Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War

by Ben Connable

A challenge to common assumptions about the future of land warfare

Ground Combat reveals the gritty details of land warfare at the tactical level and challenges today's overly subjective and often inaccurate approaches to characterizing war. Ben Connable's motivation for writing the book is to offer an evidence-based approach to examining the future of war.

Connable created and analyzed an original dataset of more than four hundred global ground combat cases, showing that there was an evolutionary rather than revolutionary shift in the characteristics of ground combat from World War II through the early 2020s. Despite advances in military technology, tanks, artillery, and infantry remain central to how war is waged on land. This book asks readers to stop and think about the implications of these findings for force planning and future predictions about military-technical revolutions.

This book sets an essential evidentiary baseline for military officers, policymakers, and scholars who think about the future of modern war.

Genres: Military Fiction

352 pages, Hardcover

Published March 3, 2025

Reviews

[Jack Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here I thought I was about to read a rigorous book on the nature of modern ground combat, complete with gripping statistics that give me a real understanding of what war is like. Nope! That's what this book is about. What you have here is a Lessons learned type book that merely describes several hundred battles from the postwar era until today, with strategic and tactical annotation asides from the author. But there are no causality figures being cited, no engagement ranges, no manpower figures, nothing practical at all really. Can you learn the nature of something by reading a series of descriptions from disparate times and places, and then jumbling them together? No, because this isn't quantitative.

He tries near the end of course. Statistics on nothing, from a collation of periods which don't matter. Did you know, for instance, that a high incidence of ground combat involves foot movement? Useless.

The thrust of his analysis is to overturn the loony RMA paradigm changes happening for the author's marine corps. That's all fair, but this book isn't statistically numerate enough to actually say much. He even makes the incredible error of claiming that because drones are only used in a low percentage of battles (the source: decades of history), they do not constitute a disruptive technology. That is a little like saying that because tanks crew were only a small percentage of ww1 soldiers, they could hardly be seen as the future of battle...

I am actually embarrassed that RAND published such a mediocre book. And that's not even mentioning the author's midwit tell of trying to convince me the German army of the second world war was bad.

[Matthew Sparling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book on the “modern” (post 1900) history and to a certain extent the future of ground combat. The book is very detailed and is not light reading. However, if one is highly interested in ground combat or wants a detailed historical overview of certain battles then this book is excellent.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very technical look at the changing character of war.