Paths of Innovation in Warfare

This very interesting and timely edited volume looks at pathways for innovations in warfare across history. As the authors describe, innovation is a process that is vital, but exceptionally challenging, to master. With chapters ranging from the Crusades to the Texas Rangers to Boko Haram, the contributors present a variety of perspectives on how innovations in weapons, tactics, and warfare occur. This book offers important and helpful lessons that should shape the way we think about innovation in warfare moving forward. -- Michael Horowitz, University of Pennsylvania
This stimulating, heterogeneous collection of case studies defines innovation broadly and explores it across a grand sweep of international history. It moves from medieval cartography during the Crusades and grand strategy in the American Revolution to racial integration of combat units and contemporary media warfare in Nigeria. Editor Nicholas Michael Sambaluk concludes the volume with conceptual threads that he finds running through the case studies. -- Alex Roland, Duke University
Nicholas Michael Sambaluk provides a range of fresh scholarship on a wide array of military innovations—defining the term broadly—and forces us all to reconsider the very term ‘innovation.’ Here one finds ideas, processes, institutions, and technologies, all in their full interaction with social and cultural forces. Innovation emerges not as a stroke of genius, but as a complex response to complex problems, from medieval mapmaking to the militarization of slaves and the invention of lawfare. There is much to digest here. -- Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada