Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 4, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Max Boot , the author of the award-winning The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. A senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he lectures regularly at numerous military schools and advises the Department of Defense on transformation issues. He is the author of the new book War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today.
FP: Max Boot, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Boot: Thanks for the invitation to share my views.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Boot: I wrote War Made New to provide historical perspective on the challenges we face in coping with warfare in the Information Age. Ever since America's victory in the 1991 Gulf War--a victory made possible by stealth aircraft, smart bombs, GPS locators, and other advanced technologies--there has been a lot of heated debate over how and whether the U.S. military should transform itself to meet future threats.
I don't have any easy answers, but I do try to introduce ordinary readers to this important discussion by looking at how previous Great Powers have coped with epochal changes--the Gunpowder Revolution (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1850-1914), the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and now the Information Revolution (1970 to the present). To make this debate more vivid and less theoretical, I build my narrative around a series of battles, starting with the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and concluding with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which illustrate the changing nature of warfare.
There has been a great deal written on these subjects, of course. But much of it is in the specialized literature and unfamiliar to the normal reader. War Made New tries to bring together a lot of writings on disparate subjects—ranging from the distant past to the near future, and from warfare to politics to economics—in a single, readable narrative. That is something no one else has attempted, at least not recently.
FP: Can you talk a bit about how revolutions in military affairs have changed the world?
Boot: Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) have played a central role in shaping the history of the past 500 years. The Gunpowder Revolution led to the rise of the West, because European states proved more adept than their rivals in harnessing cannons, muskets, multi-masted sailing ships and other breakthrough technologies. In 1450, at the dawn of the Gunpowder Age, Europeans controlled only 14% of the world’s land surface. By 1914, following not only the Gunpowder Revolution but also the Industrial Revolution, the sphere of European control had swelled to 84% of the world. This was in many ways the big story of the last 500 years.
But not everybody within Europe benefited equally. Gunpowder armies were much more expensive to equip, train, and maintain than the knights who had wielded power in the Middle Ages. Feudal lords didn’t have enough money to compete effectively in gunpowder warfare. This required the resources of a super-lord—a king or queen. Thus the dictates of the battlefield proved a powerful impetus for the growth of nation-states. In the words of one political scientist, “War made the state, and the state made war.” Many small states were left behind by this process. From Scotland to Navarre, from the Italian city states to Poland, countless political entities that could not harness effective military power were either temporarily or permanently swallowed up by their more powerful neighbors. In fact the map of Europe is still largely set in the pattern drawn in the Gunpowder Age.
The two Industrial Revolutions placed fresh strains on states and forced them to become even more effective in mobilizing military power—or pay the consequences. A number of states that were powerful in the Gunpowder Age were not able to industrialize effectively and collapsed by the end of World War I, the major war of the First Industrial Age. Think of the Romanoffs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans: all ancient dynasties swept away. Outside of Europe, the First Industrial Age furthered the European hegemony of the world. But by the time the Second Industrial Age was well under way (the 1940s), Europeans had succeeded in spreading their destructive technology and their even more destructive ideologies (nationalism, communism, etc.) to the farthest corners of the planet, thereby undermining the very empires they had founded. Thus Europeans wound up losing a series of colonial wars to their former subjects.
The Information Revolution--which has its origins in advances in computer technology dating back to the 1940s but which got going in earnest in the late 1970s--has already produced its share of upheavals. You can argue about why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did but surely a large part of the explanation is that we had a Silicon Valley and they did not. By the early 1980s the Soviets realized they were falling further and further behind the United States in the application of computer technology for economic and military purposes. They tried to reform but failed, precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The United States, in some measure due to its mastery of Information Age warfare (demonstrated so convincingly in the 1991 Gulf war), was left standing alone atop the world as an undisputed hegemon.
This is of course only a brief survey of the impact of RMAs and it’s possible to quibble with this interpretation or that, but it is hard to dispute that these upheavals have been major moving forces throughout history—a role that they continue to play.
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Max Boot , the author of the award-winning The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. A senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he lectures regularly at numerous military schools and advises the Department of Defense on transformation issues. He is the author of the new book War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today.
FP: Max Boot, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Boot: Thanks for the invitation to share my views.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Boot: I wrote War Made New to provide historical perspective on the challenges we face in coping with warfare in the Information Age. Ever since America's victory in the 1991 Gulf War--a victory made possible by stealth aircraft, smart bombs, GPS locators, and other advanced technologies--there has been a lot of heated debate over how and whether the U.S. military should transform itself to meet future threats.
I don't have any easy answers, but I do try to introduce ordinary readers to this important discussion by looking at how previous Great Powers have coped with epochal changes--the Gunpowder Revolution (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1850-1914), the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and now the Information Revolution (1970 to the present). To make this debate more vivid and less theoretical, I build my narrative around a series of battles, starting with the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and concluding with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which illustrate the changing nature of warfare.
There has been a great deal written on these subjects, of course. But much of it is in the specialized literature and unfamiliar to the normal reader. War Made New tries to bring together a lot of writings on disparate subjects—ranging from the distant past to the near future, and from warfare to politics to economics—in a single, readable narrative. That is something no one else has attempted, at least not recently.
FP: Can you talk a bit about how revolutions in military affairs have changed the world?
Boot: Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) have played a central role in shaping the history of the past 500 years. The Gunpowder Revolution led to the rise of the West, because European states proved more adept than their rivals in harnessing cannons, muskets, multi-masted sailing ships and other breakthrough technologies. In 1450, at the dawn of the Gunpowder Age, Europeans controlled only 14% of the world’s land surface. By 1914, following not only the Gunpowder Revolution but also the Industrial Revolution, the sphere of European control had swelled to 84% of the world. This was in many ways the big story of the last 500 years.
But not everybody within Europe benefited equally. Gunpowder armies were much more expensive to equip, train, and maintain than the knights who had wielded power in the Middle Ages. Feudal lords didn’t have enough money to compete effectively in gunpowder warfare. This required the resources of a super-lord—a king or queen. Thus the dictates of the battlefield proved a powerful impetus for the growth of nation-states. In the words of one political scientist, “War made the state, and the state made war.” Many small states were left behind by this process. From Scotland to Navarre, from the Italian city states to Poland, countless political entities that could not harness effective military power were either temporarily or permanently swallowed up by their more powerful neighbors. In fact the map of Europe is still largely set in the pattern drawn in the Gunpowder Age.
The two Industrial Revolutions placed fresh strains on states and forced them to become even more effective in mobilizing military power—or pay the consequences. A number of states that were powerful in the Gunpowder Age were not able to industrialize effectively and collapsed by the end of World War I, the major war of the First Industrial Age. Think of the Romanoffs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans: all ancient dynasties swept away. Outside of Europe, the First Industrial Age furthered the European hegemony of the world. But by the time the Second Industrial Age was well under way (the 1940s), Europeans had succeeded in spreading their destructive technology and their even more destructive ideologies (nationalism, communism, etc.) to the farthest corners of the planet, thereby undermining the very empires they had founded. Thus Europeans wound up losing a series of colonial wars to their former subjects.
The Information Revolution--which has its origins in advances in computer technology dating back to the 1940s but which got going in earnest in the late 1970s--has already produced its share of upheavals. You can argue about why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did but surely a large part of the explanation is that we had a Silicon Valley and they did not. By the early 1980s the Soviets realized they were falling further and further behind the United States in the application of computer technology for economic and military purposes. They tried to reform but failed, precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The United States, in some measure due to its mastery of Information Age warfare (demonstrated so convincingly in the 1991 Gulf war), was left standing alone atop the world as an undisputed hegemon.
This is of course only a brief survey of the impact of RMAs and it’s possible to quibble with this interpretation or that, but it is hard to dispute that these upheavals have been major moving forces throughout history—a role that they continue to play.