陈伯江大校专栏第二次浪潮战争.docVIP

19 Second Wave War The industrial revolution launched1 the Second Wave of historical change. That “ wave” transformed the way millions of people made a living. And war once more mirrored2 the changes in wealth creation and work. Just as mass production was the core principle of industrial economies, mass destruction became the core principle of industrial-age warfare3. It remains the hallmark4 of Second Wave war. Starting with the late 1600s, when the steam engine was introduced to pump water out of British mines, when Newton5 transformed science, when Descartes6 rewrote philosophy, when factories began to dot the land, when industrial mass production began to replace peasant-based agriculture in the West, war, too, became progressively industrialized. Mass production was paralleled7 by the conscription8 of mass armies paid by and loyal not to the local landowner, clan9 leader, or warlord, but to the modern nation-state. The draft10 was not new, but the idea of a whole nation in arms was a product of the French Revolution, which roughly marked the crisis of the old agrarian11 regime12 and the political rise of a modernizing bourgeoisie13. Relying on its industrial base for victory the United States during World War II not only sent l5 million men to war, but mass- manufactured nearly 6 million rifles and machine guns, over 300,000 planes, 100,000 tanks and armored vehicles, 7l,000 naval vessels, and 41 billion rounds14 of ammunition15. World War II showed the awesome potential for industrializing death. The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews in true factory style--creating what were, in effect, assembly lines for death. The war itself led to the slaughter of l5 million soldiers from all countries and nearly twice that number of civilians. Thus, even before atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima16 and Nagasaki17, war had reached unparalleled levels of mass destruction.On March 9,1945,for example, 334 American B-29 bombers hit Tokyo in a single attack that destroyed 267,