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The Rise and Fall of Military Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Martin Van Creveld
Martin Van Creveld
Affiliation:
History DepartmentThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Abstract

This paper is divided into four parts. Part I is a conventional, if necessarily very brief description of the way in which military technology and armed force reinforced each other from about 1500 until 1945. Part II examines the period between 1945 and the present; it argues that what most people saw as unprece-dentedly rapid military-technological progress did in fact constitute the onset of overkill and degeneration. Part III explains how, obscured and in part protected by military-technological progress, low-intensity warfare was allowed to develop from about 1660 on until it represented almost the only form of armed conflict still left on this planet. Finally, part IV pulls the threads together, pointing to the way in which war, and with it the military technology on which it depends, can be expected to go in the future.

Type
Modern Societies and Their Environments
Information
Science in Context , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 327 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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