Customer Reviews

Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unlike the previous reviewer, I really do think this is a good overview of the development of combined arms at the tactical and operational level during the 20th century. House uses his discussion of organization and the development of tactics in 5 armies to show both how the different arms developed their own weapons and tactics and their successes and failures in integrating with the other combat arms.

There are three things that I felt could have been improved in this book:

1) House at the beginning comments that he was trying to make it accessible to the general reader. A word of warning on this, I would not recommend this book to anyone not already familiar, in some detail, with the wars of the past century, as few examples are put in any context of the greater conflict.
2) The book does not have a sufficient number of concrete examples to support the number of generalizations that House makes.
3) It is a very technologically deterministic view of military history, which does not take into account the strategic level of decision making or military planning in any meaningful way. The ultimate implication is that changes in the way the different service arms worked together at the tactical and operational level were the most important factors for the military outcomes.

That being said, this is a useful and important book for anyone interested in strategic studies or military history, and has a great deal of information regarding the development of modern warfare at the tactical and operational level.

Although no book can be the last word on a subject as complicated as Combined Arms Warfare, House's effort is thorough and detailed. Personally, it is one of the best that I have run across on the subject. I will say, however, that its coverage of the first half of the century is much more complete than its coverage of the second half. As a general rule, the closer it comes to the present from the post-World War II period, the skimpier the material covered.

This is, unfortunately, a mis-titled book. It's really just a history of technological and organizational innovation in the five major armed forces it covers. It totally fails to discuss how the weapons and force structures that developed were used in combined arms systems on the battlefield.

And this is odd. The author obviously understands his subject. Detailed examples and analyses are sitting in his brain. But they don't make it to the page. And this is unfortunate because this book is virtually the only one available that makes an attempt to address this crucial theoretical aspect of modern warfare.

4 stars as a book on military evolution in the 20th Century. 2 stars as a book about combined arms. Average 3.