The Changing Face of War Martin Van Creveld
Anthony Pablo
1st Plt

The Changing Face of War
From the hard works of one of the most influential experts on military history and strategy has now written one of his greatest pieces on the changes of war for the past 100 years, an original and provocative account of the past hundred years of global conflict. The Changing Face of War is the book that discusses the many paths that led to the impasse in Iraq, and now why powerful armies are now helpless and being taken over by ill-equipped insurgents, and how the security of sovereign nations may be maintained in the future. While he pays close attention to the unpredictable human element, Van Creveld takes us on a journey from the past century of the clashes of massive armies to the short, high-tech, battels of today. Here is the world as it was in 1900, controlled by a handful of great but few powers, those great powers being mostly European countries, with the memories of eighteenth-century wars still fresh. The World’s Armies were still led by officers riding on horses, messages conveyed by hand by messengers risking their lives doing so, drum, and bugle echoing the sounds of war. As the telegraph, telephone, and radio did revolutionize communications, big-gun battleships like the British Dreadnought, the tank, and the airplane altered and benefitted the new era of warfare. Van Creveld paints the reader a very descriptive portrait of World War I, in which armies would be counted in the millions, casualties in the same numbers such as those in the fateful battle of the Marne, which would become staggeringly high, and in the process of war deadly new weapons were being produced, such as poison gases, they would be introduced to the world. Ultimately, Germany’s plans to outmaneuver her enemies to victory came to naught as the battle lines ossified and the winners proved to be those who could produce the most weapons and provide the most soldiers. The Changing Face of War then takes us to the even greater global bloodbath of World War II. Innovations in armored warfare and airpower, along with technological breakthroughs from radar to the atom bomb, with the new breakthroughs it transformed war from the simple slaughter style to a more complex style requiring troops with expertise in the new innovations and savagery, from Pearl Harbor to Dachau to Hiroshima. The further development of nuclear weapons during the Cold War shifts nations from