The nineteenth century, II: Technology, warfare and international order

Today, defence experts argue about the implications of new information technology for warfare. In the mid-nineteenth century their predecessors debated the meaning of the railway, the electric telegraph and, above all else, the new firepower available to infantry. The need to make strategic, operational and tactical sense of new technology, to find workable doctrine to govern its use, became a permanent challenge once the Industrial Revolution had gathered pace in the second quarter of the century.