Between Flesh and Steel (3 page)

During the seventeenth century, however, other centers of domestic power, some of them arising as a consequence of the changing economic structure, gradually circumscribed the national monarchs' power. Expanding domestic and international economies brought into existence new classes of domestic political claimants that demanded a share in the power of the political establishment. By the nineteenth century, the empowerment of new societal segments culminated in the rise of representative legislatures that gave these new classes some participation in public policy. The increased influence of these new domestic political actors, however, was in proportion to how valuable they were to the national authorities in conducting their war and foreign policies.

To ensure the king's control over his domestic realm, he built the armies of the new nation states. Control of these military forces became central to establishing and expanding monarchical power, and the new standing professional armies became the chief means of suppressing domestic dissent and protecting the monarchy from foreign threats. The early bureaucracies that were set up to achieve the monarch's directives in the domestic realm became the prototypes of those modern civil and military bureaucracies deemed necessary to govern the modern state.

As the social and economic structures of the new states became more complex, they gave rise to merchant and financial classes that began to challenge the monarchical order and demand a greater share in the political process. The new financial instruments—hard currencies, banking systems, letters of credit, international trade, and cross-national financing and manufacturing—used to cope with a developing international economy forced the national monarchs to depend upon the new classes more heavily to raise armies and fight wars. By the seventeenth century, national monarchs could no longer maintain armies or fight wars without the support of the merchant and financial classes.

The development of a complex international economy made the support of the new classes indispensable. Resources available for war varied greatly from state to state, and the ability to sustain one's position in the international arena required that economic resources remain securely tied to national aspirations and interests. Economic concerns began to drive military ambitions in equal measure with political and military concerns. The internationalization of economic affairs made it impossible for any one state to secure solely for itself the resources for war and to gain military
dominance over all other states or even a coalition of states for long. In military adventures any one state could hope only to achieve marginal gains at the expense of other states. Under these circumstances, a constantly shifting balance of power among many national states came to characterize the international order.

The economic costs of weapons and warfare increased enormously, and wars of this period often produced the near or actual financial collapse of the participants. Professional armies and weapons were expensive, and the resources required to produce and maintain a large military force led a number a states into bankruptcy.
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The loss or transfer of manpower from industry and agriculture to military service, the high costs of borrowing on domestic and international markets, and the disruption of domestic and international trade caused by national conflicts resulted in destruction and economic dislocation that often served to make even a successful war a near financial disaster. These circumstances gradually forced the national monarchs to share power with the new merchant classes that controlled the sinews of war and had the most to lose or gain economically by war.

By the early 1800s, the transition from the old feudal orders to the modern national era was complete insofar as weaponry, tactics, and military organization were concerned. The old political order hung on for yet another century but more in form than substance. Militarily, the pike disappeared from the battlefield, and the new musket infantry came of age while fighting in disciplined linear combat formations, a form that lingered into the twentieth century. Mobile artillery also came into its own and became a major killing combat arm used in coordination with cavalry and infantry. The standing army had come into being, with organization, logistics trains, and command structures comparable to those of modern armies.

Napoleon Bonaparte introduced yet a new element into this equation and, in doing so, revolutionized the conduct of war. Until the French Revolution, armies remained professional forces whose manpower was drawn from the least socially and economically useful elements of the population. Most soldiers came from the ranks of the urban poor or the excess rural population that had no land. Even the officer corps was drawn from the second and third sons of the nobility, leaving the first son to manage the family's estates and business interests. These professional military forces' loyalty was based largely upon regular pay. Napoleon instituted the mass citizen army based on conscription and developed an officer corps with men who were selected for their talent rather than their social origins. A number of industrial and agricultural innovations allowed him to extract ever larger groups of manpower
from the economic base without serious disruption. Still, the size of the Napoleonic armies was impossible to maintain unless the entire social and economic resources of the state were mobilized for war. The age of modern war had dawned.

The Napoleonic armies replaced the old enticements of loyalty to the king and regular pay with loyalty based on national patriotism fired by the ideal of social revolution. This appeal made it possible for Napoleon to raise mass armies. The idea of a “nation in arms” based on national patriotic fervor and sacrifice to ideals meant that all segments of the population were expected to contribute to the war effort. Entire national economies were now marshaled to support war, and private control of the resources of war passed to the control of the state. The state's economic structures were required to produce the sinews of war upon command, even to the detriment of other aspects of economic and social activity if necessary. Thus the most significant contribution of the Napoleonic era was the invention of a new national model for war, the nation in arms.

Historians sometimes call the American Civil War the first truly modern war, for it was the first conflict not only to take maximum advantage of the new efficiencies of production that the Industrial Revolution fostered but also to involve the
entire
populations of each combatant. Large conscript armies, larger than the world had ever seen, required a monumental industrial base to feed, clothe, and supply them for combat. The Industrial Revolution, the factory system, and machine mass production, along with technological innovations in metallurgy, chemistry, and machine tools, created an explosion in military technology. The great reduction in time between developing new ideas and manufacturing their prototypes was among the most important consequence. New concepts were quickly translated to mechanical drawings, then to models, then to prototypes, and finally to full-scale implementation, all within a very short time. The widespread introduction of technical journals accelerated the time it took for innovations in one discipline to have an impact on a related field. The result was a rapid increase in information transfer.

Overall these circumstances led to new technologies being rapidly applied to warfare at a historically unprecedented pace, and correspondingly weapons became more lethal than ever. As new means of economic organization and impressive increases in productivity freed large numbers of men for military service without causing serious economic dislocation in the national wartime economy, the civilian population that manned the war machine's productive base became at least as important as the war machine itself. For the first time, the production base and the
civilian industrial manpower pool became legitimate and necessary military targets to achieve victory.

The Crimean War witnessed the British Army first wielding both rifled and breech-loading artillery. Both of these improvements already had been used as early as the sixteenth century, if only as prototypes. Technical problems in barrel casting and breech sealing had prevented their operation on a widespread basis. Half the Union artillery in the Civil War comprised rifled and breech-loading guns. Rifling increased the speed of the projectiles up the barrel, enabling cannon to fire at much longer ranges and with greater accuracy. Rifled cannon also packed more penetrating power, a considerable advantage against fixed fortifications. Originally made of bronze, and later cast iron with steel reinforcing bands, the rifled breech-loading cannon could also deliver a much faster rate of fire. Improved black powder added to the shell's velocity and range. Near the end of the war, the first primitive recoil mechanisms further increased the rate of fire and accuracy of the rifled field artillery cannon.
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The musket had acquired rifling long before the Crimean War, and rifled muskets had been produced as prototypes in the sixteenth century. The most important innovation to Civil War musketry was the introduction of the conoidal bullet. Shaped like a small egg, the conoidal bullet had a hollow “basket” behind its penetrating head. Cast in one piece of soft lead, the “basket” expanded upon firing as the hot combustion gases filled the rear of the bullet. The soft lead expanded outward, forcing the raised spirals on the basket into the rifled grooves in the barrel. The result was a greater sealing of the propulsive gases and a tighter grasp of the rifling by the bullet. Both range and accuracy vastly improved. A rifled Civil War musket could easily kill at a thousand yards and was accurate at six hundred yards.
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The infantry's firepower was increasing exponentially. The Spencer carbine, a .56-caliber repeating rifle with a seven-shot capacity, appeared near the end of the war. In the hands of a competent rifleman, it could expend all seven rounds in the time it took a musket rifleman to load and fire a single round. Manufacturers also improved handguns, long the mainstay of the cavalry. Able to fire six shots of .44-caliber ball before requiring reloading, these new weapons were so effective that John Singleton Mosby, the famous Gray Ghost of the Confederacy, required each of his cavalrymen to strap six pistols to both sides of his horse's neck. Mosby's cavalrymen also carried two spare carbines in addition to the carbine and pistol they usually had.

Infantry firepower continued to increase with the introduction of the Gatling gun, the first primitive machine gun. This mechanized contraption was a multibarreled
gun that rotated each barrel into firing position in succession by means of a cast gear as the firing handle was turned. The Gatling gun was capable of a sustained rate of fire of a hundred rounds a minute, equal to the rate of fire from forty infantrymen. In 1870, the French deployed a highly reliable, if somewhat cumbersome, twenty-five-barrel machine gun capable of firing 125 rounds a minute and accurate at two thousand yards. In 1870, the Prussian Dreyse needlegun introduced a modern firing pin system for the rifle that again increased rates of fire. The introduction of the magazine-fed (British Lee-Enfield) and clip-fed (German Mauser) bolt-action rifles at the time of the Boer Wars increased the infantry's firepower and mobility yet again. In the 1880s, an American named Hiram Maxim invented a truly modern machine gun capable of a sustained rate of fire of six hundred rounds a minute. The Maxim gun was so effective that all the major armies of the world produced it under license. It became the definitive weapon of World War I, the conflict that came to be called “the machine gun war.”

The military capitalized on numerous other inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Probably most important for its impact on military operations was the railroad. Industrial nations lived by rail transport, and armies soon discovered that the railways allowed them to move large numbers of men and matériel over great distances very rapidly.
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Mobility of deployment increased dramatically, as did the ability to sustain large forces in the field over vast distances by supplying them by rail. It is important to remember that until the railway, no army could move faster than men or horses would carry it. Tinned food, although Napoleon first used it in small amounts, became common and contributed to logistical capability, as did the introduction of condensed food.
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The telegraph for the first time enabled corps- and army-level commanders to exercise relative tactical control over their subordinate units across long distances. When the telegraph was used in conjunction with the railway, units could achieve both strategic and tactical surprise at force levels never witnessed before. The ironclad steam-powered ship signaled the end of the era of wood and sail, and the use of the balloon for military purposes presaged the function that the airplane would fulfill in the next century.

Behind these military applications lay many other innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Among the most important were the factory system, mass production, and the use of machines to make weapons and military equipment. The factory system represented an entirely new form of social organization for work because for the first time larger numbers of workers directed at a specific task could gather at
one workplace. Mass production, especially Eli Whitney's championing of the idea of the interchangeability of parts, made possible previously unimagined levels of weapons production. Making goods by machine increased rates of production to unprecedented levels as implements of all types could be manufactured at a faster unit production rate. And because machines do not require rest, production schedules could be extended around the clock. During the Civil War, factories routinely ran on twenty-four-hour schedules.

The lesson that European powers took from the American Civil War was that military might required a sufficient industrial base and a supply of manpower that, except for the brief period under Napoleon, had never before been placed under arms. None of the European military establishments, however, seemed to appreciate that the Industrial Revolution had brought about a qualitative change in the nature of combat killing power. As European armies adopted each new weapon, they retained the traditional unit formations and battlefield tactics that the increased range and firepower of the new infantry and artillery weapons had made fatally obsolete. When the British adopted the machine gun to their infantry formations, for instance, they assigned only one gun per battalion, relying upon the traditional rifleman to provide the firepower for defense. Not a single European power recognized that the qualitative change in killing power had now made offensive infantry operations a deadly practice. The battlefield advantage had swung completely to the defense.