Makers of Modem Strategy: From. Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age ed. by Peter Paret

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 139 any other war, yet Hue did not fall to bombardment or smart bombs. Hue was taken and retaken the way the Spanish took Port’Ercole (1555) in the War of Siena, by infantry assaults. Since Hue, the United States has shifted resources away from com­ bat infantry and toward esoteric weapons that are seldom employed and often have no combat function. This shift away from infantry has nothing to do with technological efficiency. Wars around the globe are still being won and lost by infantry, though at a terrible human cost. For social and political reasons the United States is not willing to pay that cost. The battle for Hue produced a classic photo­ graph of an APC loaded with Marine casualties, an image difficult to sell on TV. Clean animated pictures of high-tech weapons that may not even exist have proved easier to market. Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson Dr. Garcia y Robertson is currently writing on the effect of arms control on 20thcentury weapons technology. His article “Failure of the Heavy Gun at Sea, 1898— 1922” appeared in the July 1987 issue of Technology and Culture. Makers of Modem Strategy: From. Machiaveili to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. vii+941; notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). This is a book with an illustrious ancestry. In 1941, Edward Mead Earle organized a seminar on American foreign policy and se­ curity issues for the faculty of Princeton University and the Insti­ tute for Advanced Study. A result of this seminar was a collection of twenty-one essays published in 1943 by Princeton University Press under the title Makers ofModem Strategy. This book, long consid­ ered a classic, has been widely assigned in courses on military af­ fairs and international relations. Its successor aims to achieve the same status. Despite its ancestry, the book is almost entirely new. Of twentyeight essays, only three were reprinted unchanged from the 1943 edi­ tion, and another four were revised or rewritten. The reasons are twofold. Eleven essays are on war and strategy since 1941. Even the seventeen that deal with warfare before 1941 reflect new informa­ tion and newer interpretations. This befits a discipline in constant tur­ moil. The cause of the turmoil is not hard to find: it lies in a changing technology that leaves strategists and generals far behind. For a cen­ tury, military thinkers interpreted war through the ideas of Clausewitz , Jomini, and Mahan. By the time their lessons had been fully absorbed, machine guns, tanks, and aircraft had made them obso­ lete. The result was that warfare was paralyzed in World War I, 140 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and strategy was taken out of military hands by political leaders in World War II. Readers of Technology and Culture will be disappointed to find lit­ tle discussion of weapons and arms manufacturing in this volume; in­ stead, the essays assume considerable prior knowledge of these aspects on the reader’s part. (Here readers might wish to consult Wil­ liam H. McNeill’s The Pursuit ofPower: Technology, Armed Force, and So­ ciety since A.D. 1000.) Even then, the sensitivity of the authors to technological change varies considerably. The earlier essays, dealing with the great strategists of the preindustrial age, such as Machiavelli , Vauban, Jomini, and Clausewitz, assume a relatively static weap­ onry. Not so the later essays. David Maclsaac’s “Voices from the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists” reveals the inability of airpower strategists to keep up with (let alone direct) the incredible advances in aviation between 1914 and 1945. Similarly, in his essay “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” Philip A. Crowl places Mahan in both the context of his own time and the minds of later writers; in both cases, Mahan’s ideas, though brilliant analyses of the past, were out of date as soon as they were written. It is interesting to juxtapose Crowl’s essay with D. Clayton James’s “American and Japanese Strategies in the Pacific War.” James shows the limitations of the Mahanist doctrine of decisive encoun­ ters between fleets of capital ships and...