Shooting Ahead

Revolutions in military affairs, from the rise of gunpowder to the Iraq War.

WAR MADE NEW

Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

By Max Boot

Gotham. 624 pp. $35

Fifty-eight years ago, the great science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote about an intergalactic commander mournfully recounting how his empire had been defeated. On the starships, the commander said, his unequalled Spheres of Annihilation weapons, guided by all-knowing Battle Analyzer computers, had never performed as expected. An inferior enemy, meanwhile, had moved stolidly into the gaps created by every supertech glitch.

Clarke's short story, "Superiority," soon entered MIT's engineering curriculum. There it served as a reminder that technology is beguiling, promises great opportunities yet forever tempts its believers to step into the abyss between the laboratory and the battlefield.

Three years after history's most sophisticated military demolished Iraq's armed forces, Americans keep falling victim to primitive killers with improvised explosive devices.

That makes Max Boot's overview of changes in warfare timely indeed. It arrives just before the latest of what defense intellectuals term "revolutions in military affairs": the Pentagon's incredibly complicated "force transformation" from Cold War-era weapons and formations to a 21st-century military in which robot planes and ground vehicles would be controlled by new targeting, imaging and communication technologies in order to allow small teams of networked soldiers to accomplish tasks that before had required divisions.

Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace, proposes to offer "fresh insights about the future" by demonstrating how technological advances have changed the course of landmark battles and campaigns -- from the early days of gunpowder; to the 19th century's extension of the Industrial Revolution onto the battlefield in the form of railroads, repeating rifles, the telegraph and mass-society armies; then to the 20th century's employment of radio, radar, blitzkrieg and long-range bombing; and finally to the military impact of today's ongoing information revolution.

Boot follows five major themes: Technology by itself rarely brings conclusive military advantage, since organization, training and leadership are also necessary to achieve victory; countries that take advantage of military revolutions become "history's winners"; a winner must still "know the capabilities and limitations of its war machine"; no military revolution ever confers indefinite advantage; and innovation is speeding up. These are sensible but unremarkable premises: Yes, the next new thing arrives ever faster, and, no, technological advances alone don't dictate the fate of nations.

The timeliness of the book's argument is not matched by its conceptual depth. Boot nicely engages the reader with some vividly specific details. (When the 1936 floods ruined a Pittsburgh factory that made a single, crucial propeller part, U.S. aircraft production was disrupted nationwide -- providing an insight about the importance of chokepoints that was soon harnessed to cripple specific German facilities during World War II.)

Such skillful stitches, however, are almost lost in a coarsely woven tapestry that attempts to display the grander purposes of war. The steady accumulation of contextual errors -- of which a random few are offered below -- leads the reader to question just how well the author commands his "course of history."

In America's Civil War, for example, Boot writes that "the result" of the adoption on both sides of the Minié rifle by 1863 was "620,000 dead soldiers -- more than would be killed in all of America's other wars combined." That's a rubbery statistic, considering that a good third of the war had passed by this time. Boot himself says, "Most deaths, however, were the result of disease, not gunshot."

After having been beaten by Prussia in 1866, Austria-Hungary was "slowly picked apart in the years ahead by its various national components," Boot writes; actually, the Dual Monarchy gained territory over the next half-century, only to dissolve in the general upheaval of empires during two autumn weeks of 1918. "World War I," he adds, "led, then, to the growth of government and the demise of traditional social structures." It certainly accelerated both processes, but throughout the 19th century, the Atlantic world had seen them gnawing away at every pre-industrial aspect of the social order.

Hitler is chided for not having "possessed the sagacity of a Bismarck and made peace following the victories of 1939-40." The Nazi leader might then, writes Boot, "have consolidated the conquests won by his peerless war machine." This is a startling condescension to Winston Churchill, who became prime minister in May 1940 and who was thunderously determined -- backed by his united nation -- to reject any settlement short of victory. There was no question of Hitler both dominating Europe and making peace with the resolute British empire.

Upon such frustratingly hasty histories, Boot piles repetitions of the obvious: "By the twentieth century," he observes, "economies in the developed world had moved away from agriculture"; "The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most famous, or perhaps simply infamous, events of the twentieth century." Saddam Hussein's capture "did not spell an end to the uprising." Even Boot's apt review of technology in the Iraq War can be reached only through an entire chapter of material already familiar from newspapers.

By the close, a chapter on the "Consequences of the Information Revolution" and an epilogue offer uninspired conclusions: Embrace innovation, prepare to adapt, flatten bloated hierarchies, and remember that "there is no free lunch." These are business-magazine insights circa 1987. It's not soldiers being ignorant of basic organizational development that undercuts breakthroughs (or "revolutions") in technology and doctrine (or "military affairs"). The March 2003 invasion of Iraq could have been costlier still if our opponent had been able to exploit the connectivity and software failures that occurred among frontline U.S. forces.

Arthur C. Clarke's short story ends with the intergalactic commander's heartfelt plea that he not be compelled to share his cell with the "late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces." It's an appeal that catches the perpetual conflict between warriors who have to get things done here and now and civilian genius forever pursuing ideas beyond the horizon.

Derek Leebaert's latest book is "To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles to Al Qaeda." He teaches foreign policy at Georgetown University.