ABSTRACT
Conspicuous changes affected the military field as deeply as they did civilian life. The conspicuous changes that have taken place in the face of warfare over the past decades have been titled the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. A general characteristic of the industrial-technological age with its consecutive military revolutions has been the steadily growing weight of hardware in military spending. The overwhelming destructive power of a nuclear explosion is offset by no parallel rise in defensive power, as has been the case with other military technologies. During the early modern period pay and provisions for the men far outweighed the cost of military hardware, not only in the armies but also in the much more capital-intensive navies. The fundamental challenge posed by military-technological revolutions is that they involve a sweeping change that goes far beyond existing experience. Although some oversimplification is necessarily involved, J.F.C. Fuller rightly identified major revolutionary waves of civil-military technological change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
