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Very Short Introductions #491
War and Technology: A Very Short Introduction
The war instinct is part of human nature, but the means to fight war depend on technology. Alex Roland traces the co-evolution of technology and warfare from the Stone Age to the age of cyberwar, describing the inventions that changed the direction of warfare throughout from fortified walls, the chariot, battleships, and the gunpowder revolution to bombers, rockets, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and nuclear weapons.
In the twenty-first century, new technologies continue to push warfare in unexpected directions, while warfare stimulates stunning new technological advances. Yet even now, the newest and best technology cannot guarantee victory. Brimming with dramatic narratives of battles and deep insights into military psychology, this book shows that although military technologies keep changing at great speed, the principles and patterns behind them abide.
In the twenty-first century, new technologies continue to push warfare in unexpected directions, while warfare stimulates stunning new technological advances. Yet even now, the newest and best technology cannot guarantee victory. Brimming with dramatic narratives of battles and deep insights into military psychology, this book shows that although military technologies keep changing at great speed, the principles and patterns behind them abide.
152 pages, Paperback
Published October 3, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 21, 2020
A very useful and delightfully compressed little book, War and Technology covers an enormous amount of ground in very few pages. Alex Roland's goal is to trace out the connections between thheese two domains.
The book starts with prehistory and the earliest recorded instances of tools used in war and ends with the late War on Terror. Along the way Roland offers elegant summaries and interesting insights. I liked, for example, his analysis of American war tech in the 20th century: initially lower quality and produced at high quantities, then reversed after 1945.
From this enormous canvas Roland draws some conclusions and advice. Most tech is dual (or more) use, including peaceful and warlike purposes. Militaries love gigantism, and that usually doesn't prove very successful. We sometimes trust too much in technological supremacy.
There are some limitations and biases here, of course, and not just because this in a series of very very short books. The book focuses almost entirely on the west. For example, the full range of Asia barely appears. The balance of the book settles on ancient war, so the past two centuries feel relatively scanted. Otherwise impressive.
This is an introductory text, so it's mostly useful for that purpose.
The book starts with prehistory and the earliest recorded instances of tools used in war and ends with the late War on Terror. Along the way Roland offers elegant summaries and interesting insights. I liked, for example, his analysis of American war tech in the 20th century: initially lower quality and produced at high quantities, then reversed after 1945.
From this enormous canvas Roland draws some conclusions and advice. Most tech is dual (or more) use, including peaceful and warlike purposes. Militaries love gigantism, and that usually doesn't prove very successful. We sometimes trust too much in technological supremacy.
There are some limitations and biases here, of course, and not just because this in a series of very very short books. The book focuses almost entirely on the west. For example, the full range of Asia barely appears. The balance of the book settles on ancient war, so the past two centuries feel relatively scanted. Otherwise impressive.
This is an introductory text, so it's mostly useful for that purpose.
January 1, 2021
A well-written book about a grim subject, filled with ironies and tensions. On the one hand, most moderns happily consume the benefits of science and technology every day and aren't about to give them up, but the same science and technology have provided ever-more effective ways for people to kill people. Then again, the awful lethality of nuclear weapons seems to have prevented any total war between Great Powers since 1945.
I found the book easy to read, due both to my having some familiarity with most of the topics, as well as the author's economical writing style. He seems to have survived his encounter with academia still able to write.
The book could do with a little more about the future potential of Artificial Intelligence on the battlefield. The technology of warfare to this point has focused mainly on augmenting two of the three components of lethal force: human muscles and senses. Next to nothing has been done to augment the thinking power of the human brain. I suspect this explains the persistence of asymmetric warfare, in which lightly armed fighters and saboteurs continue to embarrass technologically superior opponents. When their guys are as smart as your guys, that can sometimes level the field, especially when your goal is to build a liberal democracy instead of exterminate a population or suppress it in brutal Nazi style. Until now, intelligence has been a "found" object - commanders are completely at the mercy of random genetic recombination (i.e. traditional reproduction) to produce the intelligence distribution among their recruits. This makes intelligence analogous to "found" weapons - sticks and stones that just happened to be lying on the ground, with shapes already close enough to what a weapon requires. But "found" weapons can usually be improved by shaping them, as the author illustrates with the Schöningen spears. And no contemporary "smart" weapon is yet anywhere close to rivaling, let alone replacing, the human brain. When that happens, non-nuclear warfare may come to have the lethal effectiveness of nuclear warfare but with far less collateral drama.
Roland makes the historian's observation that revolutions can only be identified in hindsight, never announced in advance. But merely observing that something did or did not happen, while useful, isn't as useful as fully understanding why. I suspect that the failure of "smart" weapons to live up to the hype is understandable in terms of their extremely narrow endowment of smartness. When AI progresses to the point that we start seeing robots that can function as drop-in replacements for the cooks in the mess, we might start to see the end of asymmetric warfare. That is, what the cooks do (and how they learn to do it, without being purpose-designed in any way) may seem rather prosaic, but the cognitive demands far exceed the capability of any computer (so far). When computers can master that type of support job, they'll likely make a better showing at the figurative tip of the spear.
I found the book easy to read, due both to my having some familiarity with most of the topics, as well as the author's economical writing style. He seems to have survived his encounter with academia still able to write.
The book could do with a little more about the future potential of Artificial Intelligence on the battlefield. The technology of warfare to this point has focused mainly on augmenting two of the three components of lethal force: human muscles and senses. Next to nothing has been done to augment the thinking power of the human brain. I suspect this explains the persistence of asymmetric warfare, in which lightly armed fighters and saboteurs continue to embarrass technologically superior opponents. When their guys are as smart as your guys, that can sometimes level the field, especially when your goal is to build a liberal democracy instead of exterminate a population or suppress it in brutal Nazi style. Until now, intelligence has been a "found" object - commanders are completely at the mercy of random genetic recombination (i.e. traditional reproduction) to produce the intelligence distribution among their recruits. This makes intelligence analogous to "found" weapons - sticks and stones that just happened to be lying on the ground, with shapes already close enough to what a weapon requires. But "found" weapons can usually be improved by shaping them, as the author illustrates with the Schöningen spears. And no contemporary "smart" weapon is yet anywhere close to rivaling, let alone replacing, the human brain. When that happens, non-nuclear warfare may come to have the lethal effectiveness of nuclear warfare but with far less collateral drama.
Roland makes the historian's observation that revolutions can only be identified in hindsight, never announced in advance. But merely observing that something did or did not happen, while useful, isn't as useful as fully understanding why. I suspect that the failure of "smart" weapons to live up to the hype is understandable in terms of their extremely narrow endowment of smartness. When AI progresses to the point that we start seeing robots that can function as drop-in replacements for the cooks in the mess, we might start to see the end of asymmetric warfare. That is, what the cooks do (and how they learn to do it, without being purpose-designed in any way) may seem rather prosaic, but the cognitive demands far exceed the capability of any computer (so far). When computers can master that type of support job, they'll likely make a better showing at the figurative tip of the spear.
August 22, 2023
7.5/10
Kurze Abhandlung über die Entwicklung des Krieges und den damit verbundenen Technologien von der prähistorischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart.
Roland gibt in diesem Buch für jede Art der Kriegsführung (zu Lande, zu Wasser usw.) ein Überblick über die Entwicklung der Technologien in diesem Bereich, so dass das Buch die Geschichte der Technologie im Hinblick auf das Kriegswesen behandelt. Wäre das Buch nicht in dieser Buchreihe veröffentlicht worden, wäre "The History of Technology in War" wahrscheinlich ein treffender Titel gewesen.
Die Erkenntnis des immer schneller werdenden Fortschritts der Technik wird sehr gut dargestellt. So liegen zwischen der prähistorischen Zeit und der Antike zwar Tausende von Jahren, aber die Technik hat sich teilweise nur minimal weiterentwickelt. Während die Gebrüder Wright beispielsweise 1903 den ersten anhaltenden und kontrollierten Motorflug schwerer als Luft durchführten und nur etwas mehr als 10 Jahre später Flugzeuge im Ersten Weltkrieg eingesetzt wurden, primär zur Aufklärung.
Im Laufe des Buches, aber besonders im letzten Kapitel, wird die Militarisierung nicht-militärischer Technologien (der Autor hält die individuelle Feuerwaffe in Amerika für den bedeutendsten Fall) und vice versa, d.h. die (Weiter-)Entwicklung von Technologien für nicht-militärische Zwecke (der Streitwagen in der späten Bronzezeit ist ein Beispiel, für mich wäre aber die Entwicklung des ARPANET zum heutigen Internet auch passend) thematisiert. Die Darstellung der "(Nicht-)Waffentechnologien mit doppeltem Verwendungszweck" ist etwas redundant, geht jedoch etwas mehr ins Detail als die früheren Erwähnungen in den vorangegangenen Kapiteln.
Der Autor beginnt und schließt sein Buch mit der Feststellung, dass sich die militärischen Technologien in Zukunft sicherlich verändern werden, "aber die Prinzipien, die hinter diesen Begriffen stehen, wie die ehrwürdigen 'Grundsätze des Krieges', werden wahrscheinlich bestehen bleiben" (S. 114). Diese Ansicht findet sich bereits bei Napoleons General Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779-1869), der verkündete, dass die "Prinzipien unveränderlich sind; sie sind unabhängig von der Art der verwendeten Waffen, von Zeiten und Orten" (vgl. S. 2). Passenderweise kommt Roland zu dem Schluss, dass "[w]enn dieses Buch Antworten vorschlägt, dann liegen diese vermutlich im Verständnis der Begriffe im Glossar." (S. 114)
Kurze Abhandlung über die Entwicklung des Krieges und den damit verbundenen Technologien von der prähistorischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart.
Roland gibt in diesem Buch für jede Art der Kriegsführung (zu Lande, zu Wasser usw.) ein Überblick über die Entwicklung der Technologien in diesem Bereich, so dass das Buch die Geschichte der Technologie im Hinblick auf das Kriegswesen behandelt. Wäre das Buch nicht in dieser Buchreihe veröffentlicht worden, wäre "The History of Technology in War" wahrscheinlich ein treffender Titel gewesen.
Die Erkenntnis des immer schneller werdenden Fortschritts der Technik wird sehr gut dargestellt. So liegen zwischen der prähistorischen Zeit und der Antike zwar Tausende von Jahren, aber die Technik hat sich teilweise nur minimal weiterentwickelt. Während die Gebrüder Wright beispielsweise 1903 den ersten anhaltenden und kontrollierten Motorflug schwerer als Luft durchführten und nur etwas mehr als 10 Jahre später Flugzeuge im Ersten Weltkrieg eingesetzt wurden, primär zur Aufklärung.
Im Laufe des Buches, aber besonders im letzten Kapitel, wird die Militarisierung nicht-militärischer Technologien (der Autor hält die individuelle Feuerwaffe in Amerika für den bedeutendsten Fall) und vice versa, d.h. die (Weiter-)Entwicklung von Technologien für nicht-militärische Zwecke (der Streitwagen in der späten Bronzezeit ist ein Beispiel, für mich wäre aber die Entwicklung des ARPANET zum heutigen Internet auch passend) thematisiert. Die Darstellung der "(Nicht-)Waffentechnologien mit doppeltem Verwendungszweck" ist etwas redundant, geht jedoch etwas mehr ins Detail als die früheren Erwähnungen in den vorangegangenen Kapiteln.
Der Autor beginnt und schließt sein Buch mit der Feststellung, dass sich die militärischen Technologien in Zukunft sicherlich verändern werden, "aber die Prinzipien, die hinter diesen Begriffen stehen, wie die ehrwürdigen 'Grundsätze des Krieges', werden wahrscheinlich bestehen bleiben" (S. 114). Diese Ansicht findet sich bereits bei Napoleons General Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779-1869), der verkündete, dass die "Prinzipien unveränderlich sind; sie sind unabhängig von der Art der verwendeten Waffen, von Zeiten und Orten" (vgl. S. 2). Passenderweise kommt Roland zu dem Schluss, dass "[w]enn dieses Buch Antworten vorschlägt, dann liegen diese vermutlich im Verständnis der Begriffe im Glossar." (S. 114)
February 9, 2024
An absolutely beautiful and nuanced series of essays linking war & technology, focusing on a variety of technologies used in warfare - from land warfare to naval to air to space to modern warfare - the list is comprehensive and surprisingly in-depth for a Very Short Introduction.
Very motivational stuff too - outlining the excellent works of Hyman Rickover; Wernher von Braun (who, FYI, did not intend to develop spaceflight tech for military/malicious purposes); and Robert Goddard.
I had to, however, knock a star down due to the constant repetition and waffling Roland developed, particularly in the last two chapters (the 'Technological change' chapter was mostly just copy-pasted content from previous chapters). If he had omitted these before publication, he would have got my full five stars.
Still makes my favourite books shelf!
Many thanks to Oxford University Press for making such a book free for Durham University students like myself ;)
Very motivational stuff too - outlining the excellent works of Hyman Rickover; Wernher von Braun (who, FYI, did not intend to develop spaceflight tech for military/malicious purposes); and Robert Goddard.
I had to, however, knock a star down due to the constant repetition and waffling Roland developed, particularly in the last two chapters (the 'Technological change' chapter was mostly just copy-pasted content from previous chapters). If he had omitted these before publication, he would have got my full five stars.
Still makes my favourite books shelf!
Many thanks to Oxford University Press for making such a book free for Durham University students like myself ;)
February 7, 2018
Pretty interesting information discussing broad brush strokes of military revolutions through history, the use of military technology in the civilian sphere, and other topics. Obviously since this is a AVSI the author can't go into too many specifics and winds up repeating a lot of the same points on things several times, but overall I enjoyed it.
March 11, 2018
My main interest in military matters is that connected to the ancient or medieval world (it feeds back into other interests like RPGs or fantasy books), which is sadly at most half of this book (most of the chapter on land warfare, and much of the treatment of naval warfare). Still, an interesting overview that provided insight on matters that I otherwise know little about.
June 11, 2021
As with most of the books in the Very Short Introduction series, this was not only very short, but a very good, concise overview of its subject.
August 1, 2021
Not the best in the series
January 2, 2022
A delightful little book that walks through the intersect of technology with state-sponsored violence, focusing on the evolution of the latter.
June 6, 2022
I loved this! It was a short book, easy to read, but packed full of great information that gave a great overview of historical and present-day technology in war.
July 24, 2022
The book makes a very concise overview of the subject. Overall it is a good book.
Western historians conventionally divide the modern epoch -from Middle Ages to today- into two parts. The first part is from 1500 to 1789 and is named Early Modern. As known, modernism is associated with such features: secularization, national-states, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, technology and science. The author is describing these features in short, and the book mainly presents the co-evolution of warfare and technology from ancient to modern times.
The author's thesis is that technology has shaped and is shaping warfare more than anything else. The "principles of war" which are keys to victory in the battle have not changed even since the ancient times, but warfare has changed; and warfare has been shaped mainly by technology.
The author's arguments are based on examples in the historical course. He considers the hypothetical reborn of Alexander the Great, and asserts that if Alexander the Great was recovered from his grave and had the possibility to see today’s wars, he would easily be able to understand the strategy and social behaviors in wars but Alexander could not understand the “technology” of warfares. The principles of the war have not changed since the time of Alexander and it seems not to change in near future, but the technology used in warfare is changing and will continue changing dramatically. Besides, the author is claiming a mutual interaction that warfare is changing technology as much as technology does the way around.
Western historians conventionally divide the modern epoch -from Middle Ages to today- into two parts. The first part is from 1500 to 1789 and is named Early Modern. As known, modernism is associated with such features: secularization, national-states, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, technology and science. The author is describing these features in short, and the book mainly presents the co-evolution of warfare and technology from ancient to modern times.
The author's thesis is that technology has shaped and is shaping warfare more than anything else. The "principles of war" which are keys to victory in the battle have not changed even since the ancient times, but warfare has changed; and warfare has been shaped mainly by technology.
The author's arguments are based on examples in the historical course. He considers the hypothetical reborn of Alexander the Great, and asserts that if Alexander the Great was recovered from his grave and had the possibility to see today’s wars, he would easily be able to understand the strategy and social behaviors in wars but Alexander could not understand the “technology” of warfares. The principles of the war have not changed since the time of Alexander and it seems not to change in near future, but the technology used in warfare is changing and will continue changing dramatically. Besides, the author is claiming a mutual interaction that warfare is changing technology as much as technology does the way around.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews