How has the nature and technology of warfare evolved from earliest times to 1500CE?

How has the nature and technology of warfare evolved from earliest times to 1500CE?

Introduction

Warfare initially started with stones, sticks and fists and not to forget, yelling at each other from a distance. Everyone commonly used to know that who exactly is their enemy, maybe not always by their exact name, but they had general information as to the background of their enemy. The fights used to be much more direct and personal. As the weapons started to evolve, so did the style and manner of using them changed. With an arrow and a bow, it was comparatively easier, and simpler to sneak up behind your enemy and then to either shoot him with an arrow or to attack him with a spear. But with the passage of time, when different groups started to wage war on one another, then new kinds of technologies were innovated which forced people to use new and different kinds of tactics. This paper generally discusses the advancements in technology affecting the elements of warfare in the earliest times and the changes that are brought about during the present time.

Discussion

With the introduction of shields and armors, the effectiveness of arrows and bows was reduced quite a lot. In the nineteen hundreds, the soldiers used to fight in massive formations so that there Generals could easily mass the troops to that place where it would be possible to do maximum damage and harm to the enemies.

As time passed and then gradually guns started to become very common, most of the troops would be equipped with guns and were also deployed in many ranks. A bullet that was fired from a musket of black powder was so powerful that it had the capacity to penetrate almost all except the strongest of the armors. Therefore, the massed charges of expert knights could easily be slaughtered by just a group of very poorly trained and inexperienced peasants who were armed with those guns.

As time passed, and the weapons started to become more and more accurate, then gradually, the groups of men that were formed and marched in formation got obsolete except for when they were needed for administration purposes or parades. With the passage of time, the units started to disperse. This dispersion was made easier and important with the introduction of machine guns as well as due to the invention of cannons and grenades. Explosives shells which possess the ability to kill a number of people in one go also became very common as well as accurate. Therefore, dispersion was required to avoid major causalities. As time passed and the use of explosive radius in bombs increased, so does the vulnerability of military to them increased (Roland, 2009).

(Roland's article “War and Technology” describes the phenonmenon behind the fact that the innovation of warfare weapons has proved to be the darker side of technological advancements where it has proved to be destructive in a sense that ...