Fighting the Future via the Past. Pt 3

Second Generation

      In the 18th century, a mass of men standing in lines exchanging musket fire was an acceptable way to fight wars because the weapons of the time were inaccurate and slow to reload.

      In the 19th century, a mass of men standing in lines exchanging rifle fire was a costly way to fight wars because the weapons of the time were accurate and deadly.

      At the start of the 20th century, ostensibly with the invention of the machine gun, men in the open were men already dead. No amount of courage or elan, the French word for the will to win, was sufficient to overcome explosive artillery shells raining down metal shards or guns that could fire five hundred rounds a minute.

      The massed manpower of the previous generation of warfare no longer mattered in the face of such devastating destruction. But the commanders and theoreticians of the mid 1800s and early 1900s were still the products of the previous age of warfare. Instead of massed manpower, the focus shifted to that of massed firepower. Strategy became based around the idea that by inflicting more material losses to the enemy then one received, the enemy would be forced to surrender. 

      While the previous generation introduced order to the battlefield, the changing technologies created a more disordered battlefield. This method of war developed in response to the chaos as commanders tried to create order with controlled command systems and artillery when order with men became suicidal. Generals could no longer order their men to stand in lines, but they could still have cannons fire on schedule and attacks take place on time. 

      With this idea came the idea of a material war. A minor and oft-undiscussed factor is the change in banking practices that allowed nations to finance war past the limits of hard bullion. Now wars were measured in the amount of men and materiel that a nation could put on a field and so was victory. This does not mean that wars were fought with the sole idea that one could bleed the enemy dry, but in the stalemate of World War 1, it was one of the proposed solutions.

      But in order to persecute this kind of war, the nation and the military had to be one, and if not, at least closely related. A war costs untold amounts of men, materiel, and most importantly, money, all of which needed to be drawn from the country and its populace. One such effect was widespread propaganda that prepared the population for the sacrificed needed to sustain a war of any length.

      The gradual melding of the battlefront with the home will be taken to new lengths with the responses to the developments of the second generation of war, but it has already started with the first taste of the industrialized battlefield. No longer can the family sit home and receive letters while Johnny goes to war, now mother must work in the munitions factory, father must build trucks, and sister Jenny must make uniforms.