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Imagining Future War: The West's Technological Revolution and Visions of Wars to Come, 1880-1914. By Antulio J. Echevarria II. Westport, Conn: Praeger Security International, 2007. ISBN 978-0-275-98725-1. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. Pp. xvi, 117. $39.95.
This is among the first volumes in a new series of short books, aimed at an audience ranging from buffs, to scholars and serving officers, which focuses on the relationship between technology and doctrine, weapons and war. Works in the series, notes its general editor, Robert Citino, will combine empirical accounts of significant issues, with attention to questions such as "Does (technology) alter the nature of war, or is war based on timeless, unchanging principles?". The author of the present work, Antulio J. Echevarria II, considers one aspect of precisely that question: how commentators in the thirty years before 1914 gauged the impact of social and technological progress on the nature of future war. This period marks the start of the one we still are in today, when people began to realize that constant and cascading change would shape all coming struggles for power. The commentators under review include military officers, offering technical analyses to both specialist and popular audiences, newspapermen and fiction writers, all working in different genres, especially science fiction, strategic studies, military studies,...