Do we overestimate the effect of new technology on war?

This is a snippet from Sir Hew Strachans' lecture "Is the nature of war changing?". The lecture can be found here: • Sir Hew Strachan: Is t...
The lecture was a part of a sympoisum called War and Peace held 16.10.23. The remainder of the lectures can be found here: • Social Sciences and Hu...
Hew Strachan, FBA, FRSE, Hon. D. Univ (Paisley) has been Wardlaw Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews since 2015. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he taught from 1975 to 1992, before becoming Professor of Modern History at Glasgow University from 1992 to December 2001. He was Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College 2002-15 (where he is now an Emeritus Fellow), and Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War 2003-2012. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Royal Norwegian Airforce Academy for over twenty years. He was a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner 2006-18 and a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum 2010-17, and served on the national committees for the centenary of the First World War of the United Kingdom, Scotland and France. In 2010 he chaired a task force on the implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant for the Prime Minister. In 2011 he was the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies at the University of Cambridge and became a specialist adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Security Strategy. He is a Captain in the King’s Bodyguard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers). In December 2012, Foreign Policy magazine included him in its list of top global thinkers for the year. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year’s Honours, and was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Tweeddale in 2014. In 2016 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize for Lifetime Achievement for Military Writing. His publications include The Politics of the British Army (1997); The First World War: To Arms (2001); Clausewitz’s On War: a Biography (2007); The First World War: a New Illustrated History (2003); and The Direction of War (2013).