Industrial warfare

The era featured mass-conscripted armies, rapid transportation (first on railroads, then by sea and air), telegraph and wireless communications, and the concept of total war.

Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were convinced that, if the North was to be victorious, the Confederacy's strategic, economic, and psychological ability to wage war had to be definitively crushed.

Conscription allowed the French Republic to form La Grande Armée, what Napoleon Bonaparte called "the nation in arms", which successfully battled smaller, professional European armies.

The tank, a product of World War I independently invented by the British and French to break through trenches while withstanding machine gun fire, while discounted by many, came into its own.

Tanks evolved from thin-skinned, lumbering vehicles into fast, powerful war machines of various types that dominated the battlefield and allowed the Germans to conquer most of Europe.

A state's sealift capabilities may include civilian-operated ships that normally operate by contract, but which can be chartered or commandeered during times of military necessity to supplement government-owned naval fleets.

During WWI, the United States bought, borrowed or commandeered vessels of various types, ranging from pleasure craft to ocean liners to transport the American Expeditionary Force to Europe.

As artillery improved in destructive power and penetrative ability, more modern fortifications were developed, using first thicker layers of stone, then concrete and steel.

As artillery and rifles allowed the killing of enemy personnel at a longer effective range, soldiers started to dig into temporary fortifications.

The period after the Napoleonic Wars was one of intensive experimentation with new technology; steam power for ships appeared in the 1810s, improved metallurgy and machining technique produced larger and deadlier guns, and the development of explosive shells, capable of demolishing a wooden ship at a single blow, in turn required the addition of iron armor, which led to ironclads.

The famous battle of the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor in the American Civil War was the duel of ironclads that symbolized the changing times.

Although the battle was inconclusive, nations around the world subsequently raced to convert their fleets to iron, as ironclads had shown themselves to be clearly superior to wooden ships in their ability to withstand enemy fire.

In the late 19th century, naval warfare was revolutionized by Alfred Thayer Mahan's book The Influence of Sea Power upon History.

Mahan argued that in the Anglo-French wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, domination of the sea was the deciding factor in the outcome, and therefore control of seaborne commerce was critical to military victory.

As the century came to a close, the familiar modern battleship began to emerge; a steel-armored ship, entirely dependent on steam turbines, and sporting a number of large shell guns mounted in turrets arranged along the centerline of the main deck.

The Russo-Japanese War and particularly the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 was the first test of the new concepts, resulting in a stunning Japanese victory and the destruction of dozens of Russian ships.

Growing tensions of the 1930s restarted the building programs, with even larger ships than before: the Japanese battleship Yamato, launched in 1941, displaced 72,000 tons and mounted 18-inch (46 cm) guns.

The first true demonstration of naval air power was the victory of the Royal Navy at the Battle of Taranto in 1940, which set the stage for Japan's much larger and more famous attack on Pearl Harbor the following year.

Following WWII, aircraft carriers continued to remain key to navies throughout the latter 20th century, moving in the 1950s to jets launched from Supercarriers, behemoths which could displace as much as 100,000 tons.

Just as important was the development of submarines to travel underneath the sea, at first for short dives, then later to be able to spend weeks or months underwater powered by a nuclear reactor.

Top speeds had tripled; altitudes doubled (and oxygen masks become commonplace); ranges and payloads of bombers increased enormously.

Mitchell himself proved the vulnerability of capital ships to aircraft was finally in 1921 when he commanded a squadron of bombers that sank the ex-German battleship SMS Ostfriesland with aerial bombs.

Strategic bombing focused on targets such as factories, railroads, oil refineries, and heavily populated areas such as cities and towns, and required heavy four-engine bombers carrying large payloads of ordnance or a single heavy four-engine bomber carrying a nuclear weapon flying deep into enemy territory.

In the early years of WWII, the German Luftwaffe focused on tactical bombing, using large numbers of Ju 87 Stukas as "flying artillery" for land offensives.

Until the advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile, major powers relied on high-altitude bombers to deliver their newly developed nuclear deterrent.

With the invention of nuclear weapons, the concept of full-scale war carries the prospect of global annihilation, and as such conflicts since WWII have been "low intensity" conflicts,[3] typically in the form of proxy wars fought within local regional confines, using what are now referred to as "conventional weapons", typically combined with the use of asymmetric warfare tactics and applied use of intelligence.

Before the development of a capable strategic missile force in the Soviet Union, much of the war-fighting doctrine held by western nations revolved around the use of a large number of smaller nuclear weapons used in a tactical role.

Since the end of WWII, no industrial nations have fought such a large, decisive war, due to the availability of weapons that are so destructive that their use would offset the advantages of victory.

By the end of the 1950s, the ideological stand-off of the Cold War between the Western World and the Soviet Union involved thousands of nuclear weapons being aimed at each side by the other.

[4] During the Cold War, the superpowers sought to avoid open conflict between their respective forces, as both sides recognized that such a clash could very easily escalate, and quickly involve nuclear weapons.