Here is another subject I was ruminating about this morning and last night.<\/p>\n
What is the relationship between technology and victory?<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is especially important from the late 18th<\/sup>\u00a0century forward when the pace of technological innovation in western civilization sped up.\u00a0 Keep in mind that to the modern mind, change is a constant but that was not always the case, indeed for most of human history it was not the case.\u00a0 For example, the horse was the main means of transport for 90% of human history, it has only been since the 1840\u2019s since the horse began to be superseded and only really since the 1950\u2019s when the horse disappeared as a main means of transportation.\u00a0 The Wehrmacht of WWII was mostly a horse drawn force, the visions and popularity of striking Panzer forces were only a tiny part of the Nazi military machine.\u00a0 There were only 17 Panzer divisions in the German Army against something like over 150+ infantry divisions with horse drawn transport.<\/p>\n In the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century the revolutionary transport method was the train.\u00a0 Rail movement allowed for the mass movement of men and material faster than ever before.\u00a0 The limitation was that rail only let you go where tracks already existed of a suitable gage.\u00a0 Trains only got you as far as the end of the line.\u00a0 Once an army reached its concentration area it was limited to the rate a man could march as to how fast it could go, this limitation also applied to the logistic support of this army.\u00a0 So rail revolutionized transport, but only to a point.<\/p>\n This same argument can be made when we look at tactical level technology.\u00a0 One such example is the introduction of rifles and breechloaders.\u00a0 This subject appeals to me because in 1866 the Prussian army was the only army in the world that had fielded a rifled, breechloading weapon.\u00a0 This was the Dreyse Needle Gun which the Prussians fielded starting in 1848.\u00a0 A key part of most present analysis of the campaign of 1866 says that Prussian tactical superiority was decisive and the effects of the rapid fire of the needle gun were an extreme shock to their Austrian opponents.<\/p>\n But a frank discussion of technology in war is probably long overdue in historical circles.\u00a0\u00a0It is generally taken as a given that the side which is technologically superior will win.\u00a0 Or in other words that God favors not the big battalions but rather he favors the battalions with the neatest toys.<\/b>\u00a0 I don\u2019t necessarily think that history proves this point.\u00a0 A close look at any of the wars since 1815 will show that technology does not win wars, yes possession of a technology the opponent does not have confers an advantage, but that advantage need not be decisive.\u00a0 In the final analysis it is\u00a0the use to which the human material of war is put that decides wars.\u00a0 The best technology in the world is useless if soldiers are not trained in its proper employment or if the doctrine of its use is faulty.<\/p>\n There are numerous examples of advanced technology conferring no significant advantage in a war.\u00a0 The current war in Afghanistan is but the most recent; but this principle applies to conventional wars as well as insurgencies.\u00a0 Look at French employment of the mitrailleuse in 1870 as one example or the Russian failure to use railroads in the Crimea in 1854 as another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is another subject I was ruminating about this morning and last night. What is the relationship between technology and victory? This is especially important from the late 18th\u00a0century forward when the pace of technological innovation in western civilization… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[27,26,25],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-technology","tag-railroad","tag-rifle","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}