Review: War Made New

Abstract

WAR MADE NEW Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today Max Boot New York: Gotham Books, 2006. 640PP, US$35.00 cloth ISBN 1-592-40222-4This is a sweeping and ambitious book that takes aim at the current debates about the future of warfare. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the notable Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), has looked to the past to inform the reader about what can come to pass. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that despite the rapidly increasing pace and cost of military-technological innovation, the United States needs to continue to innovate to dominate the entire spectrum of military power if it hopes to retain its qualitative lead and great power status (472). Though reaching across a far greater spread of time, Boot's account reflects the intensifying concern among current military analysts over the preservation of US military strength, and is in company with similar recent studies such as Fred Kagan's Finding the Target (2006) and Thomas Mahnken's Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (2008).In War Made New, Boot takes the whole modem era (since 1500) for his scope and distils from it four key eras of change, or revolutions, in the character of warfare. The first is what he terms the gunpowder revolution, ranging from the early 1500s to the early 1800s and characterized by the widespread adoption of firearms on land and sea and the corresponding organizational changes that gave European nations great military strength over most other parts of the world. Boot follows this with the industrial revolution, largely the 19th century to the First World War and reflected in the integration of changes in steam transportation and wire communications, as well as mass-produced complex rifled weaponry. The third period he identifies as a second industrial revolution, reflecting the substantive technological changes in industrial societies in the 1920s to the 1940s and culminating in World War II and the hegemonic transfer of power away from central and western Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union. Boot then examines what he sees as the fourth major era, the current information revolution. (He specifically sets aside nuclear weapons as not having had much direct effect on warfare.) Boot does not attempt to recount the developments in each era closely - this is not a rewrite of Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) - but instead retells several key battles in each revolutionary period to illustrate his point. The focus of his analysis is clearly on military technology and how its adaptation by various successive powers changed the character of war and their strategic position. Despite the book's heft, the narrowness ofthat focus will make the reader question at times Boot's argument about how influential certain innovations truly were compared with the deeper underlying roots of a nation's military strength (such as economics, politics, and sociocultural trends) that shaped the great powers' ability to adopt and adapt the new tools of war to maximum effectiveness. …