Ever since Archimedes devised defensive engines and ‘burning glasses’ for the defence of Syracuse against Roman attack in 212 bc, scientists and engineers have been closely involved in the conduct of war, but their involvement really took off during the Renaissance. It is to be emphasized that both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo regarded themselves as primarily military engineers. From the early 16th century onwards, and most spectacularly during the last 150 years, scientific advances have accelerated progress in military technologies. This phenomenon has not been confined to firepower and weapons development. Machine power, manifested in steam, internal combustion, and jet engines, provides strategic and tactical mobility and logistic lift to armed forces. Industrial power and mass-production techniques have shovelled copious offerings into the mouth of war since the mid-19th century. Over the last 100 years communications and information technology has transformed the command and control of armed forces.
While the American civil war is seen by some as the first industrial war, the first true demonstration of what modern war would entail was given during the Russo-Japanese war. As Fuller observed in The Conduct of War, the outstanding tactical lessons of that war included ‘the failure of frontal attacks …; the enormous defensive power of field entrenchments and wire entanglements; the increasing deadliness of the machine gun; and most marked of all, the power of quick-firing artillery’.
Many understood that the greater lethality and range of modern weaponry had tipped the scales heavily in favour of the defence, but a Warsaw banker called I. S. Bloch put this into a socio-economic context in his The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations, the sixth and concluding volume being published in English in 1899 under the title Is War Impossible? Bloch thought that the burden of war finance would bring militarily stalemated wars to an end, but he overlooked the political economy considerations that made it advantageous for rulers to persist beyond apparent reason.
Science and technology came of age fully during WW I, when nations threw all their intellectual and productive energy at each other. In just one military generation, dramatic advances in the firepower, mobility, and protection of armed forces on land, air, and sea were achieved, at a staggering human and economic cost. WW II moved the military world further along the road with armoured warfare, air power, and a cascade of electronic innovations adding new dimensions on land and sea. As a result of the multibillion dollar scientific Manhattan Project, came the development in just under three years of nuclear weapons that directly threatened the lives of ruling élites, on the basis of which a latter-day Bloch might well conclude that at last wars among technologically advanced nations have become, to put it conservatively, unlikely.
While scientists involved in Nazi genocide plumbed the depths of inhumanity, military medicine was transforming the incidence of disease and the treatment of casualties. Affecting the cutting edge perhaps more fundamentally, scientific ‘operations’ analysis and research was applied to the assisted planning and conduct of war. Since the war, the pace of technological development fed by both pure and applied science has become exponential. But all this needs to put into historical perspective: some of the military technology we recognize today can be traced back to the 16th century, when we can see that the process became irreversible after the long hiatus of the Middle Ages.
What happened in the Renaissance was the beginning of synergy, where breakthroughs in one field would feed into another with the birth of what we now call ‘lateral thinking’. Advances in chemistry produced more reliable gunpowder and metallurgy, which produced effective cannon, which in turn rendered the old high-walled castle built in a prominent location obsolete. Thus military engineering grew to require sophisticated mathematics and geometry to design the new lower and less vulnerable polygonal defensive works. In turn, the attacker needed heavier guns and new techniques such as ricochet fire, as well as tried and tested mines and the carefully calculated trenches that advanced inexorably upon a work, such that by the 17th century Vauban was to set a prescribed number of days after which a given fortification was certain to fall, permitting capitulation with an honour now based on scientific calculation rather than heroism.
While on land the engineers and generals needed reliable topographical surveys and maps to conduct campaigns, at sea the advent of a reliable chronometer ushered in one of the most profound technology-driven revolutions of all time by permitting sailors to calculate longitude. The Royal Navy, with a worldwide remit, set out to chart the oceans and many of the soundings made then are still in use today. By contrast the emancipation from wind, current, and tide represented by steam power pales into near insignificance. It is of vital importance to understand that delivery is the key to military effectiveness, something perceived by Mahan over a century ago. This was illustrated when a British nuclear submarine sank the cruiser Belgrano with a WW II vintage torpedo during the Falklands war, but even more strikingly by the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rightly described as a blow delivered by the US navy, which had brought the B-29s into range.
More mundanely, by reducing the weight, recoil, and the upper-body strength required to use infantry weapons effectively, technology has made it possible for women to participate in combat on an equal footing with men. The remaining problems are sociological, and that illustrates another of the crucial factors in the impact of science on warfare: since the Renaissance, it has been the ability of the human mind to adjust to the possibilities and not the technology itself that has dictated the rate of innovation. The weapons employed on land and sea during the Napoleonic wars were largely the same as those used 100 years earlier. What changed war beyond recognition was their application in mass formations moving faster and further than ever before, and this in turn powered the escalation of ever-increasing numbers moving more and more rapidly over ever-greater distances equipped with ever-improving weapons produced by arms manufacturers whose profits were swollen by the regular obsolescence of entire categories of weapons, a process that may be said to have reached a natural limit during WW II, the only truly total war involving the major world powers. While one of the principles of war is the economical application of force, one of the fundamentals of war is the application of economy in its broadest sense. Until the 20th century, it simply did not occur to rulers that they could second every aspect of national life to the pursuit of their policies of which, as Clausewitz epigrammatically observed, war is merely a continuation. Once they realized it, there was no stopping them.
In what he called the constant tactical factor, once again it was Fuller who identified the inescapable leapfrogging effect of technology in the eternal see-saw between offence and defence in The Dragon's Teeth (1932):
Every improvement in weapon-power (unconsciously though it may be) has aimed at lessening terror and danger on one side by increasing them on the other; consequently every improvement in weapons has eventually been met by a counter-improvement which has rendered the improvement obsolete; the evolutionary pendulum of weapon-power, slowly or rapidly, swinging from the offensive to the protective and back again in harmony with the speed of civil progress; each swing in a measurable degree eliminating danger.Thus the battles between surface ship and submarine, tank and anti-armour weapons, aircraft and anti-aircraft gun, radar and electronic countermeasure. But he also indicated a more general trend in method of distancing the weapon-firer from the place of impact of his projectile, presaging the advent of modern ‘fire and forget’ missiles. Yet the constant tactical factor applies not only to weapon-power and protection. The mobility of an armoured vehicle is directly related to its all-up weight, itself a function of armament, ammunition, engine, and fuel, and the degree of protection provided. Thus there is a triangular relationship between firepower, mobility, and protection that has been the subject of considerable scientific and engineering research. Further, the heavier the vehicle, the greater the load on bridging, which in turn leads to greater engineer personnel and matériel resources being required.
Mathematical research supporting tank design also indicated that overall success in tank engagements depended on a number of linked probabilities. As Ogorkiewicz has demonstrated, the first is that the tank must arrive in time within striking distance of the target; the second is to survive engaging the target; the third is to inflict lethal damage on the target. In turn, ‘kill probability’ is a function of hitting the target; perforating the target's armour given a hit; providing lethal damage given a perforation; and the probability of the weapon system functioning correctly. Yet success also depends on the tactical skill of the tank commander in the way he exploits ground and his tank's mobility to best advantage. Although ‘get there firstest with the mostest’ is falsely attributed to Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was not that unlettered, it sums up a principle as old as war itself, and technological sophistication of and by itself is no substitute for being at the right place, at the right time, and in sufficient strength to make it count.
The same basic problem of balancing speed, range, weapon load, survivability, and reliability applies equally to sea and air-based platforms. Further, adding effective protection in terms of earth, steel, and concrete to improve the survivability of land forces, fortifications, or other military or civil installations against attack from sea, land, or air-based weapon systems requires huge investment. Providing active defences against aircraft and missiles is also very costly, and such resources that are available may have to be spread thinly. Therefore considerable scientific research has been undertaken to improve the quality of passive defences that range from dispersion, camouflage, and deception to elaborate physical and electronic decoys such as radar reflectors. But some of the simplest of techniques remain effective. In the 1991 Gulf war the Iraqis fooled Allied air forces into attacking pick-up trucks armed with telegraph poles that looked like artillery pieces.
In general the greater the degree of technological sophistication of weapons and their platforms, the greater the amount of logistic, electrical, and mechanical repair effort required to support them. By D-Day, it was estimated that for each British fighting division ashore in Normandy (averaging 16, 000 men), approximately 25, 000 men in corps, army, GHQ, and line of communication troops would be required. Thus the ‘gross division’ or ‘divisional slice’ represented 41, 000 men. Every additional non-fighting unit places its own logistic demands, is vulnerable and needs protection, and compounds the problems of mobility. When one adds that each division was accompanied by 4, 000 RAF personnel, the overall logistic demands in fuel, food, and ammunition increased further. During the US involvement in Vietnam it was (very) conservatively estimated that for every soldier, sailor, or airman committed to combat, there were ten in support. Are we to suppose that the one man on the cutting edge was eleven times more effective as a result of all this ‘support’, or was it not rather the peripheral detracting from the central purpose?
Providing sufficient trained manpower to fight has always been a problem and one that has affected all armed forces in both world wars. Thus scientific research in order to improve efficiency in terms of improving the output, expressed as fighting power for the same (or preferably, less) personnel input, has been at a premium. For example, Soviet tank design following WW II was based on the use of automatic loaders to save one crew member. Western armies remained wedded to heavier four-man tanks with a higher silhouette. Progress at reducing manpower through labour-saving technology has been more marked in the air and at sea. For instance, the work of the Lancaster bomber with its seven-man crew is now done by a Tornado fighter-bomber with only a pilot and a navigator which can carry the same bomb-load but deliver it far more accurately. Such aircraft and all complex weapons systems today rely on electronic support for communications, position-finding, and targeting. Thus the financial and technological investment required is measured as much in software as in any hardware terms. However, the job of training the operators and developing their tactics and mission support systems remains, as does the maintenance of the weapons systems themselves, and these continue to be manpower-intensive activities. Thus ‘high-tech’ warfare works from another direction to decrease the number of ‘teeth’ while reducing neither the cost nor the manpower.
Even a cursory study of the development of science and technology in war reveals that new advances have tended to cancel each other out. This is the way of many so-called military revolutions, they simply raise the ante for all participants so that warfare continues at a higher intensity and cost, without either side gaining any permanent advantage. The same is not true, of course, of human talent, courage, and commitment, without which a technological advantage may be very much more apparent than real, nor of doctrine that may not be adequate to employ it properly or on the receiving end may be adapted in order to neutralize it. Guerrilla tactics are a case in point. There is also the matter of the political will to make a military advantage felt. At the higher end, the ability to fight war at all can depend on both sides refraining from employing a given technology. A classic contemporary illustration of this was the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that permitted navies to act out nuclear warfare exercises when everybody knew that underwater nuclear explosions would crush every submarine and rip the bottom off every surface ship over a considerably greater range (thanks to the incompressibility of water) than the effective blast from similar detonations on land.
One cannot avoid the impression that the tactical or operational impact of technical revolutions is more often overestimated in retrospect than underestimated at the time of their first fielding. The German combination of forward commanders with abundant individual drive and initiative, supported by reliable radio communications and directing armoured formations, radically increased the tempo of land operations at the beginning of WW II. But the panzer forces themselves could neither be sustained at the appropriate strength nor their tactical advantage maintained for the rest of the war. New tactics and heavier land- and air-based weapons were developed to counter them. Faced with the immense resources and strategic depth of the USSR, the blitzkrieg, so successful in the short campaigns in Poland and France, met its due nemesis. So in considering conflicts of any duration, the quest to obtain a decisive technological superiority or information dominance would appear to have been illusory. As Martin van Creveld has argued persuasively:
Using technology to acquire greater range, greater firepower, greater mobility, greater protection, greater whatever, is very important and may be crucial. Ultimately it is less critical and less important than achieving a close ‘fit’ between one's own technology and that which is fielded by the enemy. The best tactics, … are based on bypassing the enemy's strengths while exploiting the weaknesses in between. Similarly, the best military technology is not that which is ‘superior’ in some absolute sense. Rather it is that which ‘masks’ or neutralizes the other side's strengths, even as it exploits his weakness.
Thus overwhelming strategic and industrial resources coupled with immense tactical firepower provide no guarantees of success in war, as the American experience in Vietnam showed. The technologically advanced Gulf war indicated to many observers a revolution in military affairs with media-friendly precision-guided munitions, but as Keaney and Cohen have observed: ‘air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer the pleasures of gratification without the burdens of commitment.’ Therefore we should be careful about drawing simplistic lessons for other conflicts with quite different strategic conditions and terrain, as operations both in Bosnia and Kosovo have indicated. Thus while science and technology will continue to play a very important part in the planning, preparation, and conduct of war, other factors will determine its origins and outcome.
The frills and furbelows of technical innovation should never be permitted to obscure first principles. The long Cold War represented a brute application of economic power, of which technology was simply one aspect, until the weaker side gave way. Had we a time machine with which to bring Epaminondas to the present, he might observe that it differed only in scale from the battle of Leuctra.
Bibliography
- Bidwell, Shelford, and Graham, Dominick, Fire-Power (London, 1982).
- Creveld, Martin van, Technology and War (London, 1991).
- Dupuy, T. N., The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (Fairfax, Va., 1984).
- Fuller, J. F. C., The Conduct of War 1789-1961 (London, 1961).
- Guerlac, Henry, ‘Vauban: The Impact of Science in War’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (Oxford, 1986).
- Keaney, Thomas A., and Cohen, Eliot A., Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, Md., 1995).
- Macksey, Kenneth, Technology in War (London, 1986).
- Ogorkiewicz, R. M., Design and Development of Fighting Vehicles (London, 1968)
— Mungo Melvin/Hugh Bicheno
