The Crimean War of 1853–1856 presented military leaders with multiple choices between reliable but less effective capabilities and superior ones that could fail unpredictably at critical moments:
By the 1850s, the predominant telegraph system — used to coordinate 730,000 British, French, and Russian troops across the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans — was not yet Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic line, but a primitive optical “semaphore.” The semaphore telegraph used a simple series of towers topped with moveable wooden arms that displayed symbols from one tower to the next like the Beacons of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. By the outbreak of the war, even these semaphore lines were sparse on the Continent. A message from Crimea in 1854 could take anywhere from twelve days to three weeks to reach London; from Crimea to Varna by steamer, from Varna to Bucharest by courier, and from Bucharest to London or Paris by mail. Russia, which had already invested in a more robust telegraph network, could send a message to the front in only two days — a very meaningful advantage. Naturally, the Allies moved quickly to catch up. They connected British and French army headquarters by telegraph, contracted with the British Electric Telegraph Company to set up 21 miles of buried cable within Crimea, contracted R. S. Newall & Co. to connect Balaklava with Varna, and installed a 150 mile line from Varna to Istanbul. By the time they captured Sebastopol, the most serious victory of the Crimean operation, they could circulate the news of their victory across Europe in only two days.
But there is a caveat in this story of progress. While the electric telegraph was faster in theory, it proved more difficult to set up and less reliable in practice. Submarine cables, unarmored and laid with little slack, often suffered outages due to damage by ships, sabotage or otherwise. While a clumsy semaphore tower could be set up and functioning in only four hours, an electric cable could take weeks to bury in hard, cracked winter ground, and could not be easily moved as needed afterwards. War correspondent William Russell noted “it was rather singular that the French preferred the old-fashioned semaphore” throughout the conflict. Though the French had begun a transition to the electric telegraph in the 1840s, they stuck with the semaphore system for the majority of the war effort, sending over 4,500 semaphore telegraphs, only finalizing their transition to electric after the war was over and reliability less critical.
Worse — the invention of the telegraph was the invention of micromanagement.
[…]
Europe had the material technology to enable central decision-making, but lacked the experience to apply it wisely. Disgruntled generals suffered a blow to their status from central ministers who believed themselves to be better-informed than they really were. Command suffered and the organizational disaster for which the Crimean War is best-remembered followed suit. As with all technological innovations, their invention is just the first act of innovation, the second are the changes to human social organization needed for adoption.
Modern naval warships weren’t ready, either:
The original incarnation of steam propulsion — the paddle wheel — designed in 1776 to emulate the paddling of a duck, was vulnerable to attack; one blow to the large target that was the wheel and the ship was dead in the water. Because the paddle wheel occupied such a large surface area along the hull, an early steamer could not be equipped with a full broadside. Worse, in rough seas, the wheel could become submerged or rise out of the water entirely, damaging the engines; if the boat encountered an obstacle like floating debris, the boilers of early engines could build up too much pressure and explode, causing the ship to sink. For these reasons, the steamer was not trusted in combat.
Ironclad hulls, too, had been decried. When the British Captain Henry Ducie Chads tested the resistance of 5 ? 8 ” iron plating against artillery at Portsmouth in 1850, he found that only two or three shots could cause the armor to shatter into shrapnel that would gravely endanger the crew. The cast iron armor was brittle and prone to fracture, and had not yet been replaced by wrought iron, which could withstand more deformation before breaking.
[…]
Traditional solid shot was designed to kill the crew and take down rigging, but it could typically only inflict repairable damage to the thick oak hulls of wooden battleships, not destroy them. In 1821, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans proposed in a seminal pamphlet Nouvelle Force Maritime that the future of naval warfare would look dramatically different. Exploding artillery shells, he proposed, which were already in use on land, could be deployed at sea to sink large wooden ships-of-the-line outright. The exploding shell gun posed a danger to the wooden ship so great, he argued in a successive pamphlet the following year, that each battleship of the future must be armored with metal. The exploding shell gun Paixhans developed had a range of up to two miles and exploded upon contact with the target, allowing battleships to pack a more destructive ordinance at a lighter weight. The French Navy began trials with this gun — the Paixhans gun — in 1824, and had adopted it throughout the fleet by 1837. The British Royal Navy followed suit the following year. Soon, in peacetime, the exploding shell spread even to Russia.
The exploding shell was deployed to resounding effect during the war’s first major naval engagement. On November 30th, 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov approached the Turkish fleet at Sinop Bay, hoping to take the Ottomans by surprise during the initial Russian offensive.
[…]
Sinop proved beyond all skepticism that the Paixhans gun had made the wooden battleship obsolete. The Allies immediately took notice. Napoleon II ordered the construction of a flotilla of five armored batteries, with four-inch iron plating that could withstand shelling as well as steam propulsion. Critically, by then, Captain John Ericsson and FP Smith of London had invented the screw propeller, which sat underneath the boat where it was less vulnerable to attack, and where it could be lifted out of the water to allow the vessel to maneuver by sail if necessary. Also critically, these armoring plates could then be constructed out of wrought iron, which could withstand shelling without fragmenting, rather than the brittle cast iron of years past.
[…]
The Western powers recognized the paradigm shift, pushed through the unpredictable growing pains of emerging technologies, and adopted proactively to win. In an age of unprecedented transformation and speed at every domain, history teaches us that to slow down change is to accept defeat.
[…]
In eight prolific decades of Pax Americana, military technology has developed to the point of being unrecognizable from WWII. Military organization, however, remains the same, and the imaginations of procurement offices haven’t moved far either.
[…]
The history of the Crimean War reminds us that adopting new technologies is not without challenges, but the failure to do so can be far more consequential.