Military Innovations since 1700AD

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Lots to choose from. More ideas:

- introduction of steel to replace iron which allows for high pressure small arms and artillery which greatly extends the ranges

- Aircraft (from Civil war balloons to the F-22) which opens a whole new dimension of engagement and shortens travel times: recon, transport, attack, protection, evacuation; also includes aircraft carriers

- Satellites for surveillance, weather mapping, and communications

- nuclear weapons

- motorized vehicles: armor, transport, artillery

- I especially liked to comments about communications: telegraph, radio particularly, now satellite, etc.

My choices for two of the hundreds of innovations would be communications and air power.
 
You could try the draft - instituted first by Napoleon (IIRC), it paved the way for wars to be bigger and bloodier than ever before. Before, it was more or less a collection of volunteers. Nowadays, we're going back to all-volunteer armies.
 
Canned food- As said, an army marches on it's stomach. Canning was really the first reliable form of long term food storage. Salting, drying, and pickeling had been around for a very long time but are in the end unreliable. Things can easily get wet and the process which preserved it was ruined, canned food stayed good reguardless so long as the seal wasn't broken. It also meant that armies no longer had to rely on foraging for food. This allowed for longer marches and better cared for troops. Big improvment.

Repeating firearms- I'd show the progression of firearms from single shot, to breach loaders, to repeaters, finally to fully automatic fire and how that changed battle tactics.
 
White,
I'd suggest one of your technologies be the radio or telephone or telegraph. Think of its effect during the Civil War but more so on the First World War etc. Command and control changed the entire face of tactics.

I'm sure that you'll get tons of ideas to write about. Good luck.

Jim
 
Think the start of mass production of military arms and food and how that affected the COST of Armies as well as their SIZE and MOBILITY. Try Europe around 1800. You could also blend this in with the little general (as an example) of how he changed the make up and the tactics of his armies to take advantage of the new economic model.


Respectfully,

jdkelly
 
The major innovations from 1700 for weapon development would be:

1. flintlock musket; and
2. Introduction of machinegun.
3. Mauser designed bolt action rifle design a distant third.

Until intro of machinegun, flintlocks have killed more humans than any prior weapon.

These two weapons changed warfare and allowed dominance of Europe as a colonial power.

Organizational innovations:
1. Standardized weapons (arsenal issued weaponry) such as the Brown Bess Musket and Charleville Musket patterns.
2. Professional National armies.

The stoner/M16 weapon has not been directly influential in winning or losing any war, but the AK47 has been influential in allowing 3rd world armies to stand against modern industrialized powers.
 
If you can track down a copy, Small Arms of The World by Edward Ezell will have all you probably want to know about the AK and Stoner small arms. He also wrote Handguns of the world, which follows major handgun development from the late 1800's.

A word of warning, once you start reading them, they're hard to put down.
 
Communications and logistics are both fantastic areas to explore. If you are dead set on wanting to explore a weapons technology though, it might be worthwhile to look into WMD's. I recently read an excerpt from a 1700s era artilleryman's handbook forbidding the use of poison globules as artillery ammunition. It might actually be more interesting to explore the willingness of nation-states to employ WMDs than the actual weapons technology.

One last thing regarding medical care - if I remember correctly, the US Army had more casualties during WWI from the Spanish flu than from the war itself.
 
All of the ideas are great! I am only confined to military innovations (preferably ones with a lot of potential researchable material) and not weapon ones. They don't even have to be related.

Based on everyone's input, I'm thinking about the radio and the machine gun. Any other suggestions?
 
I would also say air power. When air power came into play it completly changed the face of war. Break it down into movment of men and material and actual firepower.

Honestly when in history has it ever been that you could move a 100k+ men halfway around the world in a mater of months? Or get an advanced force halfway around the world in a matter of a few days? AND keep them supplied.

Also when before in history has there really been no safe area away from teh fighting? Even going back to WW2 homeland England and homeland Germany were being hit from the air when the front lines were hundreds of miles away. Going back even just a hundred years before would have taken months to move the front lines that far and thats with one side being decisive over the other. The best they could have done way maybe rule the water and hit the coast, but never before until air power was no where truely safe.
 
rifled barrels for both pistol and long guns have been around since 1500's. They were all too slow to load until introduction of the Minie ball in mid 1800's. Minie ball + percussion cap changed the effectiveness of massed arms, this was a major change from the way war was fought during the prior 200 years.
 
Thanks to all who contributed. I am going to do antibiotics and railroads, focused into the specific contexts of imperialism and the Civil War.
 
Micro level? Invention of the vacuum cleaner did more to save lives than any other distinct technology. Has to do with sanitation.

Mini level? Hyper accurate munitions has a profound impact on all things military.

Macro level? Pivotal place the American Civil War held in the technology of modern warfare.
 
Since it's inception artillery had always been the biggest killer on the battlefield. The evolution of artillery ammunition from the solid shot of 1700 to the laser guided rounds of today could be a topic.
 
Railroads +1 - lessons from the US Civil War let the Prussians beat the Austrians in 1866 and RR let the Brits to control the Raj!
 
If you are going to write about the Stoner style rifles (AR platform) and the AK style rifles you will need to do a good bit of research back to World War II. You will want to lay the foundation for the development of each rifle by discussing the lessons learned in WWII about the nature of small arms combat.
Click to expand...

Actually, development of assault rifles predates WWII. Smaller caliber weapons that were more easily controlled and offered higher rate of fire were in the theoretical/prototype stages prior to WWI, and one, the 6.5mm Federov, was developed but had its production restricted by WWI. After WWI, there was again a push to move to weapons that traded unneeded long range power for much needed ease of handling, but perceived economic benefits of staying with existing weapons and/or calibers and the lethargy of the post-WWI/Depression Era undermined the efforts.

WWII emphasized the preexisting need for assault weapons, and provided the impetus to finally go from "this is preferable" to "we need this now!"
 
2 things come to mind. all of the above apply, but combat medicine and surgery has made gigantic strides since the Civil War.
Second thing: We started off throwing rocks at each other.
In Iraq, while still seeking Sadam, the AF used a JDAMS guided inert bomb, filled with concrete. Back to throwing rocks.
 
I suggest that you also look into the basic things like human rights and press coverage, and look at how that changed warfare. In 1700, captured enemy soldiers and civilians who helped the other side in the conflict would generally have been murdered, as opposed to modern day warfare where all PoWs are (in theory) protected by Geneva convention, and where strict rules of engagements are in place to (ideally) avoid unnessecary losses.

Also, the media warfare and terror strategies are relatively new, and might be worth having a look at. From the Vietnam war and on, a large part of every major conflict have been fought in the press, and the outcome of entire wars have been changed by journalists who has succesfully undermined the political support of the war they covered.
 
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