ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the answers to the question ‘what drives change in land warfare?’. It explores the arguments between the revolutionary and evolutionary schools of thought; and reviews the contending theories on what drives change in land warfare. Advocates of the ‘change as revolution’ perspective see the history of land warfare as consisting of long periods of relative stasis in theory and methods, interspersed periodically by sudden paradigm shifts. In theory, the military revolution perspective should make establishing the historical development of land warfare straightforward. Many military revolution enthusiasts take a very extended view of the temporal dimensions of revolutionary change. The ‘military-technical revolution’ provides the narrowest explanation for military revolutions, with the subsequent models adopting progressively broader explanations for the sources of change. Revolutions in military affairs therefore involve ‘the assembly of a complex mix of tactical, organizational, doctrinal and technological innovations in order to implement a new conceptual approach to warfare’.
