Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart (review)

Reviewed by:

• Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart
• Kaushik Roy (bio)

Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare By Paul Lockhart. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 624.

Gunpowder changed the course of warfare and, ipso facto, global history. The advocates of the Military Revolution thesis (starting from Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's The Military Revolution, 1988) argue along this line. Even if one challenges this "big" assertion, there is no denying that gunpowder weaponries definitely constitute a break with the medieval past. There are some sophisticated global surveys about the history of the interrelationship between the changing contours of war and the evolution of military technology (for instance, Martin van Creveld's Technology and War, 1989; Trevor N. Dupuy's The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare, 1990; and Jeremy Black's War and Technology, 2013, among others). However, such broad-range accounts provide few details about how the different weapons worked. On the other hand, we have monographs detailing the characteristics of particular weapon systems like AK-47s, Tiger tanks, etc. Such microstudies with a wealth of technical information interest only collectors of weapons and military buffs. Interested educated readers and historians are thus left hanging between broad-brush treatments of weapon systems at one pole and microstudies of specific weapons at the other.

In the voluminous work under review, Paul Lockhart, professor of history at Wright State University, fills this vacuum. He turns the focus on the technicalities of the weapons that made up the era of gunpowder warfare during the last 600 years. He begins in circa 1400 and ends with the end of the Cold War. To avoid the barrage of criticisms that Parker and W. H. McNeill (for his The Pursuit of Power, 1982) received, Lockhart limits his gaze to Western Europe and the United States. Rightly he says that the 1980s marked the end of the dominance of gunpowder weapons and the 1990s saw the beginning of the Information Revolution, which resulted in the primacy of networking of information systems, with firepower taking a secondary role in war. [End Page 431]

Lots of information regarding the arms and munitions used in the three domains (air, land, and sea) is pounded on the readers analytically and succinctly. Lockhart tells us concisely about the characteristics of the important weapons, how they worked, and why they were being replaced by other weapon systems. We get a clear idea of a matchlock and why it was replaced by a musket in the sixteenth century, the difference between breechloaders and muzzleloaders, the shift from black powder to smokeless powder toward the end of the nineteenth century, the transition from coal to oil engines at the beginning of the twentieth century, the distinction between a bolt-action rifle and an assault rifle, etc. Credit is due to Lockhart for showing the interaction between the development of weapon systems and the transformation of tactics. For instance, while the musket gave rise to linear warfare, rifles necessitated the advent of skirmishers.

Besides telling us how and why different weapon systems became dominant in particular time periods, Lockhart also puts forward a macroargument. Firepower persuasively argues that states with a greater manufacturing base and standard-quality weapons in large numbers won wars against powers that deployed cutting-edge weaponry in limited numbers. Lockhart's analysis is more nuanced than Paul Kennedy's straightforward argument in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) that the country with the biggest economic base comes out victorious. Richard Overy's case study of World War II in Why the Allies Won (1995) showed that the Nazis—despite deploying qualitatively superior weapon systems—were defeated by the Allies due to their quantitative superiority. Lockhart extends this model throughout the last 600 years of Western history.

A critique might be that Firepower smacks of soft technological determinism. Lockhart does not consider social and cultural mores in shaping the upgradation of gunpowder weapons and their deployments. But this entertaining, valuable book is a must for educated lay readers, as well as for serious students of military technology. [End Page 432]

Kaushik Roy

Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor in the Department of History at Jadavpur...