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From Rocks to Electrons
YOU HEAR THEM all the time, blurbs or sound bites on how nifty modern military equipment is and how, if it is unleashed, some situation or another will be made right. This is an easy angle to fall for, as the twentieth century has been one of increasingly numerous and complex weapons. Why, they are no longer merely weapons, but "weapons systems." There is a method to all this hype, but not the one you might imagine. For high tech does not always mean high performance, or even minimal effectiveness. Remember that, because it only gets worse when you take a closer look
What is happening today with high-tech weapons is unique. Never before in history has there been a period where there were so many new weapons in such a short period of time. But there have, obviously, been new weapons over the centuries. For as long as there has been warfare, there have been new weapons. But until the 1800s, the new weapons were slow in coming. Really new weapons or items of military equipment were quite rare. Centuries would go by before anything particularly novel came along. And even then, the tradition-minded fighting man was usually reluctant to adopt the new technology until (and usually because) someone else used it. There were only a handful of technological breakthroughs until about eight hundred years ago, when gunpowder weapons began to appear. Then came a deluge of technology in this century.
Before looking into the avalanche of twentieth-century weapons, it's important to look back at how new weapons were developed in the past. Many of the conditions that have driven, or inhibited, weapons development in the past are still with us. You will better understand the present, and the future, if you have some knowledge of the past.
Weapons Development: The Stone Age
THE FIRST WEAPONS were rocks and clubs. Rocks were chipped to create primitive knives. Then came spears, using stone (flint, usually) heads. Bows were a major advance, using flint-tipped arrows. The sling and clubs fitted with flint were other prehistoric advances in weapons technology. Eventually there was bronze, which came along about six thousand years ago. This metal was an alloy of copper (by itself too soft for effective weapons) and tin. It was a major technological advance, and was propelled into wide use as much because of bronze weapons as for the economic advantages of bronze tools. Even that long ago, warfare gave a boost to technological advances. While bronze had obvious advantages over copper for hunting, food preparation, and construction, it was the fear of "losing the bronze race" that motivated tribes to find out how to make bronze and make a lot of it before warlike neighbors paid an unfriendly visit to show them what the new bronze weapons could do to someone still using copper.
Another such breakthrough didn't take place until some fifteen hundred years later, when iron was discovered. A much harder metal than bronze, its use gave soldiers a significant advantage over bronze-equipped opponents. The "iron race" went on for a century or two in the Middle East until everyone had it. Those that were slow in adopting the new metal were either wiped out or absorbed by iron-outfitted kingdoms. The new metal was not only useful for weapons, but led to the development of many new kinds of armor. Iron weapons dominated the battlefield for over three thousand years. Some seven hundred years ago, gunpowder weapons began to appear, but it wasn't until three hundred years ago that gunpowder displaced iron swords and spears as the primary weapon in most armies.
Military Innovations of the Ancients
JUST BECAUSE IT took so long to get from the discovery of iron to the introduction of gunpowder does not mean that three thousand years went by with little innovation in weapons. There were quite a few new ideas involving missile weapons. Then, as now, missiles were seen as the wave of the future. They were also seen, then as now, as a less dangerous way to attack an opponent. Ancient missiles were usually arrows, or large rocks thrown at fortifications by catapults and similar machines. Several new types of bows were developed during the golden age of iron weapons. Some involved the use of some iron, like the crossbow. Others used no metal at all, like the compound bow favored by the Mongols, or the longbow used by the English yeoman archers in themedieval period. While the bows often used no iron, the arrows did. Later crossbows used an iron bolt, rather than a specially designed wood arrow, and eventually the bow itself had iron parts. All arrows had an iron head, and these varied greatly in their design. One of the more interesting of these is the bodkin arrowhead used by English longbows; it was particularly effective penetrating armor.
There were many other developments during the military Iron Age, but these were tactical and administrative innovations. Some of these were very important. For example, about 2,200 years ago, the Parthians (Iranians living in the Iraq-Iran area) developed full suits of armor for mounted spearmen. They also had mounted archers. The term Parthian shot refers to their technique of riding away from an approaching enemy and turning around in the saddle to let off an arrow or two. This organization was almost identical to what the Mongols used 1,500 years later, and similar to the mounted knight developed in western Europe 1,000 years later. The Parthians didn't have the stirrup yet--that came a few centuries later. But they did have the heavy (armored) cavalry that dominated the battlefield for the next 2,000 years. The stirrup helped the later knights stay in the saddle, but the lack of same did not make the Parthian knights that much less effective. Besides, the stirrup was invented by the Chinese to make it easier to get on a horse, not just to make it easier to stay in the saddle. Special saddles had long been used to aid in staying astride the horse.
Another example of innovation during this period was the use of heavy infantry. Originally, infantry tactics had been nothing more than a mass (or mob, depending on the quality of leadership) of stout fellows armed with spears and swords. Most carried shields of metal, wood, hide, or woven material (or combinations thereof) and armor of similar construction to the shield. At various times, armies really got their act together and equipped all the troops with excellent armor and trained them thoroughly. This was more difficult than it sounds, as professional armies were, until a few centuries ago, rather rare. They were too expensive, and enthusiastic amateurs were a lot cheaper and nearly as good as most pros. In such situations, if the amateurs outnumbered the pros by, say, two to one, the amateurs usually won.
But when someone came along and managed to finance a well-trained and -equipped professional army, this was unique and the result was usually a long string of conquests followed by the establishment of yet another empire. Most commonly, these conquering armies were primarily infantry. Horses were expensive to maintain, and their quality was poor, so most professional troops walked. The mounted soldiers were usually nobles who only turned out for an emergency or when the prospects of loot were particularly good. The Assyrians,Greeks, and Romans (to mention the more successful ones) all established large empires with professional infantry armies using unique organization, tactics, and lots of training.
Ancient Inhibitions
YOU WOULD THINK that people would have picked up on the importance of training and attention to tactics. But such was not, and still is not, the case. The reasons for this lapse are rather easy to understand. First, there is the innate conservatism of military men everywhere and for all time. Warfare is a deadly business, and most of those who engage in it want to minimize their risk, rather than maximize their chances of success. In other words, the soldier will avoid combat, or anything else, that might get him killed. No one is going to readily adopt untried new weapons or tactics when he knows that the traditional arms and techniques have worked in the past. Second, there is the problem of experience. Most soldiers fight very little, if at all. Throughout human history there have always been wars or organized armed conflicts ("skirmishes") going on somewhere. But for the individual soldier, on average, there has been very little action. There have always been plenty of armies around, but very few wars for them to participate in. Thus an army, or tribal levy, might go years, or decades, without having a chance to actually get into a battle. Thus there is little opportunity to test new weapons or techniques. Few people, especially soldiers, want to bet their lives on some untried technology or technique. It took a rare, and unique, leader to get new weapons and techniques accepted and tested in combat. Once these new items are seen to work in battle, people are much more willing to accept them. But getting past that first trial has always been a nearly insurmountable task.
Human nature has shown itself to be even more perverse. Even in the face of successful new weapons, many tend to attribute such achievements to "luck," or the result of some grievous error by the loser. In times past, many believed that it was because the gods were mad at the loser and caused the defeat as a form of divine punishment. On the losing side, the people in charge often find it politically expedient to give the enemy credit for successful new ideas. After all, a general, even one who has just lost a battle, would rather blame the gods than his own lack of foresight in properly equipping and training his troops. Often it was simply pride. The losers could not bring themselves to admit that those bums on the other side were better soldiers.
Until a few hundred years ago, new weapons commonly came into military use after having first been tried out while hunting game. Thus there were many other weapons available, and there always had been. While the earliest civilizations came about because of the use of large-scale farming, hunting stillbrought in a significant proportion of the calories. Along rivers and oceans, fishing was usually the principal form of "hunting." But there was usually land game available. While the poorest people used slings or snares to kill small animals, the nobility were more ambitious. It was common for the rich folks to hunt from horseback. They would use spears or bows. The hunt was considered largely sport by the aristocrats, and also training for war. But even with that, there was enough difference between hunting animals and confronting humans on the battlefield to make the crossover a slow process. Some weapons, of course, were primarily used for warfare. Swords are the best example. Except for finishing off large wounded animals, swords played little part in hunting. Spears were the most common hunting/warfare weapon, and the largest number of troops in an ancient army were spearmen, but these were generally the poorest members of the society and had little practice using spears on large game. The nobles, who could afford to spend days or weeks riding off to unpopulated areas where large game lived, eventually developed the technique of spearing deer, bears, buffalo, or lions from horseback. This was useful practice for doing the same thing to enemy soldiers. This extensive practice made the aristocratic cavalry rather more deadly than the peasant spearman filling the ranks. It wasn't until innovative peoples like the Greeks or Romans developed specialized spears for combat, and diligently trained the troops in their use, that cavalry again had to fear infantry.
Archery, Technology, and Culture
ARCHERY WAS ANOTHER matter. The bow was an ancient weapon, and was favored by peasants for hunting birds and animals that could not be run down on foot. Unfortunately, the average hunting bow was of only marginal use in warfare. Combat troops usually had shields, and often armor. Massed archers had some effect against horsemen, or at least the horses. But many armies, when constantly faced with such archers, would armor their horses too, or see to it that battles began with an archery duel to kill off the enemy archers, or drive them from the battlefield, before sending their cavalry in.
Historically, there have been four types of bows. These are (in order of appearance), the short bow, the longbow, the composite bow, and the crossbow. The short bow is shorter than the longbow, and requires less muscle to pull. We know it was in use at least fifty thousand years ago, and it is still used by many primitive cultures today. The longbow, which is usually at least five feet long and requires a lot more muscle and skill to use, is probably nearly as old as the short bow. Longbows have been found that are over six feet long and require nearly two hundred pounds of pull. Cultures that had a lot of large people, and free time to practice with this larger bow, used the longbow. Thelongbow had a longer range than the short bow, usually two hundred to four hundred yards, compared to somewhat less than half that for the short bow. The longbow had more penetrating power. With the right kind of metal arrowhead, a longbow could penetrate most kinds of armor and shields at short ranges. In Europe, the Vikings, Germans, and Celts all used the longbow at one time or another. A major disadvantage of the longbow was that in cold weather the bow had a tendency to snap. Short bows would do this too, but not as often because not as much stress was being applied to the wood of the bow.
The longbow required a lot of constant practice to maintain the needed skills. Only those cultures that tolerated, or could afford, a lot of the manpower spending much of their time at war or preparing for it used the longbow on a large scale. Today, there are still tribes in Africa that use the longbow for hunting large game, including elephants. To bring down an elephant you need a powerful longbow and a skilled hunter to operate it.
The composite bow is, unlike the short bow and longbow, more than just a carefully selected and shaped length of wood. Often the same size as the short bow, the composite bow uses pieces of bone and sinew glued to wood to produce a bow that produces the same striking power and range as the longbow, but without requiring nearly as much pull. The composite bow has long been favored by those who hunt, or make war, from horseback. As a hunter's weapon, the composite bow is superb. The composite bow is known to have existed at least five thousand years ago, and probably earlier. The ancient Egyptians made composite bows that were as long as longbows and fired light arrows made of reeds. These Egyptian arrows apparently could be fired over three hundred yards and would land with great force. The composite bow was also less likely to break if used in freezing weather.
Short bows and longbows, although carved out of single logs of wood, often had the characteristics of composite bows if they were carved out of the center of a tree log. The sap-soaked wood at the center of a tree has different characteristics than the wood closer to the bark. Different types of trees have different properties, some species being more suitable for bows than others. While none of these "organic" longbows were as effective as the top-line composite bows, they were much cheaper to make and maintain. The English medieval longbow is an excellent example of the "organic" composite bow. While made from a single log cut from a yew tree, if carefully selected and cured just so, the English longbow was a match for most composite bows of the medieval period.
What armies needed were specialized "heavy" bows for wartime use. The problem with this was that handling a "war bow" required constant practice. While the nobility had the time to do this, you needed a lot of archers to makea difference on the battlefield. The peasants had to work hard just to survive, and provide a surplus for the nobility to live on. The ancient Egyptians, with their wonderfully fertile Nile Valley agriculture, often had the surplus wealth to maintain hundreds, or thousands, of heavy archers. These bowmen, combined with the pharaohs' hundreds of chariots, made Egypt a major military power in the Middle East for thousands of years. But whenever the royal budget could not afford the archers, or civil war diluted their numbers, archery became much less of a decisive element. What was needed was a bow that did not require so much constant training. The answer to this came in the form of the fourth type of bow, the crossbow.
The Star-crossed History of the Crossbow
THE FIRST SOLUTION to the battlefield archery problem was introduced by the Chinese nearly three thousand years ago, when they developed the crossbow. This was a mechanical bow that required skilled artisans to construct it. But once one built it, little skill was needed to use it, and the crossbows could be stored during times of peace and would, if properly cared for, last for decades. The crossbow bolt had tremendous penetrating power. If it didn't go through enemy armor or shields, it gave the enemy soldier on the other end a severe jolt. This did not help enemy morale much. A typical ancient army, with perhaps ten thousand troops, would have an enormous advantage if 10 to 20 percent of those soldiers were equipped with crossbows.
It took the crossbow some five hundred years to reach Europe, and then it was considered a specialized hunting weapon for many centuries. What was missing here was a government that could muster the resources (human and financial) to build enough crossbows to be effective. This didn't happen until the eleventh century. Why did it take so long? We'll never really know. But we can make some educated guesses. The earlier Romans could make crossbows but simply chose not to. Military tactics were fairly primitive in the medieval period, as the armored and mounted knights became more dominant. The knights monopolized military affairs, and they were not keen to mess up their thrilling cavalry charges with a lot of pesky crossbow bolts.
The crossbow was also expensive. In an era when most people were small farmers and a good annual income was a few thousand dollars, a crossbow cost about $250 (in 1990s dollars) and each of the bolts it fired cost approximately $1.25. The crossbowmen themselves cost from five to ten dollars a day, depending on their level of experience and whether they supplied their own weapons. The employer usually supplied the quarrels (arrows, or bolts fired) and this could get pretty expensive. A regular bow was a lot cheaper, costingthirty to fifty dollars, with arrows being a bit more expensive at about two dollars each. Crossbows were popular for equipping the garrisons of castles and walled towns. The crossbowman could fire the weapon from protected, if cramped, positions behind the walls. A regular archer would have to stand in a more open position to fire and could more easily get hit by besieging archers. Moreover, the time it took to reload a crossbow (a bolt or two per minute) favored those who were safe behind stone walls. It did not require much skill to do this, thus allowing for untrained (and poorly paid) men to defend the place. Remember that any other kind of bow could fire from a dozen to twenty arrows a minute, about ten times the rate of fire of crossbows. But this sort of archery required a very well trained man pulling a powerful bow.
The Romans, in the fourth century A.D., were using the crossbow, so it's not surprising that the Italians were the biggest users of the weapon throughout the medieval period. Mercenary units of crossbowmen (often numbering in the thousands of troops) served whichever Italian prince would pay them. But the crossbow never caught on as much in the rest of Europe. It wasn't just the expense; mainly it was the approach to warfare and the lack of army commanders who could see, and carry through, effective archery tactics. There were exceptions, especially during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But this involved fighting Muslims. There was a feeling in the West that the crossbow was an "unchristian" weapon and the pope unsuccessfully tried to ban its use for Christians fighting Christians.
When firearms were introduced in the 1500s, the crossbow fell from favor and eventually disappeared except for recreational or hunting use. While firearms revolutionized warfare over the next few centuries, it is well to remember that, for all practical purposes, the crossbow provided much the same battlefield firepower as the primitive muskets of the 1500s. You could line up a few thousand crossbowmen in the year 1300, and they would generate the same number of lethal missiles heading for troops a hundred yards away as the same number of musketeers would in the year 1700. Okay, the musket balls had a bit more penetrating power, but the muskets generated all that smoke (which made it more difficult to find the target), and muskets were generally less reliable than crossbows. But there was no reason that a medieval commander could not equip and drill an army of crossbowmen in the battlefield tactics of musketeers, and with the same devastating effect.
Why, then, didn't commanders seize on the crossbow to provide the massed firepower that transformed combat several centuries later? The answer is simple, and frustrating: no one thought of it, and, perhaps more importantly, no one could really afford it. Throughout history it has always been the case that just because something is possible does not mean that someone will do it.This explains why the Chinese, with a more ancient, better organized, and more advanced civilization, were eclipsed by the Europeans from the 1600s on. People still argue over just what it was with the Europeans that caused them to come out of the period of innovation known as the Renaissance and just keep going in the new-ideas department. Unlike the Chinese, and many ancient societies, the Europeans didn't just think up a lot of new ideas, they enthusiastically went out and put them to use. Then they devised variations and improvements and just kept on going. This simple mental revolution enabled Europe to, literally and figuratively, conquer the world. Many of the older cultures, in places like India, the Middle East, and China, are still trying to catch up. Learning to "think like a European" is not as easy as it seems. Conservatism is an ancient custom in humans and one not easily discarded for the seemingly dangerous world of new and untried (or at least unfamiliar) ideas.
But there was one bunch of medieval Europeans that did adopt musketeer tactics before the guns arrived. And they didn't do it with crossbows, but with an older type of bow.
Intelligent Archery
THE ENGLISH CAME up the concept of a battlefield dominated by firepower in the thirteenth century. They did it not with crossbows (which the English were familiar with), but with longbows. The Celts and Germans had been using longbows for centuries. The Romans had reported running into problems with longbow-equipped German armies. But the longbow was a difficult weapon to master and its popularity waxed and waned. The short bow was always popular, for it was the favored hunting weapon, and when the Normans invaded England in 1066 they brought short bow--equipped troops with them and encountered few longbows. But the longbows were there. When the English king Edward I set about conquering Wales in the thirteenth century, he found the Welsh using the longbow in larger and larger numbers. The Celts in Wales had been familiar with the longbow for as long as anyone could remember. Against the English knights, the Welsh found the longbow to be an ideal weapon. The English eventually prevailed, and Edward I not only conquered the Welsh, but won them over to his side by a combination of carrot (benevolent rule) and stick (many castles and a large garrison). He also hired the Welsh archers for his other wars and paid the longbowmen well, and on time. These last two points cannot be underestimated, as it was common for a noble to shortchange his armed retainers. Edward's attention to timely payment of good wages to the archers, and winning most of his battles, sent the archershome with full purses and good things to say about this English king. Edward I, and his successors, encouraged Welsh and English subjects to take up the longbow. This strategy worked, helped by the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between France and England. This series of wars provided constant employment for archers, and ample opportunity to get good pay and a chance to get rich from plunder.
The archers were not just ordinary commoners, but largely free farmers. That is, they were not serfs, but men who either leased land from a noble or owned it outright. This was a class of people found throughout Europe, but they were particularly numerous in England. Known as "yeoman farmers," they had the resources to buy longbows, arrows, a sword, some armor, and even a horse. More importantly, as free men, they had the discipline and drive to regularly practice with the longbow. Finally, the yeomen were big men. It required a lot of muscle to muster the 100 to 150 pounds of pull needed to draw an arrow on a longbow. The yeomen farmer was a more successful and better-fed farmer. In an age when a large chunk of the population was always on the verge of starvation, the free farmers were relatively prosperous. They produced more food and consumed more of it. When the mass graves of medieval battlefields are exhumed, it's always easy to pick out the skeletons of yeomen. They are the ones that are taller and have the massive bone structure typical of those who, even today, work with heavy bows or weights all their lives. Even at the time, these archers were often described as stout yeomen. And the English king that led a few thousand of them could do whatever he wanted to do in France. For a century, that's just what the English kings did, and the burly yeoman archers were the main reason why.
The yeoman saw regular service as a fighting man in the king's service as making him socially superior to those farmers who didn't serve under arms. For many centuries, the aristocracy had tried to monopolize the profession of arms. There were still hordes of infantry in medieval armies, but increasingly these troops were seen as a rabble that could be squandered in suicidal attacks or left in the lurch. The yeoman archers were treated, and paid, as professional soldiers. This gave the English a more capable and unified army than any of their opponents.
The kings passed laws making archery practice obligatory, but it was the prospect of employment as archers from time to time that kept the yeomen at it. For several centuries, the English yeomen were, along with the Swiss pikemen, the premier foot soldiers of Europe. For three or so months campaigning, a yeoman could pick up three or four thousand dollars in pay, plus that much or more in loot. Since the average yeoman farmer only generated one to three thousand dollars of cash income a year, this "campaign bonus" made the yeomanclass even stronger. Much of the new wealth went into buying more land, or improving the land already worked. Many yeomen worked their way into the minor nobility and some went even further over the centuries. All because some of their ancestors were willing to learn how to handle a longbow.
In combat, the longbow was the most fearsome weapon to grace the battlefield until the coming of large musket-equipped armies in the 1600s. Indeed, English officials noted that up through the 1800s, longbows were superior to an equal number of muskets. But the problem was that the archers had to practice constantly, and from a young age--practice was daily, or several times a week. To justify this much effort, there had to be regular employment at good wages. When England ran out of profitable wars in the late 1400s, the demand for archers declined, and so did the diligence of the yeomen for all that practice. Even the English kings soon found that it was easier to equip any old commoner with a musket and give him a few months' training. The musketeers could get off one or two shots a minute, versus over a dozen a minute by a longbowman. Moreover, the longbow had a longer effective range than the muskets. But the golden age of archery, as exemplified by the English longbowman, lasted only about two centuries. It was too expensive to maintain, and was eventually replaced by a less labor-intensive and cheaper technology.
Renaissance and Reason on the Battlefield
THE RENAISSANCE, that period in late medieval Europe when many new ideas, and quite a few old, forgotten ones, came into fashion, also brought a renaissance in military thinking. While artists and architects throughout Europe were creating a multitude of tourist attractions, soldiers were beginning to tinker with gunpowder. In the 1300s, cannons were ever more common battlefield weapons, at the same time that the arts were flourishing elsewhere. But for soldiers, there was far more than just gunpowder happening. Renaissance artists applied their talents to castles, weapons, and armor as well as painting, sculpture, and palaces. Soldiers were equally imaginative in rethinking how they organized, trained, and fought. The traditionalism of soldiers was still there, but there was so much imagination in the air that even conservative warriors were willing to risk all on a new idea. Many of the ideas didn't work, but many others did. Moreover, there began in this period a tradition of experimentation. These same attitudes among nonsoldiers led to the Industrial Revolution, an ongoing string of scientific breakthroughs, and startling new political ideas.
So let us not forget the roots of the digital soldier. They began in the Renaissance,when the likes of Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and all manner of military gear. Leonardo was not unusual for his time, or the times that followed down to the present.
The Renaissance thinkers often came up with concepts that required more advanced technology than was then available. Moreover, so many new ideas were introduced that it was only a matter of time before a few really good ideas would be organized to create a fighting style that would be difficult to improve on. For example, the Spanish invented the modern regiment (or brigade, as it is sometimes called.) The Spanish called it the tercio. It was commanded by a colonel, and the troops were called infantry (from infanta, or child). This unit was organized and trained in a regular and disciplined fashion. Not all the troops had firearms; some still used sword and shield, or various types of specialized spears (halberds.) The Spanish were not the only ones innovating. Europe became a cauldron of new ideas, with everyone playing an ongoing game of "can you top this?" Every time one turned around, someone did.
The development of seventeenth-century muskets (as used in our own Revolutionary War) from the thirteenth-century "firepots" was a succession of "can you top this?" challenges taken up by a lot of very ambitious military commanders and weapons makers. The innate conservatism of military men was overcome by increasing technical innovations, and the advantages better weapons gave to those who possessed them.
But more importantly, the Renaissance brought with it a social revolution. Europe entered the Renaissance a very stratified society. A small portion of the population, a few percent, monopolized the profession of arms. The democratic (by ancient standards) armies of Rome and German tribes, where most adult males were armed, had been overwhelmed by these armored and mounted men-at-arms. These knights ruled the population, fought the wars, and maintained their power by personally wielding military power. Crossbows and muskets allowed commoners to fight a knight on equal terms. This threatened the social order, but it had an economic ally. The economy of Europe was changing, as commerce, banking, and manufacturing increasingly were dominated by commoners. During this period, all this economic activity was making cities larger, richer, and more numerous. The commoner citizens of these cities formed their own infantry armies and hired mercenaries. Many of the wars of this period were between the rural aristocracy and the independent-minded cities. The kings and nobles had to either make deals with the commoners or smash their opponents and extinguish the intellectual and social progress under way. In Europe, the knights compromised, and became officers in armies of commoner musketeers, or bureaucrats in ever growing governments. It didn't have to be that way. When Japan faced this development inthe 1600s, the nobles decided to outlaw muskets and armed commoners in general. The Japanese knights (the samurai) and the nobles maintained this freeze-frame history for two centuries, until a fleet of American steamships armed with large cannons showed up. The Americans announced they were looking for trade. The Japanese saw what the alternative was and quickly played catch-up in government, industry, and military technology.
Many other great cultures of ancient times, in China, India, and the Middle East, also ignored what was going on in Europe. In these regions, the idea of change for the sake of change never caught on. If someone did try to innovate, he was eventually stomped on, or simply buried in delay and petty opposition by the conservative majority. These regions eventually had to submit to European domination, or undergo a European-style revolution.
It was not preordained that Europe would produce the scientific, social, and military progress after the Renaissance. But it did happen, and didn't happen in the rest of the world. Which means that in the future, no such similar progress is a sure thing. But for the moment, the idea of "progress" is still widely accepted. Yet in many parts of society, there is still the ancient opposition to progress and change. The military still contains a lot of people disposed toward keeping things as they are and not risking the unknown consequences of change.
What did give Europe an advantage, which it and America still hold, in this unprecedented explosion of new ideas and acceptance of them was the combination of:
* Rediscovering the "lost" knowledge of the ancients (the Renaissance).
* The fragmented political state of Europe. There were hundreds of independent kingdoms and smaller states. Each was competing with many neighbors. If an original thinker couldn't sell his idea in one place, a neighboring prince would usually be more open to something new.
* Europe had much in the way of new ideas and products coming in from other parts of the world, and the Europeans were more inclined to accept and adopt new things. Such was not the case with India and China, which, for geographical and social reasons, tended to look inward more than outward. The Middle East was also going through a renaissance, but lacked the political diversity of Europe. A handful of empires in the Middle East eventually smothered change, and the entire region stagnated while Europe went forward.
* The political divisions in Europe eventually led to religious divisions, and the new religious ideas often carried with them new concepts of social and political relationships. The other regions of the world did not have this degree of religious ferment. The Protestant movement did not produce one new church, but many, and forced the mainstream Catholic Church to reform.
* The pace and extent of change in Europe made change respectable. Even the conservatives embraced change (if only to better oppose change they didn't agree with). With this, the static nature of human cultures was forever changed.
By the 1600s in Europe, the Renaissance had petered out and things were settling down somewhat. Unfortunately, one of the leftovers of the Renaissance was a multitude of religious arguments. In Europe, the 1600s saw a number of very destructive religious wars. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was the worst of the lot. These wars were partly caused by the great number of individual states. With no political cohesion in places like Germany and Italy, it didn't take much to get someone fighting, and soon the neighbors were taking sides, and so it went. But even unified nations like France and England were rent by religious antagonisms. All this bad blood made people desperate to win, and survive. Technology was seen as a means to victory and the output of new weapons, or variations on old ones, was staggering. In less than two centuries, armies went from swords and spears to cannons and muskets.
But more than the hardware, there were now a lot more ideas on how to fight. There were training manuals and "how-to" books for officers. There were technical manuals for those who maintained the new technology, and regulations to keep the larger armies and navies functioning in an orderly fashion. Printing presses were in widespread use by 1500, and this had a lot to do with the rapid spread of the new knowledge. Literacy among the upper classes and nobility had become common during this time, and everyone read avidly. There had never been anything like this before. During the previous golden ages of culture, there had been ferments of new thought among the few tens of thousands of literate people with ready access to libraries of handcopied manuscripts. But in Europe, barely a century after the Renaissance began, printing was invented and spread rapidly to fill an existing and swiftly growing demand for printed versions of all this new (or ancient and rediscovered) knowledge.
When the contending parties wore each other out fighting during the 1600s, they made peace. By 1700, everyone found themselves with very well developed and effective armies and navies. The infantry had muskets and bayonets, there was plenty of artillery, and even the remaining cavalry troops had firearms. Warships depended on cannons, and all this weaponry was supported by government bureaucracies and complicated, but effective, taxation systems. By 1700, one could see what was coming: more government, more tax money to spend, and more military things to spend it on.
The Renaissance and the religious wars were followed by the "Age of Reason." Sort of a Renaissance, Part 2, it was a period of more new ideas and intellectualferment. Out of this period came, for example, the basic laws and form of government of the United States. The Age of Reason also produced a flood of new military thinking, and the fundamental organization of military units and officer ranks that persists to the present. Perhaps most importantly, this period saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Yes, you could say the eighteenth-century brought together all the elements necessary for the current military-industrial complex and the horde of concepts surrounding the concept of the digital soldier. It all had to begin somewhere.
Where Will It End?
WHILE THE FREQUENT appearance of new military technology is a recent development, you can now see that the rate of new military technology being developed has been increasing for over seven hundred years. Until about a century ago, weapons and equipment changed relatively slowly by current standards, but they did change. Before that, weapons and military equipment changed very little for centuries.
The development of military technology has speeded up throughout this century. Each decade of the twentieth century has seen an increased tempo of new weapons development. Part of this was due to the two world wars. Wartime always speeds up the introduction of new weapons. Partly this is because there is a huge demand. An equally important reason for all these new wartime weapons is the chance to instantly test the new ideas. Indeed, during wartime, many new weapons and items of equipment are found wanting on the battlefield and are quietly dropped. You don't hear about those, only about the ones that work.
This century has ended with the most expensive arms race in history. Between the late 1940s and the late 1980s, trillions of dollars was spent just on developing new weapons. This was more than was spent in any war in human history. While the cause of it all, the cold war, is over, the headlong plunge toward even more new military technology continues. While the Soviet/Russian weapons budget has shrunk to a fraction of its cold war size, American spending has declined much less. Other Western nations are also still spending at a large fraction of their cold war levels. In effect, money is still going into new weapons development at more than a third of the cold war rate.
We are still in an era of immense military change. For even though the spending on new weapons has come down, the thinking about how to use all the existing new (and many still untried) weapons has actually increased since the end of the cold war. What has happened in the Western nations is that the large armies and defense budgets common through most of this century havebecome accepted as the norm. We have gotten used to maintaining our forces on a wartime footing in peacetime. The traditionalist now resists going back to the small military force and slow change in weapons and equipment that were the pattern for thousands of years.
The Holy Grail of post--cold war military affairs has become the digital soldiers. We seek a new standard of technology and tactics for unknown future wars. The question is, What are the questions?
DIGITAL SOLDIERS: THE EVOLUTION OF HIGH-TECH WEAPONRY AND TOMORROW'S BRAVE NEW BATTLEFIELD. Copyright © 1996 by James F. Dunnigan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
