This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

The Dynamics of Military Revolution aims to bridge a major gap in the emerging literature on revolutions in military affairs, suggesting that there have been two very different phenomena at work over the past centuries: 'military revolutions', which are driven by vast social and political changes; and 'revolutions in military affairs', which military institutions have directed, although usually with great difficulty and ambiguous results. By providing both a conceptual framework and a historical context for thinking about revolutionary changes in military affairs, the work establishes a baseline for understanding the patterns of change, innovation, and adaptation that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century - beginning with Edward III's revolutionary changes in medieval warfare, through the development of modern Western military institutions in seventeenth-century France, to the cataclysmic changes of the First World War and the German Blitzkrieg victories of 1940. This history provides a guide for thinking about military revolutions in the coming century, which are as inevitable as they are difficult to predict.

A study of major military innovations in the 1920s and 1930s.

The new edition of The Cambridge History of Warfare offers an updated comprehensive account of Western warfare, from its origins in classical Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, down to the wars of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

Barring major policy failures, the U.S. military will enjoy unrivaled capabilities in the coming decades. However, a series of megatrends will undermine the U.S. position as the most influential actor while enabling its rivals to move up the ranks fast. The U.S. military should stand ready to harness these dynamics to retain its edge in a recalibrated global operational threat environment and strategic landscape. Otherwise, protecting U.S. interests in a continuously evolving world will be a fruitless enterprise, one that will hasten the perceived U.S. decline as the greatest military power the world has ever known. This monograph helps explore and prepare for the possible and the probable in a transformed world of 2050. Relying on forecasting, scenarios, and wild cards, it envisions the evolution of the megatrends and an emerging operational threat environment and strategic landscape for the U.S. military.

The People in Arms, first published in 2002, is concerned with the mass mobilization of society for war. It takes as its starting point the French levée en masse of 1793, which replaced former theories and regulations concerning the obligation of military service with a universal concept more encompassing in its moral claims than any that had prevailed under the Ancien Régime. The levée en masse has accordingly gone down in history as a spontaneous, free expression of the French people's ideals and enthusiasm. It also became a crucial source for one of the most powerful organizing myths of modern politics: that compulsory, mass social mobilizations merely express, and give effective form to, the wishes or higher values of society and its members. The aim of the papers presented here is to analyse and compare episodes in which this distinctive ideological configuration has played a leading role.

Addresses how military organizations confront the problem of adapting under the trying, terrifying conditions of war.