(This Article is part of an unfinished series of thoughts about modern thinking about military development)
The most striking notion about war is, that every singly development tends to influence all other factors involved in determining the capabilities of an army. A change in the ability of moving cross country a certain equipment might lead to changes in the application of firepower, since a wider raange of terrain must be covered, or require different apporaches of providing supplies. This may in turn lead to different tactics alltogether, thus passing a certain threshold in the availability of a weapon may change the face of battle completely, as happened with the advent of rifled guns in the American Civil War, or the mass production of machine guns in the First World War. And since more and more tools get added to the arsenal of the armed forces with each passing decade, each future invention effects needs more consideration and will have effects reaching even further than the last one. Of course, in most cases those effects can be discarded sa neglible, but for all the surprises that happened in the doctrines with every new weapon introduceed.
Anyone trying to predict future developments, too, faces the possibility that the whole web of connected factors that result in combat performance or simply victory turns into inconcernible mess if one pulls at the wrong threads first. Since war is an art more than a science, there is no given system or logical order of subjects in which to dissect the topic. The best an aspiring philosopher of war can do is to pick out the terms and sort them to his own logic, hoping that the inevitable omissions will not deter his readers from following.
This list of posts is mostly concerned with the question how warfare will develop in the future, so it seems to make most sense to first talk about those factors that are least likely to change, and proceed from there to the more frequently developing aspects of warfare. As we’re not concerned here with a definition of war itself, we shall start with basics and proceed to the specifics from there. This means talking about the constants of warfare, namely the space and time in which he is wrought, first. Afther that, we shall examine trends in the tools that humans use to fight, its weapons and technology. A third chapter will be devoted to take a look at the effects of warfare on humans itself, their bodies and their mind, before we shall in the last part of this series try to gauge how war I the future will shape those entities that define and accompany us for most of our lives: institutions of society, armies and governments of course, but of course also topics as science, economy, and morality.
While this series started out as a couple of blog posts, ther eis a distinct possibility that it might collapse under the weigth of its aspirations. So the author appologizes in advance, should he delay any publication or fall short of the expectations raised hereby.