Industrial Revolution Impact on the Conduct of War
Like all social phenomenon, ideas underlie the impetus behind the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the conduct of war. The Age of Enlightenment were responsible for promoting these ideas. These ideas were actually formulated and applied to military conduct during the eighteenth century, even though the Industrial Revolution’s most dramatic impact on the conduct of war would not been until the mid-19th century through the end of World War I on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. During the 1700’s the concepts of clockwork precision and machinery were transferred to the battlefield by Frederick I of Prussia, concepts that were developed to perfection by Napoleon. Prior to this time, military conduct consisted of lining up troops and marching them straight ahead toward one another, where they would attack opposing troops who were often told to hold their fire until they saw “the whites of enemy eyes.” Napoleon was able to achieve many a victory by his ability to move armies by applying concepts of machinery like forming units, drilling them, and mobilizing mass numbers of them. The Industrial Revolution concepts of organization, discipline, and mass-production were ideally suited to warfare, whose organization in turn was ideally suited for society “So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.”
By the mid-19th century, industrial production and invention would come to have an even more profound impact on military conduct during the Civil War with the advent of the rifle and the repeating rifle. New forms of steel and metal were used to manufacture weapons like none known before in terms of their ability to destroy, like the 10,000 dead from one day at the Battle of Fredricksburg. In the late 1800s, industrial...