This article is the English version of Hew Strachan, « Guerre et technologies : vers une révolution militaire ? », published in Politique étrangère (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2026) which celebrates the journal’s 90th anniversary.

Since the industrialization of Europe in the mid-19th century, most commentators have shaped their visions of future war through the prism of technological innovation. At first, this trend was modified by strategic thinkers who, while accepting that the development of new weapons and their mass production with precision tools were changing tactics, argued for an underlying continuity in the principles of war and the strategies which shaped it. Before the First World War, Ferdinand Foch cited Napoleon when he taught at the École de guerre and Julian Corbett’s ideas on maritime strategy, propounded at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, drew their evidence from the age of sail.

The world wars of the first half of the 20th century gave the materialists the edge. New technologies –the airplane and the submarine– took war into new dimensions, in the sky and under the sea, and the internal combustion edge promised revolutionary change on land. Within a decade after 1945, the dropping of the two atomic bombs had convinced most Americans that not even strategy could be exempt from the impact of scientific innovation. For Carl von Clausewitz, writing between 1815 and 1830, the principal precipitants of change in warfare had been social and political; for his post-1945 successors, they were physical and massively destructive.

Read the rest of the article here.

Find the table of contents for the anniversary issue (No. 2/2026) of Politique étrangère here.

>>> More articles of Politique étrangère are available for reading on Cairn International. <<<