Some Reflections on the Future of War

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld

Thanks to new administrative techniques, such as the systematic registration of entire populations and the collection of statistics of every kind, states were also in a position to take away as much as 85 percent of their citizens' wealth for the purpose of making war--a figure never thereafter surpassed, though not infrequently approached. [8] To provide a contemporary example, Microsoft's Bill Gates, with a hundred billion dollars at his command, is reputed to be the richest man who ever lived. [9] Still, his business empire is dwarfed by the U.S. government, the annual budget of which is on the order of two trillion dollars, and the assets of which, built up over many generations and including everything not owned by private individuals and corporations, are simply impossible to calculate.

Expanding political and economic power provided the foundation for a corresponding growth in military might. During the Middle Ages, hardly any territorial lords were, and not a single city was, in a position to raise more than a few thousand troops. The majority had to content themselves with far fewer; not seldom, the contingents that they sent to their lords' aid numbered in the hundreds or even the mere dozens. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the most important armed forces, now consisting mainly of mercenaries rather than feudal warriors or urban levies, already numbered in the tens of thousands. By the eighteenth century the forces had grown into the low hundreds of thousands. These forces, moreover, consisted of long-service regulars. Consequently, they were now available not only in war but in times of peace as well.

During the years between 1793 and 1815, following the declaration of the levee en masse by the French National Assembly and the subsequent adoption of the principle by other countries as well, the expansion of armed forces continued. After the battle of Waterloo there was a temporary return to professional armies, and growth tended to level off, only to be resumed after 1860 or so. By this time it was supported by the railways and the telegraphs, the twin instruments that made it possible to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. It culminated during the period 1914-39, when the main belligerents called up between them over a hundred million men (as against perhaps two million women), put them into uniform, armed them, trained them, and sent them to slaughter each other on battlefields that stretched from Leningrad to El Alamein, and from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific. [10]

Finally, the enormous growth in the political-economic-military power of the state could never have taken place without corresponding technological progress, both military and civilian. [11] To focus on the main developments only, from A.D. 1000 to 1945, the tank replaced the horse as the most powerful weapon on land. At sea, the size of capital ships grew from perhaps a hundred tons to as much as fifty thousand tons; entire media, notably the deep sea and the air, were invaded for the first time, by means of the submarine and the aircraft, respectively. Many of the most important developments of this era took place during the period of the industrial revolution, specifically during the twentieth century, but others, such as gunpowder, firearms, and the full-rigged sailing man-of-war, came earlier. All made possible vast increases not only in the power of weapons but in speed, range, rates of fire, and accuracy; in turn, they were supported by vast advances in such fields as communication, transportation, an d production.