War Made New Quotes

“Some lasting terms of military organization owe their origin to Spain: colonel comes from cabo de colunela, or head of a column; infantry most likely comes from infante, the name for a Spanish prince, who often led these formations of foot soldiers.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“a crucial element of English success was their commanders’ ability to learn on the fly, make adjustments, and attempt new tactics. The Spanish paid a heavy price for their lack of equal flexibility.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“The dominance of the man on horseback was challenged during the fourteenth century in what some historians call the infantry revolution. English longbowmen and Swiss pikeman proved to be more than a match for cumbersome heavy cavalry, the pikemen winning their first notable victory at Laupen in 1339, the longbowmen at Crécy seven years later. Firing longbows or holding pikes were not activities deemed worthy of a gentleman in medieval Europe, but warfare was beginning to be democratized. Politics and society would soon follow.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“The blitzkrieg is one of the best-known examples of a “military technical revolution”—and one of the most misunderstood by the general public. It is commonly assumed, based on the ease with which German armies overran Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France, that they possessed a big technological and numerical edge over their adversaries. Nothing could be further from the truth; Hitler actually fielded fewer tanks and aircraft than the British and French, and the quality of the Allied weapons was in many cases higher than the Germans’. The German edge lay in their superior ability to coordinate their forces, and in their high quality of leadership, training, and morale. They figured out how to make the best use of the technology of the day; the Allies did not.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“Cheap to produce and easy to disseminate, germs, chemicals, and cyber-viruses are particularly well-suited for the weak to use against the strong.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today

“Chapter 10 Precision and Professionalism”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today

“Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead.

Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today

“If the Germans did not have material superiority, what accounted for their easy victory? Quite simply, their decisive edge in doctrine, training, planning, coordination, and leadership.

Thus the final victory was a tribute not to panzers alone but to the skillful employment of the combined-arms concept.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today

“There is no question that Benedek played his hand badly. He failed to decisively attack the Prussians when they were at their weakest, while wending their way through the passes of the Giant Mountains. He then failed to take advantage of his initial success at Koniggratz on the morning of July 3. Until the early afternoon, the Austrians had a large numerical advantage over their Prussian opponents. If Benedek had gambled on an all-out offensive, he might have been able to crush the Elbe Army and the First Army before the Second Army arrived. Failing that, Benedek should have retreated while the going was still good. Instead he stayed in place, leaving his right flank dangerously exposed, and suffered the consequences. Moltke later commented that "no one, of course, dreamed" that the enemy would open themselves up in this fashion.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today

“Here commenced a scene of horrors,” the dramatist Friedrich von Schiller later wrote, “for which history has no language, poetry no pencil.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“There were few more unlikely candidates in 1611 for Great Power status than Sweden. Even with its satrapy of Finland, the total population numbered no more than 1.3 million. They lived on the northern edge of Europe in an impoverished, barren, half-frozen country with almost no industry to speak of. So poor was Sweden that by winter’s end peasants were often reduced to eating tree bark to survive. It was a society, writes historian Michael Roberts, “which was half-isolated, culturally retarded, and still in all essentials mediaeval.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“At the beginning of his reign, England had to import almost all of its guns from abroad; by the time of his death, England’s cannon industry was among the finest in the world. Under the supervision of the Ordnance Board, which carefully parceled out contracts to a small group of private firms, English foundries developed the first cannons made of cast iron.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

“But in the military sphere, just as in science, economics, art, or culture, change is not evenly distributed across space and time. Sometimes innovations cluster together to produce a major change in the way people live—or, in the case of the military, the way they die.”
― Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today