Imagining Future War

Reviews / Votes

Antulio Echevarria's Imagining Future War offers a rare, exceptional and penetrating case study in analyzing predictions about the changing face of conflict. It is a book military professionals ought to read--a cautionary tale of the pitfalls and potential of writing, thinking and preparing for the war of the future....Imagining Future War delves into all of the salient factors that shaped 19th century imagination, with chapters that describe in a jargon-free, straight-forward manner the times and dominant intellectual movements of the age....Even those not steeped in the history of the period or deeply familiar with military affairs will profit from reading Imagining Future War. * ARMY Magazine * Provides an excellent historial overview of the visions of possible technological change which challenged both military and educated civilians to envision the potentials of future war. * Midwest Book Review * Examining the writings of professional military thinkers such as Ivan Bloch together with works by relative military amateurs such as H.G. Wells, Echevarria compares how pre-World War I thinkers imagined the future of warfare. After painting portraits of general speculative thinking at the time and the actual status of warfare in broad strokes, he compares writings about land, sea, and air warfare, finding that the amateurs generally were better at predicting long-term trends in warfare but were not as good as the professional military thinkers in predicting short-term tactical developments. * Reference & Research Book News *