Specialist war vs. generalist war?

[Kasey Chang]

Recent I read an essay that explained that modern wars are really fought with specialists, i.e. special forces in low-intensity covert wars, unlike WW2 where war required basically a TON of people.

I was thinking upon that when I recognized a pattern... The way war was waged pingpongs between a specialist war vs. a generalist war.

Right now, we're in the specialist phase, special operations soldiers lead the fight, but we're on the swing back to generalist when we can let drones do some of the war.

Back at WW2 we definitely have a generalist war, where massive amount of manpower was needed. Same with WW1.

But medieval times are more specialist war, when cavalry and knights require special wealth and training, and they are not easily countered, at least until the English longbow came along with armor piercing tips.

Did any one read a book that discusses themes like this? I know I can't be the first to see this.

[Holman]

Just to be really picky about terminology: the "specialist" vs "generalist" distinction doesn't seem quite appropriate, since it differentiates between types of soldiers rather than between different strategies and different goals. As our current wars show, generalist troops can be employed in a specialist manner: most of the troops we've been using for counter-insurgency are the same troops (with a lot of the same equipment and training) we would use in a mechanized war in Europe.

This is true in history too. Low-intensity colonial warfare (British India, the American frontier, even Napoleonic Spain) was fought with European-style regulars. Getting back into the middle ages, you don't have two types of warriors in different wars so much as two types of warriors (practiced, well-equipped knights and relatively untrained footmen) on the same battlefield.

I'm not sure about the "ping-pong" pattern. The past few centuries have been full of large wars and small ones, but they didn't alternate so much as reflect the stakes and the contestants. (Prussia/Germany and France have never felt the need to wage small wars against each other, for example. They always went big.) Our current era of small wars reflects the reality of a nuclear world and massively globalized economy.

Just my quick two cents. For reading, you'd want to look to someone like Martin Van Creveld or David Kilcullen maybe.

[gameoverman]

A reason I wouldn't be so quick to tie modern war with previous eras is the nature of the weapons. In previous eras you did have empires, superpowers if you will, like the US is today. The British Empire would be an obvious example. However, even the British Empire didn't have the kinds of weapons we have now, nor did their opponents.

Today, the fact there are so many nuclear armed countries drastically alters what kinds of wars we can have and how they can be fought. This is why if you identify a pattern in previous centuries I don't think the post WWII era can be included or used to either prove or disprove the pattern.