TY - JOUR
AU - Bitzinger, Richard A.
AB - Book Reviews 139 Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation. Matthew Ford. London, 2017. xii + 264pp. $39.95 hbk. ISBN 978-1849046503. Reviewed by: Richard A. Bitzinger, Senior Fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore Matthew Ford has written a rather intriguing book, mostly because he chooses to focus on a piece of military equipment that might strike most people as rather mundane or prosaic: the gun, or, in this case, the modern automatic assault rifle. In particular, he uses this rather modest weapon as an exemplar for exploring how military innovation works in the modern, post-Second World War period. The personal firearm has been in existence for literally centuries, and its development and incremental improvement has more or less been taken for granted. For the most part, its technological evolution has been organic and piecemeal: from matchlock to flintlock, from muzzle-loader to breech-loader, rifling, the Minié ball, and so on – each advance seemed almost Darwinian, a ‘survival of the fittest’ contest that bred in battle. To many it might still seem that way, and for good reason. Firearm technology changed to keep pace with the needs of contemporary warfare. The M1911 .45 pistol 
TI - Book Review: Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation Matthew Ford
JO - War in History
DO - 10.1177/0968344518806067a
DA - 2019-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/book-review-weapon-of-choice-small-arms-and-the-culture-of-military-vpD9vE0ZYa
SP - 139
EP - 140
VL - 26
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -