The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort(1600), and the LegacyAuthor(s): Geoffrey ParkerSource: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 331-372Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138272Accessed: 14/10/2010 11:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smh.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Society for Military History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Military History.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smhhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4138272?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smh

The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of

Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy

Geoffrey Parker

Abstract "Revolutions in Military Affairs" (RMAs) currently interest both histori- ans and strategic analysts, but how exactly do they occur, why do they prove so decisive, and what (if any) are their limits? This essay seeks answers through the detailed study of one critical element of an earlier "Revolution in Military Affairs"-infantry volley fire-tracing its invention, first in Japan in the 1560s and then in the Dutch Repub- lic in the 1590s, and its first use in combat at the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600 by a Dutch army commanded by Maurice of Nassau. It then examines the current RMA in the light of that case study.

FOUR military innovations in early modern Europe facilitated the rise of the West. After 1430, the development of heavy bronze gunpowder artillery made possible the destruction of almost all fortifications of tra- ditional vertical design, while a century later the creation of fortresses of geometrical design restored the advantage in siege warfare to their defenders. Around 1510, naval architects began to place heavy artillery aboard full-rigged sailing vessels, creating floating fortresses that proved incomparably superior to any non-Western fighting ships. Finally, in the

Geoffrey Parker is the Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State Uni- versity and an Associate of the Mershon Center. His best-known book, The Mili- tary Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (1988; rev. ed., 1996) won the "Best Book" award from the American Military Institute and the "Dexter Prize" from the Society for the History of Technology. His Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998) won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Soci- ety for Military History. His other books include The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Coun- tries Wars, 1567-1659 (1972; rev. ed., 2004). He has held both a John Simon Guggenheim and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2006 he won an Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching at Ohio State University.

The Journal of Military History 71 (April 2007): 331-72 0 Society for Military History r 331

GEOFFREY PARKER

1590s, the invention of infantry volley fire (one rank of infantry firing in unison and then reloading while other ranks fired in turn) permitted the defeat of far larger enemy forces, whether mounted or on foot, in the field. These four developments had by 1775 allowed relatively small groups of Europeans to conquer most of the Americas, Siberia, and the Philippines, and parts of South Asia-over one-third of the world's land surface-and to dominate the world's oceans. By 1914, thanks to con- tinuing military and naval superiority, the West had won control of over three-quarters of the world's land surface as well as almost all the world's oceans. Although thereafter the West lost its colonies, in the late twenti- eth century another series of linked military changes gave Western forces an overwhelming superiority in almost all forms of armed conflict.1

The Office of Net Assessment within the Pentagon used the acronym "RMA," standing for "Revolution in Military Affairs," to describe the "interaction between systems that collect, process, fuse and communi- cate information and those that apply military force" that has enabled the West to use "precision violence" against its foes.2 But how do such

1. I am most grateful to Alison Anderson, Mary Elizabeth Berry, Giinhan B6rek9i, Ben Cox, Maureen Donovan, Eliot Cohen, Anthony Grafton, Ann Jannetta, Michiel de Jong, Jeanine de Landtsheer, Carlos Lechner, John Lynn, Allan Millett, Olaf van Nimwegen, and Jan Waszink for helpful suggestions; to Maurizio Arfaioli, Annelieke Dirks, and Taguchi Kojiro for research assistance; and to Wim van den Doel and the members of Leiden University's Crayenborch Seminar who first heard (and criticized) my arguments. My greatest debt, however, is to students-past and present-in the military history program of The Ohio State University: to Eric Richtmyer for demon- strating the crucial importance of the document at the heart of this article in his OSU Senior Honors thesis, "The Diffusion of the Military Revolution into England"; to Matthew Keith and John Stapleton for help with Japanese and Dutch sources, respec- tively; and, above all, to Kate Epstein, Cliff Rogers, and Leif Torkelsen for their devas- tating critiques of what I foolishly considered would be the final version of my essay. Earlier drafts of this article appeared in Coming to the Americas: The Eurasian Mili- tary Impact on the Development of the Western Hemisphere. Acta of the XXVIII Inter- national Conference of Military History, ed. John A. Lynn, 4 vols. (Wheaton, Ill.: Cantigny Foundation, 2003), 1:40-71; and in Militaire Spectator 172/4 (2003): 177- 93 (with the original texts of most quotations from European languages).

2. Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. The Office of Net Assessment uses "RMA" interchange- ably with the term "Military Revolution"; see Andrew W. Marshall, Director of the Office of Net Assessment, "Statement prepared for the Subcommittee on Acquisition and Technology, Senate Armed Services Committee" [USA], 5 May 1995. (I am grate- ful to Mr. Marshall for sending me a copy of his important remarks.) Others, however, detect a difference: see, for example, the important article of Clifford J. Rogers, "'Mil- itary Revolutions' and 'Revolutions in Military Affairs': A Historian's Perspective," in Toward a Revolution in Military Affairs? Defense and Security at the Dawn of the 21st Century, ed. Thierry Gongora and Harald von Riekhoff (Westport, Conn.: Green- wood Press, 2000), 21-36.

332 * THE JOURNAL OF

- Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs

military transformations occur, whether in the past or the present; why do they prove so decisive; and what (if any) are their limits? This essay seeks answers through the detailed study of one critical early modern innovation-infantry volley fire-and its first use in combat at the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600 by the army of the Dutch Republic commanded by Count Maurice of Nassau. It then examines the current RMA in the light of that case study.

The Birth of Volley Fire The film Zulu contains one of the most effective visual representa-

tions of volley fire, as some 150 British redcoats defend a farmstead at Rorke's Drift, South Africa, against attacks by thousands of Zulus in 1879. By then, this tactic formed the standard battle drill of Western infantry, whether against non-Westerners (as in the film) or against each other (as in the American Civil War). But when and where did it originate?

Volley fire was invented twice in the sixteenth century: in Japan dur- ing the 1560s and in the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. The first Por- tuguese visitors to Japan in 1543 arrived with some harquebuses (smoothbore muzzle-loading guns about 1.3 meters long that fired 20- gram lead balls) in the middle of an era of civil war. Many local warlords, seeing the advantage of adding a powerful new weapon to their arsenals, ordered their metalworkers to make Western-style harquebuses but, like all smoothbore muzzle-loading firearms, the Japanese guns proved both highly inaccurate and slow to reload. In the 1560s, the warlord Oda Nobunaga, perhaps inspired by the fact that Japanese archers normally fired volleys in rotation, realized that soldiers with firearms drawn up in ranks could maintain a constant barrage, however long it took them to reload, if the first rank fired and then reloaded while subsequent ranks fired. In 1575, at the battle of Nagashino, Nobunaga deployed 3,000 men with guns who delivered volleys with devastating effect.3 Handheld firearms soon became the most important infantry weapons in Japanese armies. At the