Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

First published by Armchair General.  Full text online for ease of automated translation.

In document form (15 pages):  2013-05-09 Ralph Peters Birth of Modern Warfare

THE BIRTH OF MODERN WAR

How the 1860s Changed the Fields of Battle Forever

By Ralph Peters

     The ten-year span that began with the American Civil War in 1861 and climaxed with a Prussian-led German army besieging Paris in 1870 changed warfare as profoundly as—and certainly more abruptly than—the introduction of steel blades or the development of gunpowder weapons.  That decade dramatically altered strategic and operational mobility, military communications, killing power, the relative value of combat arms and the tactics for employing them, the composition of armies, logistics, and medical care for the wounded (while navies moved to steam-driven ironclads mounting long-range guns).  A consideration of military leadership across the decade should teach us not to mock the inability of most generals to adjust to a disorienting environment, but to marvel at the few who managed to figure things out—despite the crushing weight of legacy thinking.

     The complexity of warfare exploded as the strategic pace accelerated.  And one rarely noted determinant of victory may, in fact, have been the decisive factor: literacy.  In the end, the armies with the soldiers who could read were the armies that were able to adapt–those of the United States and Prussia.  (Indeed, our contemporary experience in attempting to professionalize Afghan troops underscores the degree to which literacy is the fundamental building block of military modernity.)

     As this epochal decade approached, Napoleon’s shadow clouded the thinking of even the most-able generals.  Only outliers, such as Grant and von Moltke, escaped his thrall, while Napoleonic maxims, codified by Jomini and others, excused less-able leaders from thinking at all.  The 1860s came as a series of thunderbolts, following the confused military actions of the previous decade.  Even as steam power allowed for more rapid strategic concentration in the 1850s, European armies assembling in a theater of war had made no doctrinal advances since Waterloo.  Indeed, the allied armies that landed in the Crimea marched more slowly than had the troops of either the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon.  English rifles slaughtered Russian infantrymen, but English generals (and cholera) squandered English soldiers.  And when the Piedmontese and French fought the Austrians in Italy in 1859, the battles of Magenta and Solferino were clumsy bloodbaths that convinced generals that very little had changed on the tactical battlefield.  New rifles in the hands of poorly trained, unmotivated and ineptly led Austrian soldiers proved useless against superior leadership—resulting in a failure to appreciate the killing power of massed rifled weapons.

     Soon enough the race would be on to find generals who could think as fast as modern weapons could kill.

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