Back in the days when it had not yet occurred to people that the term “modern” should always be preceded by the prefix “post,” the origins of “modern” war were hotly debated. To some it was represented by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the event that determined that subsequent wars should be waged not by monarchs seeking to promote their own dynastic interests but by governments and regular armed forces acting on behalf of their respective states. Others thought they could find it in the French Revolution, which, having introduced the levée en masse for the first time since the Barbarian invasions, was able to wage war with the full resources of the state; in the campaigns of Napoleon, which at some point between 1796 and 1809 gave birth to strategy in its modern, Clausewitzian sense; in the American Civil War, waged on a vast scale with the aid of a comparatively well-developed railway network and also known as the first “industrial” war; and in the German Wars of Unification in 1864-71 as the first armed conflicts to be waged and directed by that all-important modern institution, the general staff. Depending on which of these factors one considers most important, obviously each of the above propositions contains a considerable element of truth. Taken together, they suggest that in the military field, as in others, the transition from the “traditional” to the “modern” was not accomplished in a single stroke. Instead, it constituted a prolonged process with numerous interlinked, interwoven strands.