# The Dark Path  ## Metadata - Author: Williamson Murray - Full Title: The Dark Path - Category: #books ## Highlights - In the end, their armies and navies failed in the contests with the West, and while Japan, China, India, and others have entered the global military competition in the twentieth century, they have done so by accepting the military framework that the West took four centuries to create. ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=74)) - The Union won the Civil War not through victories on the battlefield but through attrition, which the Confederacy, weaker in manpower and resources, suffered in both defeat and victory. ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=108)) - The specter of attrition has hung over war since 1500. It has dominated both the conduct and strategic outcomes of great campaigns and has forced statesmen and commanders to make unpalatable choices. It has soaked up finances as well as resources, and it has transformed decisive victory into a mirage. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=130)) - As the German theorist Carl von Clausewitz dismally noted, “No one starts a war—or rather no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve and how he intends to conduct it.” ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=144)) - Bismarck created a strategic framework that allowed Prussia to realize its goals on the battlefield, his successors disastrously misunderstood his emphasis that political concerns must always outweigh military considerations. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=149)) - In the end, effective strategy, whatever its military weaknesses, will almost always defeat a flawed strategic approach, no matter how impressive a nation’s military capabilities. ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=151)) - For Western military leaders, the allure of technology lies in the promise that it may break the iron grip of attrition in deciding wars’ outcomes, but this is a bit like hoping to evade the Second Law of Thermodynamics. ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=173)) - The response to the American success in 1991 reflected a misunderstanding of the difference between war’s fundamental nature, which has never changed, and its character, which in the West has been changing continuously since 1500. ([Location 183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=183)) - Friction lies at the heart of war’s fundamental nature. No amount of technology can eliminate it. The twin sister of friction is chance, a dominant theme in both Thucydides and Clausewitz, the two greatest theorists of war. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=189)) - The most important frameworks for change have come in two forms: the great military-social revolutions, which have warped the playing field in a fundamental fashion, and the more numerous revolutions in military affairs, which have immediately affected how wars are fought. ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=198)) - Once gunpowder arrived amid Europe’s fractious, warlike, and ambitious states and semi-states, it spurred vast changes in the character of war. Competition created a climate of innovation among a governing class that was almost fanatically preoccupied with war and the ruthless search for power. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=262)) - The tactical problems in 1914 were not a result of generals’ being too stupid to understand the significance of peacetime technological changes. The problem, rather, was that these changes had complex implications and offered no obvious or easy solutions. The four dark years of war thus brought a number of revolutions in military affairs. For land war, the most important was creation of combined operations—the complex combination of infantry with artillery support, tanks, and aircraft to suppress enemy defenses. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=331)) - Innovations drove other innovations. The most obvious of these, the use of aircraft, forced adaptations on the ground. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=334)) - It was not the further development of technology that drove major improvements but rather conceptual thinking. Thus, the Germans’ marriage of combined-arms exploitation tactics with armored fighting vehicles accounted for the Wehrmacht’s astonishing success against the French in spring 1940.52 ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=360)) - Technological add-ons significantly improved the performance of weapons systems. Compared to World War I, which had been a chemists’ war, World War II was a physicists’ war. The most impressive contribution from that discipline was the invention of the cavity magnetron by two British physicists, John Randall and Harry Boot, in early 1940. That invention made possible development of microwave radar, which gave the Anglo-Americans an advantage in the air war by allowing aircraft to identify both airborne and ground targets. At sea, radar was invaluable against the German U-boats once it came into widespread use. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=364)) - For the first time since before the outbreak of the First World War, civilian technological developments have been driving military technology. The implications are not entirely clear, but they are profound and worrisome. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=380)) - Battles do not decide wars; they are won by attrition and political support. ([Location 385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=385)) - The more the character of war evolved, the more strongly attrition emerged as the decisive factor. ([Location 391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=391)) - The bureaucratization of the modern state and its military from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth laid the foundation for the West’s dominance of the world. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=402)) - Yet the longbow was a dead end. Innovations were simply not possible with a weapon that could be used only by those who had trained on it from an early age. ([Location 434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=434)) - When barbarian armies descended from the north, the Chinese holed up in their cities and tried to exhaust the attackers. Without internal competition, they had little reason to innovate with gunpowder. But when the knowledge of how to make gunpowder spread from China through the Islamic world and eventually to Europe, the intensely competitive European states seized on it as a means to gain an advantage over their neighbors. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=446)) - Ironically, one of the Europeans’ best assets in the effort to develop more effective cannons was their considerable experience in casting bronze to make church bells. ([Location 454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=454)) - The gunpowder revolution was the first revolution in military affairs, and it has echoed through succeeding centuries. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=461)) - As important as the gunpowder revolution was, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century, at about the same time as the fall of Constantinople, altered Europe’s political and religious framework. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=469)) - Initially, the Dutch innovators ran into the problem that they could not make the commands work. After experimentation they discovered that Roman military commands were two steps, a preparatory command and an execution command: “Atten … shun,” rather than “Attenshun,” or “Right … face” rather than “right-face.” ([Location 689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=689)) - In effect, the armies of late seventeenth-century Europe reinvented the disciplined formations of Rome’s legions. ([Location 809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=809)) - We might ask which came first, the chicken or the egg: the modern state or the modern military? The most plausible answer is that the modern state and its military institutions emerged symbiotically over the last half of the seventeenth century. ([Location 830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=830)) - In retrospect, the musket was not an impressive weapon. In the late eighteenth century, a Prussian unit firing at a target the size of a barn from eighty yards away achieved only fifty hits out of every hundred fired.78 The problem was that muskets had no rifling, and with a ball smaller than the barrel, accuracy was not possible. ([Location 855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=855)) - The Treaty of Westphalia is commonly credited with bringing a modicum of order to relations among the European states. But as important as that was, the horrors of an unpaid and undisciplined soldiery were more important in forcing the European states to create military organizations, disciplined both in battle and in their permanent garrisons. Undergirding the significant changes was a willingness to adapt and innovate. ([Location 893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=893)) - In 1691, the Royal Navy began construction of a great stone dry dock that eventually cost over £67,000. By 1698, the Chatham dockyards were valued at nearly £45,000 and those at Portsmouth £35,000. Thirteen years later those two facilities employed a total of 6,488 officers and staff. One naval historian, N. A. M. Rodger, notes that “the dockyards had entered the industrial age a hundred years before the rest of the country.”6 ([Location 928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=928)) - These political and financial reforms represented a revolution in military affairs because they revolutionized the monetary support necessary to support English and then British military forces. ([Location 949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=949)) - The importance of the War of the Spanish Succession is that it was the first global war fought by modern states with disciplined, organized, logistically supported military institutions. ([Location 1022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFM39Z77&location=1022))