A challenge to common assumptions about the future of land warfare
Ground Combat reveals the gritty details of land warfare at the tactical level and challenges today's overly subjective and often inaccurate approaches to characterizing war. Ben Connable's motivation for writing the book is to offer an evidence-based approach to examining the future of war.
Connable created and analyzed an original dataset of more than four hundred global ground combat cases, showing that there was an evolutionary rather than revolutionary shift in the characteristics of ground combat from World War II through the early 2020s. Despite advances in military technology, tanks, artillery, and infantry remain central to how war is waged on land. This book asks readers to stop and think about the implications of these findings for force planning and future predictions about military-technical revolutions.
This book sets an essential evidentiary baseline for military officers, policymakers, and scholars who think about the future of modern war.
Reviews
"In this extensively researched study of ground combat since WWII, Connable demonstrates that modern wars show more continuity than change. Ground Combat certainly deflates the marked tendency in US defense planning circles to embrace each new technology as a paradigm shift or game changer. This book will be provocative to technophiles, but we cannot dictate future military success by emergent technology alone."—F. G. Hoffman, National Defense University
About the Author
Ben Connable, PhD, is an award-winning research leader, a retired US Marine Corps intelligence and foreign area officer, a former senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and an adjunct professor in Georgetown University's Security Studies program.
