Weapons Races

How it feels

This series looks at how new military technologies were developed and how they changed the way wars are fought. It covers the competition between enemies to create better weapons, from early ideas like radar to advanced jet fighters. Each episode focuses on a specific type of military technology and shows how it evolved over time.

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What happens

Weapons Races is a military television documentary series examining the development of various new military technologies and how their evolution impacted tactics and strategies used in warfare since the High Middle Ages, but focused mainly on film since World War I. It is an eight-part series exposing the most significant weapons races to transform modern warfare, from the original concepts that overturned military thinking to the most advanced versions of each weapon in service today. Whether it is a new idea such as radar, or a series of breakthroughs producing a dramatic new weapon like the jet fighter, in each case it shows that enemies have to react with their own countermeasures - creating a competitive arms race. The series is shown on the Military Channel (now AHC) in the U.S. and UKTV History. Each episode looks at particular military development – or "race" – through a succession of historical developments and the responses by the various rivals of the day, displaying them against the ideal requirements necessary to engineer the new technology successfully. All eight episodes use mixed examples where applicable with such mentions like the Revolutionary submarine Turtle and the CSS Hunley, but most mentions and examples are from modern warfare where ample film archives exist, dating mainly from the First World War (1914–18) up to the recent Iraq War (2003). A varying panel of military or military history experts provide commentary and highlight key developments including Lloyd Clark (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) and Bruce Gudmundsson (US Army War College). These panelists analyze the information and talk about it on the show. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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