Bernard Brodie (1910–1978)

Brodie was a historian who became a nuclear strategist (one of the bright young minds at RAND Corporation) during the Cold War. His PhD thesis at Yale was on the transformation of naval warfare by the shift from sails and wood to steam and steel, and he saw nuclear weapons bringing about a similar transformation. From Crossbow to H-Bomb is Brodie's attempt to survey all the technology-driven transformations in Western warfare, and (once you adjust for the fact that it was written in the 1960s and last updated in 1973) it's a credible job. Brodie knows the details of the subject cold, and he presents them in a straightforward way. If you want to know the what, when, and why of a particular weapon and its impact, this is a good place to go.

That said, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1973. The narrative barely comes to grips with Vietnam, or the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs . . . and it misses the subsequent conflicts in the Falklands, Bosnia, and the Middle East. It has little to say about air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, and nothing to say (not its fault, but still a problem) about precision-guided munitions, stealth technology, and information warfare. Historical scholarship has advanced a lot in 30+ years, too, and specialists in the field would want to revise or qualify a lot of what Brodie wrote about earlier eras.

Bottom Line: If you're interested in the relationship between technology and war up to the mid-20th century and plan to read extensively on the subject, you should certainly add Brodie to your list. If you want to read one book on the subject, though, Martin van Creveld's Technology and War or Robert O'Connell's Arms and Men or William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power are (for varied reasons) better choices.… (meer)