In war, victory goes to the side that applies the technology of the day and succeeds in adjusting to rapidly changing conditions, said author Max Boot in a Sept. 25 talk, "500 Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs: The Implications for Iraq and Beyond," in Cornell's McGraw Hall.

But holding on to military supremacy is another matter.

The term "a revolution in military affairs," Boot said, crept into currency in the early 1990s after what he called "the smashing U.S.-led victory" against Iraq to liberate Kuwait. The Gulf War marked the first use of global positioning systems, precision-guided munitions and tank-mounted computers.

The gunpowder revolution transformed warfare circa 1500, said Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the acclaimed 2006 book, "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today." While the Europeans controlled only about 14 percent of the world in 1450, they controlled 84 percent by 1914.

"In many ways this is the big story of the last 500 years, the rise of the West," Boot said, noting that Europeans were most successful at harnessing the gunpowder revolution to conquer their enemies.

In the 1940s, Germany and Japan, taking advantage of technology, became superpowers. The Germans put two-way radios in their tanks and pursued a rapidly moving battle plan, while the Allies were stuck in a trench warfare mentality from World War I. But by the end of Word War II, "pretty much all the great powers of the past [were] swept off the board in the emergence of two new superpowers dividing the world between them, largely through their mastery of industrial technology," said Boot.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? "They tried to reform, they failed, they collapsed," suggested Boot. "We had a Silicon Valley and they did not. That was one of the major spurs for perestroika [the Soviet Union's economic restructuring] and the whole process that ultimately brought down the empire from within."

To sustain long-term military dominance, Boot said, "It's not the technology per se. It's management. It's bureaucracy. Who has the more effective governmental structure for harnessing commonly available technology?"

Yet an established bureaucracy can become an albatross. The U.S. military, designed to fight mirror-image adversaries, now copes with ragtag guerilla insurgents in Iraq who, Boot said, "thanks to the generosity of their patrons in Tehran, have stayed half a step ahead of us and [are] reacting faster than we are."

By the mid-1990s, because of its mastery of the information revolution, the United States "was left standing alone atop the world as this kind of unbridled hegemon. In the decade since, we've found that being king of the hill ain't all it's cracked up to be," said Boot. "With great power comes great discontent.

"In many ways, I would argue … especially in the war against terrorism, it's the U.S. government, which is this lumbering old-style bureaucracy, kind of the Ford or GM of international relations," Boot said. "Our enemies, the al-Qaidas of the world, are in many ways the Microsofts or Dells -- these more nimble, flatter competitors, which are able to use our technology against us in ways that we hadn't even imagined."

Boot's talk was sponsored by the Cornell Department of History, the Faculty Initiative on the Foundations of Free Societies and ISI/Jack Miller Center.