Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750^141one caliber of musket ball was required. And since each soldier could
be trained to the precise movements of standardized drill, reinforce
ment of the depleted personnel of any given unit became almost as
simple as replacing spent musket balls. Soldiers, in short, tended to
become replaceable parts of a great military machine just as much as
their weaponry. Management of such an army was easier and more
likely to achieve expected results than anything possible before. The
cost of organized violence went down proportionally; or, perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that the magnitude and controllability
of such violence per tax dollar went up—spectacularly.^22
Over a somewhat longer run, however, uniformity of weaponry
among scores of thousands of soldiers introduced a new kind of rigid
ity into the arms market. Once an entire army had standardized its
equipment, any improvement in design became far more costly to
introduce than had been the case when the weapons of dozens of
different designs were simultaneously in use. Military purchasers had
to choose between technical improvement and the costs that would
arise from loss of uniformity. Not all changes were inhibited by this
new dilemma. Still, really important departures from existing designs
of weapons were certain to upset established patterns of drill, training,
and supply. As a result, changes in handguns, which had been very
rapid from the fifteenth to seventeenth century, almost came to a halt
after about 1690, when the invention of the ring bayonet made it
possible to combine firepower with close-in defense against cavalry for
the first time, rendering pikemen unnecessary.^23
By that time, to be sure, the handguns in use by European armies
had attained a satisfactory degree of reliability, simplicity,^24 and dura
bility so that improvements in design were, perhaps, more difficult to
- Standardization and routinization, applied to industrial production in the
eighteenth century, were pioneered in army administration and supply in the sev
enteenth. Similar results—sharply enhanced productivity and lowered unit costs—
occurred in both cases. This point is argued, perhaps a little too emphatically, in Jacobus
A. A. van Doorn, The Soldier and Social Change: Comparative Studies in the History and
Sociology of the Military (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973), pp. 17–33; Lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), pp. 81–106. - On the uncertainty surrounding the invention and introduction of the ring
bayonet, see David Chandler, The Art of War in the Age of Marlborough (New York,
1976), pp. 67, 83. - Matchlocks of Prince Maurice’s day gave way to flintlocks and correspondingly
simplified drill by about 1710, at least in the best-managed European armies. Flintlocks
had been invented as early as 1615, but were at first too expensive to displace the
matchlock, despite a far higher rate of fire (about twice as fast) and superior reliability
(ca. 33 percent misfire vs. 50 percent for matchlocks). I take these statistics from
Chandler, The Art of War, pp. 76–79.