From an esteemed military historian a sweeping history of the revolutions in war-fighting that
have shaped the modern world Heraclitus wrote that “war is the father of all ” and it has
formed much of the modern world. Although the fundamental nature of war has not altered over
the centuries constant change innovation and adaptation have repeatedly reshaped how wars
are fought in the West. Revolutions in military practice cannot be separated from larger social
developments in areas like logistics finance and economics and the culture of military
organizations. In The Dark Path Williamson Murray argues that the history of warfare in
the West hinged on five revolutions which both reflected the social political and economic
conditions that produced them and in turn influenced how those conditions evolved. These five
key turning points are the advent of the modern state which formed bureaucracies and
professional militaries the Industrial Revolution which produced the financial and industrial
means to sustain and equip large armies the French Revolution which provided the ideological
basis needed to sustain armies through continent-sized wars the merging of the Industrial and
French Revolutions in the U.S. Civil War and the accelerating integration of technological
advancement financial capacity ideology and government that unleashed the modern capacity
for total warfare. An ambitious work of synthesis this book shows how the world
continually re-creates war—and how war in turn continually re-creates the world.
