Early firearms
edit- Homes, Richard (2000), "Battle: The Experience of Modern Combat", in Townshend, Charles, The Oxford History of Modern War. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 224-244, ISBN 0–19–285373–2.
Early firearms were less effective—in range, accuracy, and rate of fire—than a longbow in skilled hands. But with them came developments which have come to distinguish modern war. First was the deepening of the battlefield, whose dangerous edge widened from the spear’s cast or arrow’s flight of ancient times, through the hundreds of yards made deadly by the bounding cannon-ball, to the horizon-distant lethality that came with the breech-loaders of the late nineteenth century and on to the airdelivered death of the twentieth. (page 230)
Europe
edit- Black, Jeremy (2000), "The Military Revolution II: Eighteenth-Century War", in Townshend, Charles, The Oxford History of Modern War, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 40-54, ISBN 0–19–285373–2.
Similarly, within Europe, the victory of armies using the concentrated firepower of disciplined infantry and their supporting artillery over more mobile forces that relied on the use of shockpower in attack can be seen in the British government’s defeat of the Jacobite Scottish Highlanders at Culloden (1746): the Jacobite reliance on the ‘Highland Charge’ led to heavy casualties. (page 44)
The general rate of fire was increased by the absence of any disruptive fire from the Jacobites, while the flanking position of the royal units forward from the left of the front line made Culloden even more of a killing field. The battle was decisive in both a military and a political sense. The Jacobites were crushed as a military force, and the British War of Succession, which had begun with William of Orange’s invasion of England in 1688, was brought to a close. (page 45)
New weapons were developed: the bayonet and the flintlock musket in the late seventeenth century, the elevating screw for cannon in the eighteenth; they spread rapidly. The quick introduction of successful inventions or modifications in most European armies suggests that the importance of a technological lead over potential opponents was well recognized. (page 46-47)