War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

In order better to appreciate the scope, depth and significance of the Industrial
Revolution of the nineteenth century, it is helpful to understand it in the context of the
whole of modern strategic history. Some historians and social scientists have postulated
a grand theory of military revolution (MR) (Murray and Knox, 2001: ch. 1). They argue
that since the seventeenth century there have been just six truly profound revolutions
either in warfare itself directly or in the most critical contexts for warfare. These
revolutions, so the story goes, have been unavoidable and inescapable, and can be likened
to irresistible seismic events. Statesmen, soldiers and indeed everyone else simply has
had to make the best of the novel conditions wrought by the great changes. Box 4.1
summarizes the mighty six.

Nineteenth century: strategy 55

Box 4.1Modern military revolutions

1. The invention and the rise of the modern state in the seventeenth century.
   This triggered, accompanied or was a consequence of the first of the modern
   MRs. Historians disagree over the issue of whether the emergence of the state
   as we know it is the product mainly of military necessity, or whether a
   monopoly of effective military power is more the consequence than the cause
   of the rise of the state.


2. The French Revolution, which, with some inspiration from the ideals and
   the practices of the American Revolution only a decade earlier, invented the
   modern concept of the nation state. The American and French revolutions
   postulated the radical notion that people were citizens, not subjects, and that
   they had an obligation, a duty as the price of their rights, to defend their
   nation.


3. The Industrial Revolution is still under way. The material character of
   this revolution has shifted several times since the age of steam and coal and
   steel, but it initiated a process of scientific, technological and industrial
   manufacturing, advance that has never halted or even noticeably slowed.
   Indeed, it has been unstoppable. In common with the other MRs, the thesis
   holds that the military revolution sparked and sustained by industrialization
   was unavoidable. All that soldiers and statesmen could do was adapt as best
   they could to the conditions it imposed.


4. The Military Revolution of World War I. Modern warfare, in the fullest sense
   of the term, was invented under fire and as a matter of the direst military
   necessity, from 1916 to 191 8. This military revolution was mandated by the
   strategic context created by the previous, but still authoritative, MRs. In World
   War I the belligerents were centralized and fairly efficient states, which ruled
   over societies of variably patriotic citizen-subjects, with the products of
   unevenly mature industrial infrastructures.


5. The Nuclear Revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. Once the nuclear discovery
   was made, and especially once it had been demonstrated in weapons that
   worked, states had no choice other than to make the best of it. This revolution,
   in common with the others, could not be repealed. It could only be accepted