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Military Innovation in the Interwar Period

by Williamson Murray (Editor), Allan R. Millett (Editor)

3.73 · Rating Details · 83 Ratings · 6 Reviews

This study of major military innovations in the 1920s and 1930s explores differences in innovating exploitation by the seven major military powers. This volume of comparative essays investigates how and why innovation occurred or did not occur, and explains much of the strategic and operative performance of the Axis and Allies in World War II.

Paperback, 444 pages

Published August 13th 1998 by Cambridge University Press (first published 1996)

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Aug 02, 2010 Roger Burk rated it it was amazing

Anyone concerned about military innovation, and with an historical turn of mind, should read this insightful book. It discusses the successes and failures in Britain, the US, Germany, the USSR, Japan, and France of various kinds of innovation between World Wars I and II: in armored warfare, close air support, strategic bombing, radar, amphibious warfare, and other areas. It provides many lessons for the present, when another transformation in warfare seems to be underway. Notably, it concludes t ...more

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Jan 23, 2016 Martin Samuels rated it really liked it

This is one of a number of books of essays that Williamson Murray and Allan Millett have edited, each taking a comparative look at military innovation or effectiveness during the first half of the twentieth century. As with the previous books, this volume comprises a series of essays by experts, focusing on specific aspects of the topic, which are then brought together by several essays seeking to synthesise more general lessons from the various case studies.

This volume considers the interwar pe This is one of a number of books of essays that Williamson Murray and Allan Millett have edited, each taking a comparative look at military innovation or effectiveness during the first half of the twentieth century. As with the previous books, this volume comprises a series of essays by experts, focusing on specific aspects of the topic, which are then brought together by several essays seeking to synthesise more general lessons from the various case studies.

This volume considers the interwar period, focusing on a number of key areas of military innovation (including the devlopment of armoured warfare, strategic bombing, aircraft acrriers, and radio / radar technology), with each essay considering the responses to the given topic from a number of different countries.

The volume has great strengths as a thematic exploration of the issues, and the comparative approach adopted allows the different routes taken by individual countries to be highlighted and considered more readily than the more usual single country monograph. Perhaps inevitably, the individual essays can be a little superficial and may be overly dependent on a handful of relevant previous studies.

While recognising the vital importance of contingency (history never does repeat itself), Murray and Millett draw out some valuable themes affecting military innovation:
* The need for there to be a clear vision of the future, which can both guide and drive innovation;
* The need for the vision to be connected to operational realities, in order to avoid the risk of practicalities being ignored;
* The need for the core bureaucracy of the armed forces to accept the proposed innovation, securing senior support, funding, and protection of the proponents of change;and
* The need for processes and attitudes that promote the rigorous testing of new visions and their development into practical systems, connecting doctrine, kit, and organisation, based on evidence.

In summary, an excellent introduction to many of the issues and a good starting point for deeper investigation into the specific case study topics. ...more

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Apr 10, 2013 William added it

Shelves: history, nonfiction, war, military-history, wwi, wwii, marine-corps, european-history, us-history

Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet’s Military Innovation in the Interwar Period is an edited collection of chapters on the response by the military institutions of major world powers to technological and tactical innovations over a twenty year period between the world wars. The multinational comparative collection is comprised of a brief introduction written by Murray and Millet, followed by ten topical chapters – armored warfare, amphibious warfare, strategic bombing, close air support, airp Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet’s Military Innovation in the Interwar Period is an edited collection of chapters on the response by the military institutions of major world powers to technological and tactical innovations over a twenty year period between the world wars. The multinational comparative collection is comprised of a brief introduction written by Murray and Millet, followed by ten topical chapters – armored warfare, amphibious warfare, strategic bombing, close air support, airpower at sea, submarine warfare, radar, innovation in historical context, patterns of innovation, and peacetime military innovation. Editors Murray and Millet are joined by airpower historian Richard R. Muller, British naval historian Geoffrey Till, German military historian Holger H. Herwig, German political historian Alan Beyerchen, and airpower historian Barry Watts. It is notable that Murray, Millet, and Beyerchen served together on the history faculty at Ohio State University, and that Muller received his Ph.D. in military history from the same institution.

Murray and Millet impress a few points upon the reader: that innovation between the wars was significant, though the successes were uneven; that innovations even within the same fields varied from nation to nation; that innovations “represented fundamental, basic changes in the context within war takes place;” and that deriving an understanding of how the factors which appear to encourage innovation – whether doctrinal or technological – are more significant than deriving “lessons learned.”

Murray and Millet’s book is myopic in places. Little attention is paid to the Soviet Union throughout. On the surface, this may seem fair, as Stalin’s political purges of the Red Army effectively extinguished innovation for a period before the Second World War, a point Murray observes in his chapter contextualizing innovation. Nonetheless, Soviet armor is not considered beyond Murray’s mention of German attendance at the Kazan tank school between 1929-1933. This blind spot may also be attributable, in part, to the editors’s direction that authors “compare and contrast the different experiences of three or more national military institutions.” Predictably, the stars are the United States, Germany, Japan, and Britain.

Harold Winton found the organization of the book to be a major weak point. Winton notes that the chapters are repetitive in their focus on the strategic context, particularly as the same national military institutions are featured again and again. Moreover, the final three chapters re-dredge the same material, and Winton points in particular to the chapter co-authored by Watts and Murray, which rehashes the airpower at sea chapter written by Geoffrey Till, “apparently because they disagreed with Till’s analysis.”

The volume likewise might have incorporated a chapter on industrial innovation. Here, too, attention to the Soviet Union would have been worthwhile, particularly the forced industrialization undertaken following the Russian Civil War. David Sorenson likewise raised the question of whether innovation was “limited or aided by depression-era financial constraints.”

The book shows its age most in final chapter, in which Watts and Murray consider future implications of these innovations, observing that “the potential for civilian or outside leadership to impose a new vision of future war on a reluctant military service whose heart remains committed to existing ways of fighting is, at best, limited.” Five years after the book’s initial publication, the United States was attacked by terrorists and began to fight two large, asymmetric wars. The book received its twenty-first reprinting in 2009, but the editors have not added an epilogue which might contextualize the developments therein considered with those of more recent vintage. This has the effect of freezing the book in the mid-1990s peace bubble, even as American involvement in territorial, ethnic, and religious wars in the former Yugoslavia (and Russian involvement in Chechnya) pointed toward a world of expanded asymmetric conflict. ...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Geoventuring Watershed-marshal rated it it was amazing

Found this to be a vital resource for understanding context of U.S. Navy "Code Breaking" & fast fleet oiler/tanker UNderway REPlenishment (UNREP) innovations ...

Military Innovation in the Interwar Period - Page 426 -
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Williamson R. Murray, Allan R. Millett ...
Ernst, 160,272 Ultra code-breaking program, 295, 297, 348
Air Support Board, 186 Air War Plans Division, 107, 126-27, ...

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May 12, 2015 Neil rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: military-history, general, general-history, history, source-for-research

This was an interesting book. It discusses various technological advances between WWI and WWII. I read it in regard to a paper I was writing on aircraft carriers, so that was more the chapter I focused on, but I did skim through other sections of the book. It was very detailed, but it was also dry in parts. At some point, I will finish reading the other sections of the book; I never finished it because it became due at the library where I checked it out and somebody else was waiting for it.

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Jun 18, 2011 Lee rated it liked it

Shelves: military-history, world-war-ii

The case studies were easier to read than the analysis chapters.

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