Dark Path

From an esteemed military historian, a sweeping history of the revolutions in war-fighting that have shaped the modern world.

Heraclitus wrote that "war is the father of all", and it has formed much of the modern world. Although the fundamental nature of war has not altered over the centuries, constant change, innovation, and adaptation have repeatedly reshaped how wars are fought in the West.

In "The Dark Path", Williamson Murray examines the social and military revolutions that led the West to global dominance by tracing five revolutions in military practice:
- the advent of the modern state, which formed bureaucracies and professional militaries;
- the Industrial Revolution, which produced the financial and industrial means to sustain and equip large armies;
- the French Revolution, which provided the ideological basis needed to sustain armies through continent-sized wars;
- the merging of the Industrial and French Revolutions in the U.S. Civil War;
- the accelerating integration of technological advancement, financial capacity, ideology, and government that unleashed the modern capacity for total warfare.

In explaining the forces behind the scale and lethality of warfare in the twenty-first century, Murray shows how the world continually re-creates war – and how war, in turn, continually re-creates the world.