War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict

2. Technology, Industry, and War, 1945–1991

chapter 2 ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Technology, Industry, and War, 1945–1991 Warren Chin The Industrial Revolution changed all aspects of how states fought wars. It may well represent one of only three revolutions to have affected the domain of war over the last fourteen thousand years,1 and it was so important that it became one of the fundamental pillars of military power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 The first and most important aspect of this revolution was that it completely changed the material conditions of war. In the past, the scarcity and cost of resources required to wage war were a principal limitation on the character, intensity, and duration of such conflicts. In contrast, from the second half of the nineteenth century , the creation of a mass-consumer, mass-production society and the transfer of these techniques to the realm of armaments production resulted in the erosion of this limitation. States now possessed almost limitless means with which to wage war. More important, in the context of the rivalry between the great European powers in the period leading up to World War I, the desperate need to secure victory in war resulted in an imbalance between the means used to fight war and the grand strategic goals for which the war was fought.3 As a result, a new phenomenon was born: total war.4 Total war was a condition peculiar to the bloody wars of the twentieth century, and its character was very much shaped by the power of modern manufacturing. Such was the importance of industry in war that it affected even 42 our conception of strategy and tactics. As Martin van Creveld explains , whereas in the preindustrial world strategy was purely concerned with the concentration of force at the decisive point, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, it acquired an added dimension. By the late nineteenth century, it was no longer simply concerned with waging military operations: instead, it became necessary to coordinate all areas of activity within the state: political, economic, and industrial. Thus was born the term grand strategy.5 The new material conditions also changed the conduct of war in that it became less decisive, and as has already been said, industrialized war demonstrated a propensity to escalate toward totality. In the preindustrial era, armies were small and tended to march and fight as a single, concentrated mass. Because of the inability of principalities and kingdoms to replace their losses, defeat in a few battles usually made it imperative for the losing side to negotiate an end to the war. In the era of mass-industrialized warfare, however, the enormous size of armies and the ability to replace losses quickly served to make it almost impossible to achieve a decisive victory in a single battle or campaign. Victory depended on a willingness to fight a protracted and often attritional warfare, and it went to the side best able to meet to material demands of this new style of war.6 World War II represented the apotheosis of total war and demonstrated in the clearest possible terms that, in the era of mass-industrialized warfare, quantity possessed a quality all its own. Thus one of the strongest images we have of this war is that of a highly skilled German military machine being overwhelmed by the material superiority of their militarily less skilled opponents. The best illustration of this view is Germany’s fight against the Russians on the Eastern Front (1941–45) where, it was believed, superior numbers allowed the Soviets to prevail over the numerically inferior but more skilful German army.7 Although this is a simplistic view, there is little doubt that the economic strength of the Allied powers and the efficient mobilization of their economies constituted a significant reason for why they prevailed.8 Indeed, it is estimated that the United States alone raised over one hundred divisions during the war and technology, industry, and war, 1945–1991 43 supplied aid to both Britain and the Soviet Union equivalent to the creation of a further two thousand divisions.9 In 1944 the Germans produced 17,800 tanks and 39,800 aircraft. This output was dwarfed by the Allies, who constructed over 51,000 tanks and 167,654 fighter aircraft in the same year.10 The Industrial Revolution also changed the material conditions of war by establishing the idea of military invention as a permanent and systematic feature...