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Some points that are more or less pedantic nitpicking, but I think are worth calling out because they illustrate the kind of trouble that technological determinism can run into:

> The longbow ended knights

This is not the case. Sounds like something that comes from a pop account of crecy or agincourt? Gunpowder is closer to the mark, but funnily enough armor kept getting heavier longer than many realize. The full plate harnesses that people generally picture when they think of a “knight in shining armor” are really Renaissance/early modern, well after the Middle Ages.

> Gunpowder ended archery

Again, ehh… sure, guns eventually obsoleted archery, but it’s more important that gunpowder ended a social system based on local military elites and enabled a period of rapid state consolidation.

> The Mongols too had a technology that completely altered warfare and gave them a huge advantage: the humble stirrup

Even the article doesn’t really bear this out. The stirrup was far from new, and even before the stirrup both shock and skirmish cavalry got along fine without. Stirrups are cool, no doubt, but far from a secret to the mongols success. Kind of like saying the Polynesians were great sailors because of their boat designs. Like, it helps, but it also really helps to have a culture oriented around sailing.

So again, this is really nitpicking, not arguing against your main point. But I think it’s worth pointing out how Jared Diamond-style stories can sound really sensible, but once you get into the details things often turn out to be much more complex and interesting.

> Stirrups are cool, no doubt, but far from a secret to the mongols success.

You don't realize how huge an impact stirrups had to horseriding and by extension, civilization.

Their response was about how it wasn’t the secret to mongol success specifically. The mongols had the double recurved bow and the advantage of a fully nomadic pastoral society in which all adult males were trained to be warriors. That and Genghis Khan’s decimal system is what transformed them into a fearsome conquering machine.

True, but stirrups very introduced into Europe by the Avars hundreds of years before the Mongols.

> You don't realize how huge an impact stirrups had to horseriding and by extension, civilization.

Yeah, but in all likelihood they weren't a mongol invention. The alans and avars probably had them five hundred years earlier, of perhaps the huns beofre them.

> This is not the case. Sounds like something that comes from a pop account of crecy or agincourt? Gunpowder is closer to the mark, but funnily enough armor kept getting heavier longer than many realize. The full plate harnesses that people generally picture when they think of a “knight in shining armor” are really Renaissance/early modern, well after the Middle Ages.

Really a combination of weapons (first crossbows - not because they were super effective against knight armor, but because it was cheaper to train crossbowmen, then gunpowder for the same reasons. Knights were reasonably effective well after primitive gunpowder weapons.) and gradual decline of feudalism and thus knights as a class, as Monarchs started transitioning to standing/professional armies.

Also, as manufacturing improved, it became much cheaper to equip soldiers with standardized equipment rather than rely on tailored to the individual hand-made full-plate armor.

As always, the truth is somewhere between economics and cultural/tech shift.

> but because it was cheaper to train crossbowmen

And the difference was massive. It took years and years of dedicated training to become a good archer, something you start from childhood. The average peasant didnt have the time just do this on the side. As a result they were often handsomely paid.

Crossbows on the other hand could be maned by anyone and were usable in a few days. It was such a threat to the existing social order that the catholic church tried to ban its use against Christians for a while.

> It was such a threat to the existing social order that the catholic church tried to ban its use against Christians for a while.

I'm pretty sure the same papal bull tried also to ban bows and it wasn't the first time a pope had tried to ban ranged weapons

I would like to highlight the, to me very surprising, observation that medieval crossbows truly aren't more effective than bows. Their impressive draw weights are mostly consumed by inefficiencies in arm weight/elasticity and bowstring weight.

It was very surprising to me also, after watching several videos of crossbow testing against a typical knight's breastplate, that hand-launched missile weapons could really only make dents (best case scenario) in the armor and only when hitting at a nearly perfect angle.

The vast majority of projectiles would have simply bounced off.

The effectiveness of archers then, is mostly in sheer volume (and getting lucky shots on the horse or weak spots in the armor) of projectiles, against less armored targets.

Modern crossbows with 200lb+ draw weights might be different, but that's another story.

Gun powder and social order is very interesting. At one point, under Nobunaga if memory serves, Japan had more, and better, muskets than any other country on earth. Until the social order was inforced by banning those, going into isolation and cementing Samurai rule. In Europe on the other hand gun powder let to nation stated (sort of) and ultimately (along with a ton of other factors, incl. a Chinese withdrawl from the high seas) a colonial rule across the globe.

I don’t think they were banned. Just less noteworthy because there wasn’t much war once Japan was finally unified.

> going into isolation

Japan didn't go into isolation. It's one of the many myths we invented to hide our horrible history. Japan kicked out europeans because they were enslaving japanese and taking them away. The easiest way to debunk the myth of japanese isolation is that japan didn't isolate itself from korea, china and rest of its neighbors. Only the slave trading europeans.

It's funny how we portray japan kicking out barbaric european slavers as isolationism.

> This is not the case. Sounds like something that comes from a pop account of crecy or agincourt?

Not the OP and there is lots of post-factum rationalisation like "the Crusaders lost because they were sloppy, not because they were cavaliers", but there's also the famous example of the 1393 Battle of Nicopolis which the Ottomans won because they were way lighter compared to the Westerners. Their archers and sharpened stakes against the Crusaders' heavy cavalry can be compared to today's NLAWs against the Russians' tanks. It is true, by the mid 1400s and especially by the start of the 1500s artillery and gunpowder had won the game, that's mostly how Suleiman the Magnificent managed to reach the gates of Vienna.

Also, there's much to be said about the Mongols' excellent administrative skills once they had conquered some land, I think that because of some Western-related bias that doesn't get underlined as much as should do in today's mainstream historiography. As the US (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the Soviets/Russians (in Afghanistan and partially in Ukraine) have found out at their own expense is not enough to militarily conquer some land, you also have to administer it afterwards, preferably with the help of some of the local population. Because, among other things, of their religious tolerance the Mongols (or Tartars, as they were mostly known here in Eastern Europe) were really good at it, probably there are some good books written about this specific aspect of their rule but to be honest I didn't put my hands on any of them until now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Nicopolis

I guess technological-determinist arguments are generally easy to source, because there's usually abundant archaeological evidence of the kinds of equipment people use to fight wars.

I'm generally pretty skeptical: there are just a ton of cases where an army strong in one category (say, heavy cavalry) have slaughtered enemies strong in other categories, and vice versa.

It seems to me that technologies that dominated entire eras (heavy infantry for the romans, heavy cavalry for medieval europe, horse archers for the steppes, etc) follow naturally from the social models rather than military necessity. A feudal lord wouldn't have the ability to organize or provision a roman legion, for instance, or the raw culture of mobility and horsemanship for horse archers, etc.

In some ways that’s true but it’s important to realize military effectiveness was increasing over time. This was most obvious with naval warfare, but also holds true of land armies.

Professional feudal armies would have crushed Roman armies of equivalent sizes. However, they lacked the scale of true empires.

> Professional feudal armies would have crushed Roman armies of equivalent sizes.

Really? Why?

The other thing is that a feudal state wouldn't be able to field an army that was of an equivalent size to a Roman army. The Romans fielded eight legions at Cannae, which was like 80,000 guys. Agincourt, in comparison, involved about a quarter of that number if you combine both sides.

Even if the roman legionnaire was worse than a feudal soldier, which I see no reason to believe, it's obvious that there was a precipitous decline in organizational and logistical capacity. In a battle, that would count more than the quality of the soldiers involved.

Plus, nit to forget, a Legionnaire was a professional soldier. The majority of feudal armies was part time soldiers. Exceptions were late medieval, early Renaissance mercenaries. And those, e.g. Landsknechts, men-at-arms and the Swiss pikemen, dominated the battlefields in their time.

The Romans build their empire on logistics and organization as much as they did on legions and civil engineering. No feudal kingdom came close to that.

Rome had a huge empire and could therefore field large armies so yes they had a real logistical advantage.

As to feudal soldiers vs legionnaires it was largely a question of equipment. Mounted knights required horse that weren’t available to Rome because selective breeding had yet to produce them. Improvements in metalwork and armor design resulted in far better coverage for the same weight. Knights largely stopped using shields because they didn’t need them as much as they could use a free hand.

That said there was a large variation on both sides. Disease, exhaustion etc could also wreck an otherwise capable army.

>Rome had a huge empire and could therefore field large armies

My feeling is actually that as the empire grew, the armies they could field somewhat declined. When Cannae happened, the Romans were big, but not huge, and they could literally field army after army of professional soldiers. Part of this was demographics (there had been a population boom in Italy) but part of it is economics and state capacity.

I would guess that up until really late (like, 1880's) warfare was not that technical, so stuff like 'elan' and 'will' was typically by far the most important characteristic in a soldier. That's at least what generals right up to the first world war tended to prize. When it comes to sheer discipline, bloodymindedness and martial spirit, I don't think anybody would surpass the Romans until the modern era.

What is a "professional feudal army"?

No seriously, that is a conceptual oxymoron, or at least I understand it to be.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Army_of_Hungary

That's already early Rennaissance, stabding mercenary formations started to show up around that time. Feudal armies tended to be passants being called to arms centered around some highly trained knights and professionals. The Mongols were a standing professional army, something that played an important role during their campaigns.

I don’t think there is agreement to when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance started, but 1458 could easily fit into both. That said, they started having a professional army in the 1440’s.

The late medieval and early renaissance line is blurry in part because various practices got adopted at different times in different locations.

It truly is, as is the question when the medieval period started. Personally, I think it's fair to see the first "modern" principles from 1400 onwards. What is usually considered being classical feudal middle ages is, IMHO, earlier. That's why I think the 15th century is so damn interesting. It was the turning point after which European powers became the dominant powers. Up to then global domination was up for grabs.

Do you know this book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165851/lo...

It talks about the often overlooked civilisation in Central Asia between 800 and 1200.

Nope, and thanks a lot for the recommendation, I'll give it a try. I've mostly read Peter Golden's [1] excellent works about that area, but they approximately stop before the Mongol invasions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Benjamin_Golden

Oh, thanks. I wanted to read his Central Asia in World History since a long time. Sometime I'll write a Global History of the Turkic-Mongol mercantile business.

Past participle of the verb of the day? 'Obsoleted'.

The Stirrup would be an unknown inexplicable advantage for about one dead mongol horseman's time above ground, followed by the delay to ask a smithy: "make me 20,000 of these"

More realistically, however long it took to make something in the field from the leather/rope/cloth to hand, and a willingness to understand it's implications.

But stirrups hd already been available in Europe for hundreds of years prior to the Mongol invasions

I think to a large degree technology is overrated. Especially in the long run.

The knight was not beaten by gunpowder or longbows but by vast hordes of peasants with halberds.

Those peasant hordes showed up because changes in society enabled rulers to field these large armies.

In order to conduct in a long lasting war with large armies one needs a society with "backbone". The ability to lose a battle and still win a war is what makes a true great empire. Few ancients could to this, like the Roman empire, the Assyrian empire, the Mayans and so on.

Medieval Europe (where the knights ruled) was a largely fragmented bunch of small states, where a lost battle often resulted in a complete defeat.

WW1 style trench warfare emerged in the American Civil war and the Crimean war. Neither machine guns nor barbed wire where deployed in mass. Those wars where won by the ones who could hold out for longer.

Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated.

Here are the German numbers for operation Barbarossa:

3.8 million personnel

3,350–3,795 tanks

3,030–3,072 other AFVs

2,770–5,369 aircraft

7,200–23,435 artillery pieces

17,081 mortars

600,000 horses

600,000 vehicles

There are a couple orders of magnitude between infantry and tanks.

The numbers for the attack on France look similar.

That tanks feature so prominently is due to propaganda (since those things look cool).

In modern societies, warfare is all about logistics, morale and the ability to take a punch.

Even a completely lopsided tech advantage can be negated if you survive the first few attacks.

That is one of the reasons why the Mongolians are gone but the Taliban are still there.

> Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated.

You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy:

> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.

Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabees_in_World_War_II

I think you are really going to enjoy this blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry https://acoup.blog/

It's all about history and it's popular conception from an actual historian.

I wonder when acoup is going to reflect on the relationship between Russia's approach to taking Ukraine, and the Mongol long line of advance, transforming into a crescent and finally an encirclement. It certainly looks as if Russia tried to encircle Ukraine.

Putin has spoken and written about the legacy of the steppe people to the Russians; it seems to almost be a romantic obsession of his. Unfortunately tanks and trucks are not horses, and the gist of the article is about the dependence of steppe horse armies on large amounts of grassland, and the effect that has on their operations.

Russia tried to execute on their normal "Deep Battle" doctrine where they attack from multiple fronts simultaneously and culminate towards the same point.

The problem was execution. Military analysts expected exactly that, but Russia failed in operations. See here on March 4th when it started becoming clear the operation was botched [1]:

"They [Russia] have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force."

[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-confli...

I’ve heard it said that the defining technology of World War 1 was barbed wire.

That stopped horse based cavalry from advancing and led to entrenched positions.

That stalemate lasted until the invention of the tank later in the war.

>barbed wire

On the topic i recently watched an interesting documentary on the problems at the battle of the Somme in WW1 https://youtu.be/CbkJS5cLLOQ?list=PLhMDlPcDRBKQuhPC9Ifj2IL8L... ( ~15min segment)

A short summary is the British assumption that massive artillery barrage would destroy the German defenses and allow for British troops to walk through easily. Unfortunately they used shrapnel shot which did very little to the defenses and worse, left the barbed wire installations untouched. Advancing troops then got stuck and were mowed down

On the Western front, and tgat was as much the machine gun, and artillery, as it was field fortifications. WW1 on the Eastern front was very much mobile warfare, including cavalery. Until WW2, for what it's worth.

We used horse cavalry in WW2 in the middle-east as well. At one point British horse cavalry was fighting Vichy French aircraft.

Horses are great for rough terrain mobility, as are Camels and donkeys.

EDIT: People tend to see the Wehrmacht as this fully mechanized beast of an army. Truth is the vast majority of soldiers walked into battle, with animal drawn carriage for their stuff from food to field guns.

Where exactly in the Middle East?

The British and French did in the Syria-Libanon campaign in '41. A superficial search didn't show an mounted cavalry in the North Africa campaign. All sides did use horse cavalry quite a lot at the Eastern Front, the Polish cavalry managed to stop German panzers for two days, the Poles and Germans even fought a cavalry-vs-cavalry battle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Krasnobr%C3%B3d_(193...). The Soviets did some raiding using cavalry, while the SS used horse mounted troops in their genocide operations.

Quite fascinating topic, horses in WW2. I'll have to some more research on this.

Last British cavalry charge carrying swords was 1941!

There’s a new book on cavalry in WW2 being published soon look out for it.

In WWI the horse was far more reliable than any mechanical vehicle. Armor was useful enough that WWI had a few tanks, but they broke down often. WWII was just enough later that mechanical vehicles were reliable enough to use - but only if you had new ones, if you were doing like Russia is in Ukraine now and running anything old you were in for problems.

It was really a combination of different technologies, barbed wire and machine guns among them, but by far the most important was long-range indirect fire artillery with explosive shells.

My understanding was that artillery was brutally effective but supply lines couldn’t keep up. So you would blast a trench, and it would be quickly abandoned by the defenders, but when you tried to actually get your guys in to capture it they would just storm it from their backup trench and you would lose because you had no way to support the offensive.

AFAIK it's the machine gun that really led to entrenched positions because the death toll of charging or advancing on such positions was huge. Early in the war, generals (who are known for fighting the last war) kept trying. This is one of the reasons the casualties were so high (sometimes >100K in a single day).

But the real story of WWI (IMHO) was artillery. Here's a story I heard: at the start of WWI, Russia produced 35,000 artillery shells per month and was using 25,000 a day. By 1917, there were battles on the Western Front where between both sides over a million artillery shells were fired in a matter of hours.

As for tanks, this was clearly a huge development. It really nullified machine guns and small arms fire. But the writing was already on the wall for trench warfare. Artillery accuracy and tactics had improved (eg the creeping barrage became possible) and tactics in trench assault (on both sides) were improving.

> But the real story of WWI (IMHO) was artillery. Here's a story I heard: at the start of WWI, Russia produced 35,000 artillery shells per month and was using 25,000 a day. By 1917, there were battles on the Western Front where between both sides over a million artillery shells were fired in a matter of hours.

Meanwhile more tonnes of oats and hay for horses were shipped from the UK to France than munitions.

Julius Caesar refers to foraging in his "Gallic Wars". It wasn't easy because the Gauls would systematically destroy all food supplies in the vicinity of the Roman army ("scorched-earth policy"). I wonder what the local peasants thought about that. Do you think the Gaulish soldiers punished peasants who tried to hide their grain supplies rather than let them be destroyed? Bad times for the working peasant!

Isn't "foraging" just euphemism for "looting"? They were not picking wild berries. They were taking that food from peasants. So yes, peasants were in for bad times.

It's looting if your enemy does it. And yes, passants, and generally civilians, are always in for bad times during war.

An army that wants the peasants alive (which is by no means all) can only take so much of the food the area produces in a year, if a previous army had already been through that was probably zero.

Of course for Peasants you need to come up with a way to hide most of your food, while having what looks like all your food in what looks like a poorly hidden place where the army can force you to give it up. (good luck)

Also: "Sorry, we've already been pillaged!" (It might work.)

The army that is passing through does not have reason to care about keeping peasants alive. Moreover, soldiers were brutalized enough not to care.

That demands on the amry's goals. If they want land to settle down and farm then death to the locals. However if they want tribute dead peasants pay no taxes.

I find technology of war to be fascinating but the reality of demographics and geography seem to be historically more important, and interesting in the balance.

Look at Afghanistan or Ukraine and see how geography trumps even modern tech. Aviation units struggle with mountains and mechanized units struggle with wet ground.

Technology doesn’t enable an elderly population to wage war effectively.

"Technology doesn’t enable an elderly population to wage war effectively. "

How about drone operators?

Eyesight, fine motor skills, learning and using technology, sure you can find some old people who can function as drone operators but they won’t be as effective as young people.

They won’t be able to ruck into the front lines with a pack of drone equipment to support front line units.

They aren’t doing effective manufacturing of drones.

Old people can shoot an ak47 but they aren’t effective combat soldiers.

Fascinating indeed, i am still looking for a book / timeline of dominant military doctrine throughout history. You tend to have years of evolving efficiency of doctrines and technologies till one day a hard counter shows up that changes everything.

Technology in general often overrides and obsoletes existing things.

And war has historically been the impetus for much technological investment.

Food and Sex have been the prime motivators for all most everything, and Murder when someone prevents you from either of those. Only relatively recently has Entertainment become an end in itself when the other three are satiated. :)

I would hardly think this is what drives Putn and other dictators.

Power, money and sex are quite often interchangeable manifestations of the very same desire.

Probably the same things that drove Bush and other democratically elected warmongers.

War has brought the human civiaztion where it is today.

Without war, we would be in caves.

This feels like a bit of a historical trope.

It doesn't even make economic sense. During a war you're not going to invest as much into R&D (especially basic research), industrial production, etc, because you know, you have to... build the things that kill the other people.

To me war feels more like the thing that publicizes the things we've discovered since the last war, because the way (pop) history is presented, everything is about:

- wars (because they're "interesting", finding out about the slow accretion of inventions that lead to the mass production of iron is less cool)

- great people (99% great men)

You might want to read about the history of jet engines, the Manhattan project, the V-2 and related (R-series and Redstone) rockets, radar, GPS, and the internet. Just for some recent examples.

I know about all those. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30904417

What about peace time inventions? Which ones outpace the others? Are we SURE that war time inventions outpace peace time inventions?

Do we have any studies that prove or disprove what you claim?

Otherwise it's just a trope.

Please do post the numbers that you find, I am interested as well.

While it is not the only driver, a major early driver for integrated circuits was the need for reliability in military electronics. I saw an estimate that at one point 1/4 of all carrier based aircraft were out of service at any time due to avionics malfunctions. And the first major user of ICs, the Minuteman II guidance computer, would not have been possible without them. The Minuteman I computer was smaller and used discrete components, and could only be made sufficiently reliable by enormous testing and retesting at multiple system levels. Doing the same for the larger MM II computer would have been entirely too expensive.

ICs increased reliability by making interconnections far more reliable (being deposited on the chip together so failure is correlated.) Of course they are also smaller and use less power, but reliability was more of a brick wall issue.

R&D soars during war, at least for war relevant technologies. Rockets, jet engines, aviation, synthetic fuel, chemistry, smokeless gunpowder, steam powered ships, nuclear fission... You name it. And that is in addition to all the stuff needed to actually build those things.

If you think industrial production isn't invested in during war you should fresh up on any modern war since WW1.

Umm... that's the thing, does anyone have NUMBERS to back these claims up?

What we know is that military budgets SOAR (duh!), but what about washing machines? Transistors? Ballpoint pens? Antibiotics? The gazillion peace time inventions?

There's no part of me that can actually believe that you can ship off hundreds of thousands of folks off to war, you switch 10-20-40% of your economy to make bullets, and somehow research overall still comes ahead, it makes no sense. Let alone those cases where you country is physically under attack (which is most wars, not every country is as privileged as the US, to never have had a foreign power invade it at any serious scale in the last 200 years).

Research is more concentrated during war time, and more visible, frequently. But does war time research actually outpace peace time research? I don't believe that.

Technoligal advances in WW2 that are still valuable today: Radar, ASDIC, modern massproduction, jet engines, rockets, nuclear fission, operations research, modern aviation ingeneral, pressurized aircraft compartments, synthetic fuel

Just go on wikipedia and look up global production nimbers of war related stuff between 1939 and 1945 for increased industrial output.

I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying.

Yes, war related stuff goes up during wars. What about non-war related stuff?

What about peaceful explosions of the global economy and trade? My point is that those most likely surpass wartime growth.

Peacetime economic growth > wartime economic growth.

Peacetime research > wartime research.

You want reliable numbers, look up studies about economic growth during war and peace. Probably nobody will be able to answer that for you around here.

As far as research is concerned, without any numbers, I'd assume the focus shifts from civilian research to defence research. As does production. If it surpasses peace time production depends on the scale of the war. That output so should be measured in production units, war has the habbit of screwing up economic metrics.

There are lots of components of "non-war stuff" that originated from military R&D, and probably would appear much later if it wasn't for the Defense Budget.

And how many "war things" originated from non-military R&D?

After all every country's GDP is much higher than its military spending and for sure non-military research dwarfs military research.

This whole hypothesis seems unsound. It would mean that all civilian research is somehow much, much worse per dollar than military research. I highly doubt that.

I never said that, did I? You said R&D cannot increase during war, history showed otherwise. Now it's about war R&D outranking peace time R&D, which was never the question.

You seem to be lost.

Here, let me refresh your memory with the original trope:

> And war has historically been the impetus for much technological investment.

Yes, war also brings innovation. The only question worth answering as a follow up, is, does it bring more than peace?

Because otherwise it makes no sense glorifying war, which this line of thinking is fundamentally about.

yes, but a lot of those advances were based on R&D that was done before the war. I think war is more a time where newer technologies are put to the test, those that don't fail see widespread usage and that's why we associate that war as the introduction of those technologies

If you think wars don't spur technological changes, I suggest you look at the planes of 1940 vs those of 1945. Inventions in WW2 avaiation include radar and the jet engine. It's planes that ultimately ended the U-boat clockade of the Atlantic as improved technology increased the range of anti-submarine bombers such that the US could cover the entire Atlantic leaving the U-boats nowhere to hide.

I didn't say they wars didn't do anything. I said they probably do <<less>> than the equivalent peacetime.

99% of the examples you and other commenters use are in the military field.

And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.

Let's compare the washing machines of 1990 with those of 1995, instead. Let's compare Intel CPUs of 1980 with those of 1990. Let's compare desktop publishing in 1995 with that in 2000.

Heck, the more answers I get the more I'm convinced people are also partly influenced (I don't want to say brainwashed), by military R&D propaganda that needs to justify its budgets.

For every radar and jet engine there's a F22 jet fighter.

  > And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.

Then your perspective would be appreciated with facts, not questions. Though I agree that often the questions are more interesting :)

I'm interested in dispelling the notion that war spurs innovation, even though I hold this view I'd love any excuse to demonstrate that we don't "need" wars. What were the specific technologies that led to the change in washing machines from 1990 to 1995? How does that compare to a war-period of development? What drove Intel to improve the CPUs in 1990, as compared to 1980? How does that compare to the previous decade?

Thank you. I'm not quite a "history buff" but the implications of history are of course of interest.

On this subject I highly recommend William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power.