It is very easy to point out, with hindsight, what the seminal moments that change the nature of warfare are. It is not so easy to point them out when they are occurring right now. Furthermore, it's always going to be the case that people will promise that their shiny new technology will be the one that makes all existing battleplans obsolete and is unstoppable, etc., etc. Only rarely are they right, and in historiographical terms, we tend to only remember the people who were right and not those who were wrong.
A good example of people betting wrongly on new technology is air power, or specifically, strategic bombing. Early air power theorists (we're talking the 1920s here) made the case that once you start lobbing some bombs at civilian targets, you'd so shatter the morale of the target country that it would collapse in a few weeks--a few months, tops. When WW2 came about, both sides indeed attempted to end the war via bombing the other side's civilians into oblivion. And both times, it failed miserably. Even the US Strategic Bombing Survey struggled to find examples where it came close to achieving its goals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept.
Yes, I was living in London when the blitz started(I was 2). The bombs were a random event, and you lived/died on that basis. It failed to defeat the British public - it made them angry. In addition to being useless strategically it also diverted Nazi efforts away from the RAF and allowed a higher degree of production dispersion to be implemented - the result was the UK won the air war and it was impossible to invade the UK with air superiority. Our house was bombed, but we had an estate in Wales and we went there when the blitz began. Insurance failed to pay under an 'acts of war' clause.
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It is very easy to point out, with hindsight, what the seminal moments that change the nature of warfare are. It is not so easy to point them out when they are occurring right now. Furthermore, it's always going to be the case that people will promise that their shiny new technology will be the one that makes all existing battleplans obsolete and is unstoppable, etc., etc. Only rarely are they right, and in historiographical terms, we tend to only remember the people who were right and not those who were wrong.
A good example of people betting wrongly on new technology is air power, or specifically, strategic bombing. Early air power theorists (we're talking the 1920s here) made the case that once you start lobbing some bombs at civilian targets, you'd so shatter the morale of the target country that it would collapse in a few weeks--a few months, tops. When WW2 came about, both sides indeed attempted to end the war via bombing the other side's civilians into oblivion. And both times, it failed miserably. Even the US Strategic Bombing Survey struggled to find examples where it came close to achieving its goals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept.
Yes, I was living in London when the blitz started(I was 2). The bombs were a random event, and you lived/died on that basis. It failed to defeat the British public - it made them angry. In addition to being useless strategically it also diverted Nazi efforts away from the RAF and allowed a higher degree of production dispersion to be implemented - the result was the UK won the air war and it was impossible to invade the UK with air superiority. Our house was bombed, but we had an estate in Wales and we went there when the blitz began. Insurance failed to pay under an 'acts of war' clause.