numbers of riflemen by railroad, what the Japanese achieved in the 1930s when they decided to group aircraft carriers together in strike groups, and what the Americans achieved in the 1980s when they integrated smart bombs, sensors, stealth, and professional soldiers in the AirLand Battle doctrine.

Bureaucratic innovation can seldom be limited to the military alone because armed forces are always a reflection, however refracted, of the broader society. Each military epoch comes with its own distinctive system of governance. The rise of the Gunpowder Age fostered the growth of absolute monarchies. The First and Second Industrial Ages fostered giant welfare and warfare states. The Information Age is leading to a more decentralized, flatter form of government and the rise of more powerful non-governmental groups. States that fail to keep up with these transformations risk getting run over by those that do.

In lieu of the right bureaucratic structures, the possession of modern weaponry is of dubious utility, as the states of the modern Middle East have found out. No matter how great the Arab preponderance in men and materiel—and against Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 their advantage appeared, on paper at least, to be insuperable—they have continuously contrived to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The armies of Russia and the United States were far more competent, but in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Vietnam and Iraq, they, too, found themselves stymied by smaller, poorer adversaries, largely because their armed forces were not properly configured for counter-guerrilla warfare. This does not mean that modern military hardware is useless—only that by itself it is not enough to guarantee victory against a clever, determined adversary. When combined with the right organization, doctrine, training, leadership, etc., however, sophisticated weaponry can confer a decided advantage even in battling irregular foes.

Next: the danger of too little change--and too much.

Some of today's respondents have expressed skepticism about my assertion that having a better bureaucracy was the key advantage enjoyed by England over Spain in the 1580s or by the U.S. over Iraq more recently. If it didn't have a better bureaucracy--i.e. one capable of producing a more effective navy, with better ships, better cannons, better sailors, and better commanders--it is hard to know how England could possibly have defeated the Spanish Armada, when Spain was considerably richer and bigger than England. For the record, here is a very brief excerpt from Chapter One of my book which gives a partial overview of the English bureaucratic advantage (there is much more on this in the book itself):

"The Royal Navy was ready to meet them [i.e., the Spanish warships]. It had ancient roots, but as an official body it had existed for only half a century. In medieval times English kings would raise fleets from among the merchant marine when necessary in time of war, and few if any ships were built expressly for fighting. Even the king’s personal ships, when not needed in a campaign, would be used to transport Bordeaux wine or other goods for the royal household. Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547), Elizabeth’s father, had pioneered among European monarchs a standing fleet belonging to the crown, and, as important, a standing department to administer it. This was part of what is sometimes called the Tudor Revolution, which gave England the prototype of a modern bureaucracy long before Spain possessed one. Under Henry VIII and his energetic ministers, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, the center of English administration shifted away from the royal household and toward new governmental departments.

"To manage the navy, officials were appointed with such titles as Master of Naval Ordnance, Lieutenant of the Admiralty, Treasurer, Controller, Clerk of the King’s Ships, and General Surveyor of the Victuals for the Seas. Beginning in 1546, many of these senior managers sat together on the Council of the Marine, popularly known as the Navy Board, direct ancestor of the modern Admiralty. The slightly older Ordnance Board was responsible for procuring weapons and everything needed to operate them. Together, these two organizations provided England with more efficient naval administration than that of any contemporary state, with the possible exceptions of Portugal and Venice. The Spanish navy was a virtual one-man operation by comparison, and that man was the overworked King Philip II, isolated in his gloomy cell at the Escorial.

"Spain had nothing like the royal dockyards and storehouses that had sprung up around southern English ports like Portsmouth, Woolwich, and Deptford. Nor did it have officials, as England had, who carefully drew up mobilization plans to make full use of its maritime might. England, not yet possessing lucrative colonies, was much poorer than Spain (Elizabeth’s ordinary revenues were a tenth of Philip II’s ) and could not keep a large fleet mobilized for long periods. It needed accurate intelligence and ready contingency plans to defend itself when danger materialized. There was no margin of safety. As part of this planning, the Elizabethan navy launched an ambitious program of construction in the 1560-1570s to take advantage of a (so to speak) sea change in warship design."

As for the U.S. and Iraq, there was no question that the U.S. was much bigger than Iraq so it should have defeated Iraq--if the bigger power were guaranteed to come out on top. But it isn't. We found that out in the Vietnam War. We're finding it out today in Iraq. Iran learned the same lesson when it failed to defeat Iraq during their war in the 1980s even though Iran has about three times as many people. The U.S., of course, is even bigger and richer than Iran, so the odds are that we would defeat Iraq no matter what--but no one expected that coalition forces would win the 1991 Gulf War as easily or cheaply as they did. That was a tribute to American skill at warfighting--especially to the changes made in the previous decade to incorporate new technologies (e.g., stealth and smart bombs) and new organizational models (the all volunteer force, Goldwater Nichols, etc.). The result: one of the most lopsided defeats in military history. The reason the U.S. proved more effective, I would argue, is that it had a more efficient organization for marshalling military power. Whereas Saddam frittered away his military capabilities with a perverse organizational model designed NOT to field powerful armies--for fear that they would rise up against him.

Part 3 of excerpts from War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot.

A British army colonel noted in 1839: “In no profession is the dread of innovation so great as in the army.” Successful adaptation to major technological shifts requires overcoming that dread and changing the kinds of people who are rewarded within a military structure. The rise of railroads and steamships in the 19th century elevated the importance of logisticians and engineers—technocrats who were initially looked down upon by traditional army and navy officers. In the Imperial German Navy, engineering officers were sent to a separate school, they wore less gaudy uniforms without the sashes and imperial crowns sported by regular officers, and they were not allowed to dine in the officers’ mess. They even had to endure the indignity of having their wives addressed as “women,” not “ladies.”

Today, the U.S. Air Force faces difficult dilemmas as it figures out how to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles: Should someone controlling a Predator from a trailer thousands of miles away be a certified pilot? Should control time count as “flying” hours? This may seem a picayune matter, but it looms large in a service where the fastest advancement has always gone to fliers. If the Air Force doesn’t give greater promotion opportunities to UAV operators, it cannot attract and keep the best people for these jobs, but if it advances them ahead its fighter-jock culture will inevitably change.

This is part of a broader challenge confronting all Information Age militaries: How to make room for those who fight with a computer mouse, not an M-16. Will traditional warriors--men with shaved heads and hard bodies--continue to run things, or will nerds with bad posture and long hair, possibly even women, assume greater prominence? Two Chinese strategists write that “it is likely that a pasty-faced scholar wearing thick eyeglasses is better suited to be a modern soldier than is a strong young lowbrow with bulging biceps,” but, even if that is true, reordering any military along those lines presents a far more profound and problematic challenge than questions about which tank or helicopter to buy. As Eliot Cohen writes: “The cultural challenge for military organizations will be to maintain a warrior spirit and the intuitive understanding of war that goes with it, even when their leaders are not, in large part, warriors themselves.”

War Made New surveys many instances where militaries had to change or die. Those armed forces that did not successfully integrate the gun, the long-range bomber, precision-guided munitions, or other important innovations experienced the agony of their members dying in great numbers. But War Made New also looks at some instances of militaries too eager to change in the wrong way. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force placed too much faith in the ability of unescorted bombers to win a future war—a doctrinal mistake that cost the lives of tens of thousands of air crews over Europe. In the 1940s Hitler poured vast resources into the development of the V-1 and V-2 that might better have been employed on his conventional forces. And in the 1950s the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force did so much to rearrange themselves around the demands of the nuclear battlefield that they were not ready for the actual threat they wound up confronting in the jungles of Vietnam.

There is no rule-of-thumb to suggest how much or how little a military should change in response to technological developments. Each revolution raises painful questions of prioritization such as those that the United States and other countries confront today: Should they pay for more traditional infantrymen and tanks, or push resources into “transformational” programs like surveillance satellites, wireless broadband networks, and directed-energy weapons? Each path has major risks and trade-offs: Paying for larger standing forces can make it easier to respond to today’s threats; cutting force strength and using the savings to pay for high-tech hardware can make it easier to respond to tomorrow’s threats.

History indicates that the wisest course is to feel one’s way along with careful study, radical experimentation, and free-wheeling war games. Paradoxically, revolutionary transformation often can be achieved in evolutionary increments. The Germans did not shift over their entire army to panzer divisions in the interwar years. In 1939-40 only about 10% of German forces were composed of armored units, and the Wehrmacht had more ponies than panzers, but this was enough to produce breakthroughs from Poland to France.

A corollary is that a military revolution does not necessarily sweep aside all old weapons and old ways of doing things. Battleships may have been dethroned as queen of the seas in 1941 but they continued to perform a valuable auxiliary role as a shore bombardment platform into the 1980s. Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632) did not simply toss out pikes in order to make way for muskets and cannons; he used a combination of weapons, old and new, to achieve maximum effect. Indeed, bayonets continue to be fixed onto rifles (though rarely used) hundreds of years after edged weapons lost their primacy on the battlefield.

This offers a counterpoint to skeptics who deny the existence of an Information Revolution simply because not everything has changed: It never does. On the other hand, this also offers a cautionary lesson that some modern-day J.F.C. Fullers or Billy Mitchells anxious to scrap the tank, the aircraft carrier, and the manned airplane should keep in mind: Introducing “transformational” systems does not necessarily mean getting rid of all “legacy” platforms. Rather, it means readjusting the balance between the two.

“You need to think about how to make a transition,” counsels Andrew Marshall of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, “not about how to eliminate current weapons.”

Next: Why Military Power--Not Just Economic Power--Still Matters.

Part 4 of excerpts from War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot:

The major theme that runs throughout War Made New is the importance of not missing out on the next big change in warfare. History is driven by many factors, but in academia’s rush to focus on economics, race, class, sexuality, geography, germs, culture, or other influences, it would be foolish and short-sighted to overlook the impact of military prowess and especially aptitude in taking advantage of major shifts in war-fighting. Of course a country’s success, or lack thereof, in harnessing change cannot be divorced from such underlying factors as its economic health, scientific sophistication, educational system, political stability, and so forth. But, contrary to Napoleon, God is not necessarily “on the side of the big battalions.” Even big and wealthy countries often lose wars and head into longterm decline through a lack of military skill.

The considerable gains of the Axis during the early years of World War II came, after all, against a coalition of Allied states that in aggregate had 40% greater GNP and 170% larger population. That the Axis ultimately lost goes to show that military skill can sometimes be trumped by greater resources if a war drags on long enough and if the side with greater resources shows sufficient wisdom in their employment. But even in a long coalition war the side with the greater resources does not always prevail. The alliance of Britain, Hanover, and Prussia was dwarfed in economic and demographic resources by its adversaries in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763)--France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and (near the end) Spain—but still managed to win largely because of the superlative skill of the Prussian army and the British navy. War Made New chronicles many other examples of the poorer side emerging victorious—Britain beat the Spanish Armada (1588), Sweden beat the Holy Roman Empire at Breitenfeld and Lutzen (1631-32), Prussia beat the Habsburg Empire at Königgrätz (1866), and Japan beat the Russian Empire in 1904-1905. More recent instances might be cited of the poorer power winning, such as North Vietnam’s defeat of the United States or the Afghans’ defeat of the Soviet Union.

These were not anomalies. In a statistical analysis of 20th century wars, the side with the larger GNP, population, armed forces, and defense expenditures won only a little more than half the time, making these factors about as useful in predicting military outcomes as flipping a coin. Political scientist Stephen Biddle, who analyzed these statistics, writes that “Superior numbers can be decisive or almost irrelevant depending on the two sides’ force employment. This in turn means that states’ relative economic, demographic, or industrial strength are poor indicators of real military power: gross resource advantages matter only if they can be exploited via modern-system force employment, and many states cannot do so…. How forces are used is critical.”

The ongoing proliferation of destructive technology means that the link between economic and military power is more tenuous than ever. Al Qaeda, whose entire budget would be insufficient to buy a single F-22, can inflict devastating damage on the world’s richest country. Advances in biological and cyberwar promise to put even more destructive potential into the hands of ever smaller groups—as does the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Imagine the devastating consequences of a mega-terrorist attack. Not only could millions die but international travel and commerce—the lifeblood of the global economy--could be severely disrupted. Such a scenario reveals the falsity of economic determinist arguments which counsel that military strength is unimportant and that it is feasible to stint on military preparedness in order to strengthen the economy. On the contrary, there can be no long-term prosperity without security. The entire world today depends, no matter how begrudgingly or unwittingly, on the protection provided by the United States, whose armed forces keep open air and sea lanes, safeguard energy supplies, and deter most cross-border aggression.

Dreamers can convince themselves that military power no longer matters, that economic interdependence has consigned war to the dustbin of history, and that a country need only wield “soft power,” but history is likely to deliver a stark rebuke to such wishful thinking. As a matter of fact, it already has. The attacks of September 11, 2001 put an end to a decade of talk about the “end of history,” a “strategic pause,” the inexorable flow of “globalization,” and the “peace dividend.” The incidence of war may have declined for the moment, but great dangers still loom ahead. Santayana had it right: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Next (and final) installment: Fighting Wildcats and Rodents

The 5th and final excerpt from War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot:

Technological advance will not change the essential nature of war. Fighting will never be an antiseptic engineering exercise. It will always be a bloody business subject to chance and uncertainty in which the will of one nation (or sub-national group) will be pitted against another, and the winner will be the one that can inflict more punishment and absorb more punishment than the other side. But the way punishment gets inflicted has been changing for 500 years and it will continue to change in strange and unpredictable ways.

In assessing the future conduct of conflict, most analysts tend to fall into one of two camps. One group stresses the dangers of terrorists and guerrillas who use cheap, simple weapons like AK-47s, machetes, or explosives. Another group stresses the danger of high-tech weapons such as cruise missiles and killer satellites proliferating around the world and into the hands of states such as China and North Korea. The former school (associated with ground-combat arms) stresses the need for better warriors; the latter school (associated with air and naval forces), the need for better machines. The reality is that both high-intensity and low-intensity threats are real and that both more superlative people and first-rate equipment are needed to counter them. Michael Evans of the Royal Military College of Australia offers sage advice when he writes: “In a dangerous and unpredictable world, military professionals and their political masters must … be ready to tame the big wildcats and not simply the vicious rodents, to be able to fight troops like Iraq’s former Republican Guard as well as Taliban, al-Qa’ida militia, and terrorists.”

Today, the U.S. is much further along in figuring out how to tame the Republican Guard than Al Qaeda, and it needs to place more emphasis on making up for its deficiencies in irregular warfare rather than simply enhancing its already substantial lead in conventional warfare. While the Information Revolution has decreased the number of weapons and soldiers needed to defeat a conventional adversary, occupation duty and nation-building—the prerequisites for turning a battlefield triumph into a long-term political victory--continue to demand lots of old-fashioned infantry. Therefore, the U.S. and its allies would be making a mistake if they were to seriously stint on force size in order to procure more high-tech systems.

But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. can simply ignore the dangers of major warfighting or the dictates of technological change. That was the mistake Britain made before 1914 and again before 1939. The British had the world’s best “small war” force—an army well-trained and equipped for fighting bandits and guerrillas—but it was ludicrously insufficient to deter German aggression or to defeat Germany once a world war broke out. That mistake, symbolized by deficiencies in tanks and aircraft carriers, hastened the end of the Pax Britannica.

Today, the possibility of conventional inter-state war is lower than at any time in 500 years, but it has not disappeared altogether. Because Americans and other citizens of Western democracies no longer seem willing to suffer the same level of casualties experienced by their ancestors, their armed forces must be able to defeat adversaries at scant cost in lives. That argues for keeping the qualitative edge that the U.S. gained in the Information Age--an edge that cannot be preserved by standing still. It will be necessary to keep innovating since, as previously indicated, some of the technologies and techniques employed by the U.S. are starting to be negated by their dissemination around the world. Innovation must be organizational as much as technological, and it needs to focus on potential threats across the entire spectrum, from low-intensity guerrilla wars to high-intensity conventional conflicts.

In any case, the boundaries between “conventional” and “unconventional,” “regular” and “irregular” warfare are blurring. Even non-state groups are increasingly gaining access to the kinds of weapons—from missiles and landmines to chemicals and perhaps even atomic bombs—that were once the exclusive preserve of states. And even states will increasingly turn to unconventional strategies to blunt the impact of American power.

Two colonels of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army envision “unrestricted warfare” encompassing not only traditional force-on-force encounters but also financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes, tsunamis, or other disasters). In a clever bit of ju-jitsu, many of these strategies turn the strengths of Information Age countries against them. Al Qaeda is pursuing similar strategies.

Countering such threats will require much more than simply buying more advanced aircraft, tanks, or submarines. Such traditional weapons systems may be almost entirely useless against adversaries clever enough to avoid presenting obvious targets for precision-guided munitions. To fight and win the wars of the future—wars that may more closely resemble a series of terrorist attacks or hit-and-run raids than traditional force-on-force armored, aerial, or naval engagements--will require reorganizing conventional militaries to emphasize such skills as cultural awareness, foreign language knowledge, information operations, civil affairs, and human intelligence. It will also require cutting away the bureaucratic fat to turn bloated Industrial Age hierarchies into lean Information Age networks capable of utilizing the full potential of high-tech weapons and highly-trained soldiers.

Whether the U.S. is ready for such challenges will determine whether it can keep its position as the lone superpower or whether the world will see another power shift of the kind that accompanied the Gunpowder Revolution, the First Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the early stages of the Information Revolution. The course of future history will turn on the outcome.