"If Gustavus Adolphus rose up from the dead ... and was magically transported to the western front in 1914, he would have understood the underlying concepts governing warfare with little difficulty" How true is this statement? In what ways did the underlying concepts stay the same for 300 years?

by Skogsmard

Source for the quote in the title: 'Parker, G., Is the military revolution debate dead, lecture at Institut Guerre et Paix, Paris 2014.'

I recently came across this quote and source. In which way did warfare stay the same between the 1630s and 1914?
In the intervening 300 or-so years countless tactical and equipment innovations were made, everything from the Swedish Gå-på tactics of the late 17th century to the Napoleonic Square and the Gatling gun of the 19th century.
What does Parker mean when he says that the underlying concepts went unchanged during that time?

Not being able to find a copy of this lecture I cannot place the quote in context, but I can offer some insights on what I assume the point Parker is trying to make. Although technology may have developed and progressed, warfare in the western world continued to be viewed through the lens of maneuver rather than attrition. The war of 1914 was launched as a war of maneuver, but the efficacy of the weapons saw the mitigation of offensive maneuver--machine guns, coupled with stable defensive lines (ie trenches), with the resources of industrialized, imperial economies (the latter on the allied side), made prolonged open maneuver offenses extraordinarily deadly (just look at the so called Franco-German clashes known as the Battle of the Frontiers, with 27k Frenchmen killed on 22 August alone. Although it was fought before stable defense lines, the sheer murderous power of machine guns and artillery on an industrial scale made maneuver next to impossible to sustain).

So, 1914 on the Western Front (but notably, not the Eastern) changes things (though it is interesting to note that by 1918, the path towards maneuver had been recovered, first by the Germans, then by the Allies. Haig and Foch deserve a lot of the credit.) The operational art of war generally stays the same from Gustavus Adolphus to Joffre, but by the end of 1914 it is clear that the way that industrial wars will be won is through a strategy of attrition. Attrition both as an operational choice (the Somme) and strategic goal (Verdun).

The one major difference, tho, that Adolphus would not have recognized is the logistical and transportation revolution brought about by railroads. The American Civil War initially demonstrated how the railroads could quickly move troops and supply around, and this was further seen in the Franco-Prussian war. But the scale of 1914 is far beyond either of those, and played decisive roles in both the initial German offensive campaign in the west and defensive campaign in the east, and the Marne. It truly was a revolution, and a decisive one at that.

If you're interested in this shift, strategically, operationally, and logistically, a couple of books you could check out: War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War, by William Philpott, To Arms, by Hew Strachen, and Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War, by Jorn Leonhard (recently translated into English from the German). Also, people should ask more First World War questions, cause I wanna try and earn some flair =)