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World War I And Its Impact On Interwar Military Innovation Thesis

At the time the West started its ascension to global domination and power in the sixteenth century, military institutions and organizations played a pivotal role in its impetus to supremacy. Contemporary historical work gives the suggestion that the military structure of the West has gone through repeated periods of innovation starting at the onset of the fourteenth century and prevailing on to the present and that these sorts of periods have given rise to general and significant changes to the simple nature of combat and the establishments that fight. The military account of the twentieth century demonstrates that this configuration has prevailed uninterrupted aside from the aspect that key innovations have been deteriorating as the intricacy of innovation has progressively advanced. Military innovation does not take place in a setting that lacks politics. The military institutions of nations such as France, Britain, and Germany subsisted within dissimilar political and strategic settings despite the fact that they were adjacent to each other. In addition, their experiences were noticeably dissimilar in the decades taken into account. On one hand, the 1920s was a period that was comparatively peaceful whereas the 1930s decade was a period of increasing pressure. Nonetheless, owing to the defeat it endured during the First World War, the German armed forces felt that it had a clear directive to prepare for a war whereas the British army never got any proper command from its government up until 1939 to ready itself for such an event.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Murray, Williamson R., and Allan R. Millett, eds. Military innovation in the interwar period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.] There is no key army that went in to the Second World War with the similar policy and weaponries that it had employed two decades before. In the course of the interwar period, a great deal of the trained soldiers acknowledged that a magnitude of change was essential if they wanted to have better performances in battlefield...

Nonetheless, armies significantly varied in their resolutions to these issues. Every arm was faced with a range of prospective changes, a sequence of magnitude of modernization between two dissipations. In numerous instances, the choice was ascertained by social, economic, and political factors more than by the strategic and calculated ideas of senior officers.[footnoteRef:2] [2: House, Jonathan M. Toward combined arms warfare: A survey of 20th-Century tactics, doctrine, and organization. ARMY COMMAND AND GENERAL STAFF COLL FORT LEAVENWORTH KS COMBAT STUDIES INST, 1984.]
A key illustration of the impact of World War I on interwar military innovation is the reaction of the German army to losing the allies who consisted of the United States, Britain, and France. In particular, the Germans fashioned and advanced a ground-breaking tactic to war, one that lay emphasis on operation and reinforced war as a way of evading the tactical and political significances of their downfall in 1918.[footnoteRef:3] The Germans appeared to have advanced a much more remarkable inclination and capability to adapt to change. To begin with, the Germans had an overall staff component whose key function was to analyze the necessity for change, and when change was decided on, to put together the essential programs to make it happen. There subsisted a long-standing and entrenched structure for assessing the need for altering policy. Second, the German nonconformists were all products of the extremely arduous and difficult officer selection and training system distinctive of the German army up until the present day. In addition, education rendered to them was similar and in the similar schools, which implies that convincing reasoning to one individual was similar to all this making consensus simpler. In addition, the key initiators of reform endured for years in positions associated to carrying out of the changes…

Sources used in this document:

References

Gabel, Christopher R. The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 1992.

House, Jonathan M. Toward combined arms warfare: A survey of 20th-Century tactics, doctrine, and organization. ARMY COMMAND AND GENERAL STAFF COLL FORT LEAVENWORTH KS COMBAT STUDIES INST, 1984.

Murray, Williamson R., and Allan R. Millett, eds. Military innovation in the interwar period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Starry, Don. A. To Change an Army. US Army Command and General Staff School.

 


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