Fighting the Future via the Past. Pt 2

First Generation

     The Battle of Lutzen, in 1632, is often considered to be the bloodiest battle in the 30-Years War. For some seven hours, 40,000 men from the Holy Roman Empire and the Swedish Empire fought, only stopping once night fell. In total, more than a quarter of the men were killed or wounded. 

      Two hundred years later, in 1812, Napoleon and his Grande Armee met the Russian Empire at the Battle of Borodino. Both armies suffered an estimated 80,000 casualties in that single day of fighting, out of the starting total of 250,000.

      So what happened in between these two wars that made armies so huge? 

      According to the ideas of the 4 Generations of warfare, the rise of the nation-state happened. The first paradigm shift came with the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the 30-Years War, which effectively gave states the exclusive rights to organize its own armies. No longer were armies owned by their captains, who were also owned by their feudal lords and their feudal lords. Under the nation-state, all of a state's military was subordinate to its ruler, who could now more effectively gather men for war.
      The Peace of Westphalia sought to end the wars that had ravaged Europe previously by creating a framework for a sovereign state and its affairs with the outside world. The most important tenet was that a sovereign state had exclusive control over its own people, military included. In Central Europe, the Holy Roman Empire was effectively broken into over 300 independent states and the feudal system collapsed. 

      Prior to this change, combat was typically irregular. The famous battles of the Medieval Ages and the Early Reformation were exceptions to the general idea of "war," which consisted mostly of raiding. Even the armies that took part in these battles were very often alliances very tenuously held together by shared circumstances. The change to centrally-controlled armies was the first attempt to bring order to the battlefield. The most visible of this new "order" is the idea of uniforms, saluting, and stratification of military ranks.

      But aside from more organization, strategy and tactics changed according to technology, not from the Peace of Westphalia. The changeovers of the next Generations will be less subtle, as a result of technology far outstripping the limits of the human body. A bow and arrow functions a lot like a musket on the battlefield. But a machine gun, what is a machine gun?