TWO HISTORIANS IN TECHNOLOGY AND WAR

Sir Michael Howard

John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

July 20, 1994
ii

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The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do

not necessarily reflect the official policy of position of the

Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S.

Government. This report is cleared for public release; distribution is

unlimited.

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Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be

forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War

College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may be

conveyed directly to the Conference Organizer, Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.,

commercial (717) 245-3234 or DSN 242-3234. Copies of this report may be

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commercial (717) 245-4133, DSN 242-4133, FAX (717) 245-3820, or via the

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All Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) monographs are loaded on the

Strategic Studies Institute Homepage for electronic dissemination. 

SSI's Homepage address is: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/

*******

These papers were originally presented at the U.S. Army War

College Fifth Annual Strategy Conference held April 26-28, 1994, with

the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The Strategic Studies

Institute is pleased to publish the papers as part of its Conference

Series.
iii

FOREWORD

In April 1994, the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute

held its annual Strategy Conference. The theme for this year's

conference was "The Revolution in Military Affairs: Defining an Army for

the 21st Century."

New technology is one of the most compelling aspects of the

current Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Technological advance has

offered advantages to one side or another at various times since the

dawn of history and the advent of armed conflict; near simultaneous

events. Because the current RMA profoundly affects the many aspects of

armed conflict, the Army must understand this revolution in all of its

parts. Just as importantly, professional soldiers must retain their

professional perspective and avoid becoming enchanted with technology.

They would do well to remember that while technologically sophisticated

weapons can help secure victory, technology in and of itself cannot win

wars. Ultimately, wars are won or lost in the minds of soldiers and

their leaders.

Soldiers can learn about warfare from either personal experience

or from studying history. Clearly, actual combat provides very obvious

lessons, but the curriculum can be painful. Failure and death are often

synonymous. The study of the history of warfare provides the student

with an opportunity to examine critical aspects of warmaking without the

same risk. Fortunately for those who study the reasons for, and results

of, conflict, this year's Strategy Conference began with a keynote

address by one of the world's foremost military historians, Sir Michael

Howard. His address was followed, in the first formal session, by a

paper presented by Dr. John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Sir Michael and Professor Guilmartin are historians who have

experienced warfare; indeed, have distinguished themselves in combat.

Sir Michael Howard served in the Coldstream Guards in Italy in the

Second World War. Dr. Guilmartin served two tours as a U.S. Air Force

rescue helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Their personal experience with

warfare is expressed eloquently in the following pages as they make the

point that war is, as Carl von Clausewitz defined it nearly 200 years

ago, a distinctly human endeavor.

Clausewitz wrote, "the nature of war is complex and changeable." 

Because the Revolution in Military Affairs makes warfare all the more

complex and changeable, one would be well advised to heed another of

Clausewitz's admonitions, "The use of force is in no way incompatible

with the simultaneous use of the intellect." We have elected to present

the thoughts of these two warrior scholars in one volume so as to

provide the reader with something of the synergy they developed in their

presentations during the Strategy Conference.

JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director, Strategic Studies Institute
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS

SIR MICHAEL HOWARD was most recently the Robert A. Lovett Professor of

Military and Naval History at Yale University. He distinguished himself

by service in the Coldstream Guards in Italy during the Second World

War, and was twice wounded. Sir Michael earned his B.A., M.A. and

Litt.D. degrees at Oxford, where he has also been the Regius Professor

of Modern History. He is the author of numerous books and articles,

among the most notable being The Franco-Prussian War and The Continental

Commitment.

JOHN F. GUILMARTIN, JR., LTC USAF (Ret), is an Associate Professor of

History at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches

military history, maritime history and early modern European history. He

holds a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the USAF Academy and an M.A.

and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He served two tours in

Southeast Asia in long range combat aircrew recovery helicopters during

1965-66 and 1975. He was a Senior Secretary of the Navy Research Fellow

at the U.S. Naval War College during 1986-87, and served as Leader of

Task Force II, Weapons, Tactics and Training, for the Secretary of the

Air Force/Gulf War Air Power Survey. He has published and spoken widely

on pre-modern military and naval history and on the theory of war.
HOW MUCH CAN TECHNOLOGY CHANGE WARFARE?

Sir Michael Howard

There is a tendency among military professionals, particularly in

the United States, to look to history for "lessons." This is not wise.

It has been well said the words, "All History Teaches..." are usually

followed by bad history and worse logic. History is simply what

historians write, and what they write is often determined by their

prejudices. The best that even the best historians can do, on the basis

of their knowledge about the past, is to pose questions and issue

warnings about the future.

The answer to the question posed by the title of this essay is

obviously, "Quite a lot." The essence of war, however, remains the same

no matter how one defines that essence. Carl von Clausewitz's definition

of war as "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will" is as

valid today as it was two hundred years ago.1

 Violence is what turns a

conflict into a war. Trade wars and tariff wars may involve conflicting

interests, but unless there is an element of organized, sanctioned and

purposeful violence, these are not war. I shall therefore work

pragmatically on the assumption that, whatever changes brought about by

social and technological transformation, the essence of "war" remains.

Clausewitz likened it to a chameleon that takes the color of its

surroundings. While warfare may seem to change, it remains as Clausewitz

defined it, just as the chameleon, whatever color it adopts, remains the

same animal still.2

All historians do agree, however, that a systemic change in the

conduct, if not in the nature, of war was brought about during the 19th

century by the technical transformations of the industrial age. So long

as society depended upon manpower, waterpower, windpower, and animal

power for its energy sources, warfare had consisted basically of battles

or sieges conducted by armies whose size was narrowly constricted by

logistical limitations. In consequence, there was little systemic

difference between the campaigns of Julius Caesar and Scipio Africanus

on the one hand, and those of Marlborough or Frederick the Great on the

other. The study of the "Great Captains" of antiquity was, with good

reason, regarded as being still the best preparation for the conduct of

war in 18th century Europe. Technical innovations had indeed made

incremental changes. The stirrup made cavalry a controllable instrument

for organized battles as well as for sporadic raiding. Mobile heavy

artillery transformed siege warfare as it had been conducted from

antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages. The combination of the ring

bayonet with the flintlock provided a force-multiplier for infantry,

making every soldier his own musketeer as well as pikeman. The same kind

of force-multiplying effect was gained when Jean Baptiste de

Gribeauval's French army reforms resulted in a new generation of more

mobile and accurate field guns in the mid-18th century.

Clausewitz held that battle is as essential to warfare as cash

transaction is to business. Throughout the agrarian age war consisted,

if not of battle, then of the search for battle. And battle consisted,

or was seen to consist, in corps-a-corps fighting with "cold steel"--the

arme blanche. All developments in fire power were perceived as ancillary

to this. Artillery was developed to make it possible for infantry to

close with the enemy, not to make it unnecessary. Infantry volley-fire
2

was always preliminary to a charge.

Around this perceived necessity for the decisive corps-a-corps

encounter, a whole military culture developed. In this social hierarchy

those who delivered the "shock" in battle, the cavalry and elite

infantry, were at the top. All ancillaries, including artillery, took

their places lower down the pecking order. Napoleon Bonaparte became an

artillery officer because he did not have the social standing to get

into the infantry or cavalry. It is interesting to speculate whether he

would have been quite so innovative in the conduct of war if his

pedigree had been good enough for the cavalry.

During the agrarian age, the only fundamental changes that

occurred in the conduct of war were the results of social and political

factors rather than technological innovation. For instance, the chivalry

of Western Europe, which had monopolized the conduct of war for half a

millennium, was destroyed on the battlefields of France and Burgundy in

the 14th and 15th century by soldiers wielding pikes and bows, weapons

that had been around for quite a long time. It was not the advent of

those weapons that eclipsed mounted, chivalrous warfare; rather it was a

fundamental change in social attitudes that allowed peasant bowmen and

pikemen to be promoted to the core of the English and the Swiss orders

of battle. Further, it was only the development of the bureaucratic

state in early modern Europe that made possible the development of

professional, disciplined, long-serving armed forces, especially navies.

(Part of their professionalism, incidently, consisted in the study and

mastery of weapon technology.) And it was the French Revolution, not

any technological breakthrough, that made possible the Napoleonic

campaigns, which not only introduced a new operational concept into

warfare but overthrew an entire political order in Europe and prompted

Clausewitz to foresee a new era of "absolute" war.

Clausewitz prophesied better than he knew. The industrial age

which was just dawning in his lifetime, and of which he was totally

unaware, did indeed transform warfare. It did so by increasing the

range, accuracy, and lethality of weapons, while logistical

developments, in particular the railroad and the telegraph, made

possible total war on a scale such as even Clausewitz had never

conceived. Between them, these two developments produced the destructive

deadlock of the First World War. The development of firearms,

magazine-fed repeating rifles for the infantry and breech-loaded guns

for the artillery made it impossible for armies to come to sufficiently

close quarters to obtain the kind of decision that battles had always

been fought to achieve. The development of railroads, telegraphs, and

supply systems meant that the size of armies was such that their

limitations were determined only by the size of the population and the

economic capacity of the state to train and sustain them. The result was

what might be called Total War Mk. I, on the assumption that Napoleonic

warfare had been no more than an overture setting out the principal

themes. In Total War Mk. I, the entire resources of the state were

mobilized to sustain armies in the field whose only formula for victory

was attrition and whose commanders were military managers like Ulysses

S. Grant and Douglas Haig rather than the "Great Captains" of military

legend. The object of operations became, not the destruction of the

enemy army on the battlefield, but, by engaging that army in prolonged

and inescapable battles of attrition, to bleed the opposing society to

death. The first example was Grant's campaigns of 1864-65; the most
3

notorious, the Western Front in World War I in 1916 and 1917.

Total War Mk. I was to be rendered partly obsolete by further

technological innovations. Mechanization, the development and

application of the internal-combustion engine, and radio communications

restored mobility and decisiveness to the battlefield. Air power not

only extended the battlefield itself, but made it possible to attack the

social structure and the economic resources that maintained the armed

forces in the field, and to do so more directly and, in many cases, more

completely than naval blockade ever had.

In Europe, these developments of the later industrial age led to

Total War Mk. II. In this phase of warfare civilians became involved,

not just as part of the mechanism supporting the armed forces, but as

targets almost more significant than the armed forces themselves; not

only because of their role in producing the resources that made military

operations possible, but because their morale was seen as a principal

element making it possible to conduct war. The "ideal model" of Total

War Mk. II was that of the air power enthusiasts who believed that it

might be possible to decide a war without surface forces engaging at

all, but this was never achieved in World War II. That conflict was also

to be decided by attrition, victory going to the strongest industrial

powers. Air power provided only an important additional dimension.

Commanding generals such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sir Bernard L.

Montgomery, Georgi K. Zhukov, and Gerd von Rundstedt were, essentially,

military managers. "Great Captains," such as Erwin Rommel, George S.

Patton, and the British commander in Burma, General William Slim, who

carried on the heroic image of the agrarian age, were effective only

under exceptional circumstances and then usually at the margins.

The atomic bomb seemed to epitomize the era of Total War Mk. II.

After the Korean War, the battlefield itself was held in many quarters

to be an anachronism; certainly in any conflict between nuclear-armed

powers. Some laymen maintained that nuclear weapons would make war

itself impossible. Even professionals had to accept that the conduct of

war in any traditional sense would be possible only when political

circumstances set strict limits to the likelihood of its escalation.

Under those conditions, it seemed possible that traditional battlefield

skills might again come into their own. Three Arab-Israeli wars pointed

in that direction, even if the conflict in Vietnam did not. Whether the

technology of the post- industrial age will renew the need for

battlefield skills, or transform war in totally new directions, is a

subject that is being discussed at war colleges throughout the world.

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Since Operation DESERT STORM, there has been a focus on the

technological dimension of warfare. The social dimension however, is no

less important--possibly even more. In fact, the two cannot be

separated. Social structures and social needs produce technological

innovation, while that innovation in turn affects, and sometimes

transforms, the social system out of which it has developed.

In the agrarian age, as previously stated, the conduct of war was

based on the concept of the decisive battle, and the conduct of battle

on that of the decisive shock. This concept determined not only the

structure of the military hierarchy, but that of an entire social and
4

political order. Society was governed by a warrior caste whose primary

function was leadership in battle. This remained the case in Europe

through the 19th century and even into the 20th. The Emperors of France

and Austria and the King of Prussia were present on the battlefields in

1859 and 1866. Napoleon III surrendered himself and his army to the King

of Prussia to avoid further carnage at the Battle of Sedan in 1870.

Kaiser Wilhelm II remained titular commander of the German armies

throughout the First World War, while Czar Nicholas II, with General

Mikhail Alekseyev as his chief of staff, assumed personal command of the

Russian Army on the Eastern Front.

Agrarian societies were thus based on a military hierarchy, and

the classes that did not conduct war, the merchants and peasants, were

socially subordinate to those that did. War was an acceptable, indeed a

dominant and often a continuous activity. Further, horrible though war

might be, peace was not much better. Disease, pain, suffering, and

grinding hardship was the fate of all but a minute minority of the human

race. Death came in violent and terrible ways to many who never

experienced battle. Death in battle, at least, was accompanied by

prestige and panache, while for those who survived, participation in a

successful campaign held out hope of social and financial advancement.

With the dawn of the industrial age all this began to change.

Increased life expectancy was accompanied by increased comfort

expectancy. Violent and agonizing death became exceptional. The more

societies "advanced," the more they considered war to be barbarous

rather than heroic. This, paradoxically, was happening at a time when

the conduct of war was becoming dependent on conscript armies. One of

the great anxieties of European governments at the beginning of this

century, indeed, was whether these conscript armies would actually

fight, and how their populations, drawn from an increasingly urban

environment, would endure the necessary hardships of war.

In fact in World War I, the populations endured astonishingly

well. This was partly because of the social solidarity produced by

national sentiment; partly because for many European armies, especially

for those in Eastern Europe, the standard of living in the armed forces

was rather higher than what they were used to at home. But mainly they

endured because there remained, even in societies as industrialized as

Britain and Germany, a considerable residue of the standards and values

of the agrarian age. These values included a respect for authority,

deference to the monarchy and aristocracy, and a surviving tradition

among the ruling classes of heroic leadership. But national sentiment

and disciplined obedience had its limits, and during that war, almost

imperceptibly, a major transformation occurred in the conduct of battle.

At the outset in 1914, artillery fire was still being used to make

possible the decisive assault a la baionnette. But by the end of the

war, the function of fire power was to make that assault unnecessary. In

the words of the French, who took the lead in this development, "It is

fire that conquers ground; infantry occupies it." Conscript armies

showed themselves increasingly unwilling to die gloriously on the

battlefield. If they did not actually mutiny, as did the Italians and

the French, they showed other ways of making that unwillingness felt. At

home, the civil populations increasingly did the same. By the end of

that war, the concern among political, and to a lesser extent among

military, elites throughout the Western democracies was how to use
5

technology in future wars to prevent the troops from being killed.

This reaction did not affect the Germans to the same extent.

Partly because their highly professional armed forces were limited in

size by the Versailles Treaty until Adolf Hitler denounced its

disarmament clauses and Germany began rearming in 1935, the Germans

turned to the innovative use of technology to enhance the effectiveness

of their smaller army through the use of Blitzkrieg tactics. Perhaps

more important, the Nazi revolution did its best to indoctrinate the

German people, especially the young German people, with all the warrior

values of the agrarian age that the "decadent" West seemed to be losing.

This they did exceptionally well, as indeed did the Japanese. Nazi

Germany and Imperial Japan proved themselves such formidable adversaries

because they combined the techniques of industrial societies with the

values and skills of the agrarian age bolstered, respectively, by

elements of Norse mythology and Bushido traditions.

Eventually the Allies wore down the Germans and the Japanese 

under conditions very comparable to those under which the industrialized

Union wore down the armies of the agrarian Confederacy during the

American Civil War. But it has to be admitted that, with all their

technological advantages, the conscript armies of the Western

democracies in World War II did lack battlefield skills. They did not

excel at close-quarters fighting. For the most part they were very

reluctant to run risks, and most of their generals were reluctant to

make them do so. They committed their forces to action only if they

could support them with massive fire-power and by air power.

Furthermore, these forces were provided with supplies, and medical and

recreational facilities that replicated, as far as possible, the

standard of living they enjoyed at home. It proved a slow and expensive

way of making war, but given the standards and expectations of late

industrial societies, there really was no other way in which it could be

done.3

All this tended to bear out the apprehensions of the 19th-century

military analysts. Industrial societies no longer nourished the skills

and virtues that had been needed in agrarian-age war. The expectation

was that military technology would make the skills and virtues of the

warrior unnecessary. The enemy, his military forces as well as the

supporting society, could be destroyed at long distances from positions

of comparative safety. Whether in the air or on the ground, increasingly

it was felt that, insofar as close-quarter fighting was necessary, it

should be left to small teams of specialists; commandos, paras, Special

Forces, Special Operations aircraft, and the Special Air Service.4

This kind of war at long range seems very sensible and civilized,

but a troubling question remains. In spite of all the technology of the

industrial and post-industrial age, does there not still lie at the core

of all warfare a need to engage in the basic, primitive encounters of

the agrarian age? And was not the lesson of Vietnam that, if the

capacity to do so disappears, no amount of technology is going to help?

To put it in brutal terms, soldiers must not only know how to kill, but

must also be prepared if necessary to die. More important, the societies

that commit them to action must be prepared to see them die; and in

these days of CNN quite literally so. Western societies have learned how

to kill on an enormous scale, but they may still fight at a disadvantage

against agrarian age armies who have not forgotten how to die and know
6

well-enough how to kill. The Vietnam War and the recent experience in

Somalia indicate that if those agrarian age armies are well-led, and if

their leaders develop superior strategies, they can still prevail. A

readiness to engage in close combat in which there is a very high risk

of mortality remains the basic requirement, not only of the specialists

in violence, but of every man and woman in uniform. When they put on

that uniform, they are accepting that risk.

So long as, in the words of Hilaire Belloc,

We have got

The Maxim gun,

and they have not

the skills and virtues of the agrarian age may no longer be so essential

as they were in the past. But even today our forces have to engage in

combat against highly-motivated peoples whose primary concern is to kill

them; and are willing to risk their own lives to do so. Furthermore,

they may have the equivalent of the Maxim gun as well. Future conflicts

will not be so conveniently one-sided as was the Gulf War. Will future

technology be able entirely to eliminate the need for the armed forces

of Western societies to be placed in situations where they are required

not only to kill, but accept the risk of being killed, perhaps in large

numbers; and will our post-industrial societies find that acceptable? In

short, can technology change what has until now been the essence of

warfare?

Notes:

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Parets,

eds., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989 ed., p. 75.

2. Ibid.

3. The United States, at least, perhaps because the final victory

in World War II was so complete, did not seem to learn from the

experience. The swimming pools, officer clubs, indoor and outdoor movie

theaters, tennis courts, gymnasiums, even miniature golf courses,

bowling alleys, and archery ranges built into the more lush American

bases throughout Vietnam and Thailand a quarter century later, are

testimony to that fact. Ed.

4. A technological case in point is the U.S. Air Force

McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter-bomber. It was conceived in the

early 1950s for the U.S. Navy as an air-to-air missile launching

platform to be used for fleet defense. During the Vietnam War, the Air

Force and the Navy used it to perform attack missions. Only in its very

last production models (the F-4Es built in the late 1960s and early

1970s) was an internal gun included so that it could perform the

"warrior-like" mission of aerial combat (called "dogfighting") more

effectively. During the 1960s, despite evidence to the contrary

resulting from aerial engagements in the skies over North Vietnam,

training in air-to-air combat maneuvering and gunnery was practically

nonexistent in the U.S. Air Force based on the assumption that advances

in air-to-air missile technology would make old fashioned dogfighting

unnecessary. Ed.
7

TECHNOLOGY AND STRATEGY: WHAT ARE THE LIMITS?

John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

technology, n., (1): the application of knowledge to achieve

a physical effect by means of an artifact, object or thing

(distinct from art, which involves the application of

knowledge to achieve aesthetic effect). (2): the artifact

itself; the class of artifacts to which it belongs. (3): the

knowledge needed to design, manufacture, operate, sustain and

logistically support the artifact or thing and its user(s).

Author's working definition

Sometime around the beginning of the fourth millennium BC an

anonymous metalworker in the Fertile Crescent, no doubt after

consultation with his village hero, the defender of fields and

agricultural surplus, smelted a quantity of imported ore and cast a

small sphere of copper pierced with a hole tapered to accept a haft.

Breaking the object from its mold, he dressed and polished it and

inserted the haft, fashioned from wood carefully chosen for strength,

resilience, and perhaps magical properties. He then fixed the sphere

securely in place with wedges, thongs or perhaps glue, a chore of vital

importance, for the bond between haft and sphere would have to reliably

resist unprecedented accelerational and vibrational forces in the harsh

arena of combat, and structural failure would expose the user to lethal

risk. Invoking the blessings of the deities who presided over the

smelting and hafting processes and had permitted him to penetrate their

mysteries, he presented the finished object to the hero. In so doing, he

completed the research and development (R&D) cycle of the acquisition

program of the first weapons system--or for that matter any system--to

use metal for other than ceremonial or ornamental purposes: the

copper-headed mace.1

To this point, the production of food, clothing and shelter had

been the leading edge of technology. The development by selective

breeding in late Paleolithic and Neolithic times of plant and animal

sources of food and fiber was perhaps the most impressive achievement,

though the development of seafaring, fired pottery and polished stone

implements for cutting and grinding was not far behind.2 The earlier

development of the bow, no doubt for hunting though arrows could kill

humans as well as game, was a major benchmark as well. Whether the

application of animal traction to agriculture came before or after the

development of the stone-headed mace is not known. What is clear is that

the appearance of sedentary agriculture and storable food surpluses made

the specialist combatant both possible and necessary.3

 We know little

about the first military specialists, but it is clear that their ideas

about weaponry, its production and uses, diverged sharply from those of

hunter-gatherers who might supplement their larder by raiding

neighboring tribes. From that change in attitudes emerged the

specialized technology of war, and with the appearance of the

copper-headed mace military applications assumed a leading role in the

development of technology which they have rarely relinquished since.

We can surmise the rest of the story from the archaeological and

historical record. The hero, skilled in the use of the stone-headed

mace, adjusted his swing and footwork to the new and more powerful
8

weapon, no doubt with the aid of a sparring partner. The results were

sufficiently encouraging to prompt adoption of the new weapon.

Operational test and evaluation (OT&E) was a smashing success, both

figuratively and literally. Invoking the protection of the gods of the

village and battle, the hero demonstrated the effectiveness of the new

weapon, laying out for divine and human inspection in Chalcolithic body

count the barbarian warriors whose crushed skulls were proof of its

power--and of that of the gods which sponsored its development. As

fabricator and wielder hoped, the bold use of a new technology had

yielded important advantages in combat. But copper was scarce and smiths

able to work it scarcer still. Copper-headed maces were wielded only by

the select of the gods and the possession and use of such weapons became

closely associated with divine approbation and earthly power.

Significantly, the earliest known inscription in which an individual

human being is identified by name, the Palate of King Narmer dating from

around 3,100 BC, depicts the first Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt

ceremonially smashing the forehead of a prostrate enemy with a mace.4

The copper-headed mace in the hands of a powerful champion

remained the world's premier weapons system for a very long time, but

then as now both technology and the political ends to which it was

applied were subject to change. In Egypt and regions of the Fertile

Crescent blessed with broad river valleys and fertile soil, villages

gave way to cities. Competition for resources and favor in the sight of

the gods increased and the defenders of cities fought one another as

well as barbarians. The barbarians responded to increasing prosperity

among the civilized polities with increased aggression and to advances

in civilized weaponry by augmenting the power of their traditional

weapons, notably the bow. Proliferation became a reality as barbarians

adopted metal points for their spears and arrows. The smith provided the

hero with protective armor of leather-backed Electrum to shield his body

from stones and arrows and to protect his head from the crushing blow of

a mace. Early in the third millennium, Sumerian smiths responded to the

appearance of effective head protection by developing a whole new

technology, first manifested in the piercing axe of arsenic bronze. The

appearance of the piercing axe accelerated the race between offensive

and defensive weaponry which continues to this day and ushered in a

whole new age, the Bronze Age.

The above summary, of course, is simplified. Examined in detail,

the interplay in late prehistoric and early historic times among

developments in the design and production of weapons systems; changes in

the way in which they were viewed and used; evolution of the social,

ideological and economic systems they served; and--the crux of the

matter--changes in the ways in which weapons systems served political

ends, both in perception and reality; were far more complex. Regions

slipped into and out of the Bronze Age as reserves of easily-worked ores

were depleted and better smelting technologies were developed. Long

distance trade in strategic materials became increasingly important.5

“Barbarians" engaged by hydraulic civilizations as mercenary warriors

overthrew their employers and established their own dynasties, merging

languages and cultures.

From the military and technological perspective, the lessons are

clear. Advances in technology have yielded important military advantages

from the earliest times. More often than not the demands of war press

technological change first and farthest. The technology of war is
9

developed and applied within a cultural and social context of which

supra-rational beliefs are an important part. Evaluation criteria

revolving around tactical success are an integral part of the process of

selection or rejection. Finally, the production of high technology

weaponry may well depend on imported materials.

Finally, this example from remote antiquity makes a two-fold

point: first, that the decision-making matrix within which the

technology of war is developed, tested, adopted or rejected, and applied

in combat is at bottom culturally-derived; and, second, that the

essential categories in that matrix have seen remarkably little change

over the ages. In short, history is relevant.

After briefly describing the establishment of the geo-political,

technological and cultural context within which our military

institutions presently operate, this monograph will then trace the

technological developments which formed the backdrop for the supposed

military technological revolution of the recent past. For a number of

reasons, the story begins in 1914. First, by then the national

boundaries and perceived national interests of the major economic and

military players in today's international arena were in place. Second,

the basic notions of national interests, national policy objectives and

the appropriate national and military strategies for pursuing them were

also in place or emerged shortly thereafter. On a technical military

level, the continuing influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan's Theory of Sea

Power, promulgated in the late 1890s, substantiates this point. Finally,

one can argue that our basic notions of military strategy and tactics at

the national level, and professional military officers' ideas of how to

go about implementing them, are firmly rooted in the experience of World

War II and largely derived from World War I. The fact that the United

States participated in both wars served to reinforce their lessons. Much

of our technical military vocabulary comes to us directly from the two

world wars: front lines, frontal system (as in weather forecasting),

barrage, strafe, flak, spotting artillery and calling out bandits by

clock position; so do our approaches to recruiting, training, weapons

system procurement and organization of the national industrial and

scientific base for war. Having briefly delineated this baseline,

offered as a war paradigm, this monograph will then examine recent

changes in the technology of war and address the proposition that they

are of sufficient magnitude to require a paradigm shift.

When Gabrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in

Sarajevo to start the First World War, the essential elements of our war

paradigm, though not their interpretation, were in place. Industry, and

through industry science, had been firmly and more or less formally

harnessed to war, though navies were more clearly aware of the link than

armies and more skilled at exploiting it.6

 Air forces existed in nascent

form. Artillery technology on land and at sea had been brought to a

level which differs from today's only in degree by the universal

adoption of nitrocellulose-based propellants; high explosive shells with

time delay fuses; hydro-pneumatic recoil systems; and breech loading,

quick fire mechanisms. Armies throughout the world had standardized on

small arms using ammunition which differs in no essential way from the

predominant form in use today: a fixed round consisting of brass case,

nitrocellulose propellant, impact primer and jacketed lead bullet.

The determinant of strategic capability subject to the greatest
10

change over the next three quarters of a century lay not in weaponry,

but in the industrial base. In 1914, industrialized nations with

adequate reserves of coal and iron ore were essentially militarily

self-sufficient, dependence on natural nitrates for high explosives

production having been eliminated as a strategic consideration by the

recent German discovery of atmospheric nitrogen fixation. Transportation

and steel production were the critical determinants of military

strategic power, manifested in weapon and munitions production, capital

ships and railroad mobilization. All were fueled by coal. Indeed,

industrial capacity, and hence military capacity, was almost congruent

with coal and iron ore reserves, Japan being the only exception though,

for the moment, a minor one. To be sure, the successful adaptation of

the internal combustion engine to military applications was a harbinger

of things to come. During the Great War, gasoline-fueled aero engines

would absorb only a tiny proportion of fuel energy expended, but

aircraft would exercise a disproportionate influence on land operations

by its end. The same point applies to the strategic impact of

diesel-powered submarines at sea. In the run-up to war, Britain had

begun construction of a new class of capital ships powered by oil-fueled

steam turbines, the Queen Elizabeth class battleships, to exploit of the

substantial advantages of oil over coal in thermal and volumetric

efficiency, consciously accepting the strategic vulnerability implicit

in dependence on imported oil--and hedging its bets by seizing the

recently-discovered Iranian oil fields.7

Imports in certain specialized niches were important to the

conduct and outcome of the First World War; significantly, these took

effect at the high end of the technology spectrum: American spruce was

important to French and British aircraft production. Petroleum was

sufficiently important strategically--most critically for aviation

gasoline though gasoline-powered trucks and tractors performed certain

essential tasks beyond the capacity of horses--and the Central Powers'

reserves sufficiently small that only Romania's obliging declaration for

the Allies in 1916 saved Germany and Austria-Hungary significant

embarrassment by placing the Ploesti oil fields in their hands. The

petroleum-based lubricants of the day broke down under the temperatures

produced by high performance rotary radial aero engines and the British

blockade denied Germany supplies of the castor oil they required,

effectively grounding some of Germany's best fighters of 1918. On the

whole, however, the war economies of the powers whose military forces

dominated the conflict were self-sufficient and coal powered.

By the eve of the Second World War, oil had supplanted coal and

iron as the critical determinant of military power. Coal and iron ore

retained their importance to war production, to be sure; steel was vital

to weapons manufacture and coking coal was needed to smelt steel.

Moreover, while bunker oil had largely replaced steam coal as the fuel

of navies and merchant marines, coal-fueled steam locomotives and

electric power plants played a vital role in the war economies of the

contending powers. Indeed, the sophistication with which German industry

squeezed every possible advantage from the Third Reich's coal deposits

gave the German war economy a remarkable robustness and probably

lengthened the war by six months to a year.8

 But in the final analysis,

the enduring economic and industrial importance of coal notwithstanding,

tactical success at the cutting edge, and thus strategic advantage,

depended on machines fueled by gasoline, diesel fuel and bunker oil.
11

If high performance aircraft were a critical determinant of the

outcome of the First World War on land, they were an absolutely

indispensable ingredient of victory on land and at sea in the Second.

Moreover, the capabilities of military aviation had increased to the

point that entire air campaigns were mounted. At least one, the Battle

of Britain, was clearly decisive and others were arguably so, though not

always in a form highlighted by conventional measurements of victory and

defeat. An example can be seen in the devastating effect on the German

war effort of the massive losses of trained aircrew which the Luftwaffe

incurred in the spring of 1943 in efforts to reinforce and then evacuate

German forces in North Africa.9

 Tanks, fueled by gasoline and diesel

oil, became a critical tactical determinant of victory on land wherever

terrain permitted their use. Armies spearheaded by armored fighting

vehicles were supplied, at least in the attack, not by rail but by truck

convoy; trucks and tractors replaced horses as field artillery prime

movers. That Wehrmacht petroleum reserves were so scant that the German

Army had to rely on horse traction for tactical logistics and field

artillery mobility would seem, with full wisdom of hindsight, to have

virtually preordained defeat.

The pivotal importance of oil to the war at sea is even more

apparent. The lack of petroleum reserves in the Home Islands forced the

Japanese militarists to go to war or back down in December 1941. The

vulnerability of Japanese merchant shipping, oilers in particular, to

attack by American submarines placed the Japanese war economy in an

ever-tightening noose from 1943 on, a noose made even tighter by

air-dropped mines in the final year of the war. Though the American war

economy was effectively self-sufficient, that of Britain was anything

but and German U Boats and aerial commerce raiders posed a similar

threat to the Western Allies. From the British standpoint, the critical

strategic logistic requirement from the beginning was the provision of

sufficient stocks of petroleum to support naval and air operations from

British bases, a requirement which expanded to encompass the support of

U. S. air forces from 1942 and the support of Allied ground forces on

the continent after D Day. The war at sea intersected with that in the

air and on land in the critical importance of British petroleum stocks,

for those stocks had to be replenished from American and Iranian

oilfields by ship.

The importance of oil to the conduct and outcome of the Second

World War extended well beyond quantitative, macro-economic

considerations. High octane aviation gasoline gave British and American

aircraft, particularly fighters, a critical performance boost not

enjoyed by their Axis equivalents; indeed, some have gone so far as to

attribute British victory in the Battle of Britain to 100 octane

gasoline. Axis engineers were well aware of the performance advantages

conferred by high octane, but the refining process was highly

inefficient, many more barrels of crude being required per barrel of

refined gasoline as octane increased. So long as their sea lanes stayed

open, Britain and America could afford the inefficiency; the Germans,

Japanese and Italians could not, and their fighter pilots entered combat

at a significant handicap.

Beyond the critical importance of petroleum as a fuel, the

relative importance of coal and iron was further eroded by the emergence

in the interwar period of new structural materials with critically

important properties which could not be obtained with steel. Moreover,
12

in most cases if not all, reserves of these structural materials lay

beyond the boundaries of the major powers. Far and away the most

important was aluminum, the preeminent structural material for high

performance aircraft from the mid-1930s.10 Rubber, the raw material of

pneumatic tires, O rings, aircraft de-icer boots and a host of other

essential sub-technologies, was a tropical import. Rubber could be

synthesized from petroleum and coal, but the product was inferior, the

process inefficient and the raw materials valuable. Tungsten carbide was

required to give hardness and durability to machine tool cutting heads.

Only small quantities were needed, but there was no substitute and

Germany lacked tungsten deposits, a fact with implications beyond the

machine shop floor. Tungsten carbide is not only extremely hard, but

extremely dense and German engineers developed highly effective

anti-tank ammunition using sub-caliber tungsten carbide penetrators.

Guns designed to fire this ammunition were much lighter and more mobile

than their Allied equivalents and were among the most powerful anti-tank

guns of the war, but shortages of tungsten forced their abandonment in

1942.11

In sum, the preeminence of oil as the crucial determinant of

strategic capability and tactical effectiveness in World War II is

clear. The result was a war in which the ability to move raw materials

over extended distances by sea was both a vital determinant of victory

and a potentially lethal vulnerability. At a lower level of abstraction,

the ability of design engineers to harness the propulsive energy of

petroleum distillates and apply them to the propulsion of military

vehicles played a major role in shaping the outcome of the war. Within

this matrix, the design and production of fighter aircraft was arguably

the most critical node, though the design and production of bombers,

tanks, torpedoes, submarines, artillery pieces, escort and

anti-submarine vessels, assault landing craft, trucks, prime movers and

so on in approximate--and debatable--descending order of importance

followed closely behind. More important than their individual tactical

power and strategic importance, none of these critically important

technologies could be approached in isolation, either from one another

or from the production and logistical apparatus which built and

supported them.

Moreover, the increasing tactical and operational interdependence

of the various technologies of war and their sophistication lent a new

importance to the human factor. The establishments which selected and

trained the crews upon whose skill the effectiveness of military

hardware depended were of pivotal importance. To cite a critical and

illustrative example, the ability of the U. S. and Commonwealth air

forces to generate large numbers of well-trained pilots played a major

role in the defeat of the German and Japanese air arms, while poor

planning and worse execution in this area by the Germans and Japanese

went far to ensure Axis defeat.12 Nor was the importance of recruitment,

selection and training limited to operation of the most expensive and

sophisticated weapons systems: the increasing power and diversity of

infantry weapons and the increasing sophistication of infantry tactics

posed serious challenges for training establishments, not least of all

in the United States where a small peacetime Army and Marine Corps had

to expand enormously in very short order. Raw nationalism had sufficed

to mobilize and motivate millions of recruits at the outset of war in

1914-17. By 1939-41, disillusionment with the ideologies of an earlier

day called for more sophisticated appeals.
13

Finally, the Second World War brought home to the Americans and

British, at least, the verity that science not only could contribute to

the war effort but was essential to its prosecution. If the war was run

and won on petroleum, it was guided, directed and shaped by electronics,

optics and acoustics. Just as coal gave way to oil, telegraph wires and

submarine cables gave way to the vacuum tube. As with the internal

combustion engine, there were harbingers in the First World War:

wireless telegraphy was used to control fleets, and at times armies, and

was exploited for intelligence; field telephones came into common use;

the artillery preparations which broke the back of the German Army in

the last year of the war depended on aerial photo-mapping and

photographic reconnaissance for their effectiveness; sophisticated

electronic and acoustic sensors were used to direct counterbattery

fire.13 Between the First and Second World War there was an increase in

communications and sensor capability of at least an order of magnitude:

radar, sonar and electronic cryptanalysis have received the lion's share

of attention; but on a day-to-day basis aerial photo reconnaissance was

of at least comparable importance, particularly to the British and their

American understudies who used it most effectively; and voice radio and

intercommunications systems had enormous impact across the board.14 But

the most important change was not in capability, but in use: Sensors and

electronic communications were tactically and operationally important in

World War I, and at times played a vital role. In World War II, they not

only totally recast the face of war tactically, they had direct

strategic impact: the British, and then Anglo-American, systematic,

centrally-directed collection and analysis of photographic, electronic

and human intelligence is the most dramatic example, though by no means

the only one.

Still, both world wars were won as much by production as

technique, though the quality of what was produced was important to the

outcome, particularly in the second. In sum, both wars were won by

engaging and overwhelming the enemy production and population base. In

World War I, this was accomplished indirectly though attrition of

manpower and material at the front and by eroding the war economy and

civilian morale through naval blockade. Direct attack on allied sea

lines of communication by submarine had the potential to cause the

collapse of the British war economy, but inadequate resource allocation

doomed the German U Boat campaign to failure. In World War II,

production and population bases were exposed to direct attack by aerial

bombardment, and economic attrition by submarine attack came into its

own, though the Germans once more put inadequate resources into the

effort.

The military leaders of the United States and their civilian

superiors learned the lessons of World War I as well as the leaders of

any major power. Granted, the British taught the Americans some vital

lessons in technique, but it is safe to say that by 1944-45, the U.S.

military establishment had embraced and mastered a war paradigm which

corresponded very closely to strategic reality. It is important to note

that this paradigm incorporated a keen appreciation of the importance of

technological advantage and of the need to systematically pursue that

advantage in time of peace. This perception stemmed largely from

painful memories of the unpreparedness of its air arm and field

artillery when the United States entered World War I.15 That perception

found expression in the steady expansion of aerodynamic knowledge by the
14

National Advisory Committee on Aviation (NACA) during the interwar years

which yielded important dividends in World War II.16 It also found

expression in the design of a range of thoroughly capable artillery

pieces, already in production when war came, and a rationalized scheme

for the production of trucks and prime movers.17

Still, at bottom, insofar as technology was concerned, the central

focus of the American war paradigm was on production. The creation after

World War II and continued existence of the Industrial College of the

Armed Forces provide eloquent testimony to that emphasis, an emphasis

which is deeply imbedded in the U.S. military services' corporate

memories and thought processes. John Patrick has neatly encapsulated

that reality in his perceptive description of the U.S. Army, Navy, and

Air Force as “classic industrial institutions."18

The fundamental underpinnings of the paradigm, however, were

shaken by the advent of the nuclear age. After a brief period of

unexploited monopoly, nuclear proliferation set in. The United States

and its primary allies faced the reality of the Cold War; they also

faced a situation in which their industrial bases were secure from

direct attack save by a massive nuclear strike which would surely have

been answered in kind.

In the United States, the immediate response at the national level

was to embrace a new and radically different war paradigm under the

rubric of massive retaliation. Confident under the atomic and then

thermo-nuclear umbrellas, Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D.

Eisenhower drew down conventional forces. To their great credit,

elements within the Army and Navy challenged the validity of the new

paradigm but it took the Korean War to demonstrate that defense could

not be bought on the cheap with nuclear weapons. The lesson was that the

United States needed deployable divisions, carrier task forces and the

draft. After the Korean War, the two paradigms uneasily coexisted side

by side and the resultant inconsistencies produced problems: the Air

Force, at least, continued to assume that air power should be applied as

it had been in World War II. Consequently, the United States bombed

North Korea as if it were Nagoya or the Rhur. Over a decade later, the

essence of Air Force plans for bombing North Vietnam was not

substantially different.19

As the U.S. defense establishment relearned the value of

conventional forces, concern for the cost of national defense came to

the fore, and defense dollars became tight. The attention of senior

military officers and staffs was directed increasingly to the

competition for funding for weapons system procurement. Secretary of

Defense Robert S. McNamara's establishment of rules for the competition

in the form of PPBS (Planning, Programming and Budgeting System) only

formalized and accelerated an ongoing trend. By focusing preemptively on

rigorous quantitative analysis of cost benefit effectiveness, PPBS

subtly inhibited technological innovation: to calculate whether or not

something is worth its cost, one must know precisely what it will do.

Since by definition it is impossible to precisely predict the effect of

something which has never been made before, advantage in the PPBS arena

accrued to systems which offered incremental improvements of tried and

true technologies whose effect could be predicted with reasonable

accuracy. Should anyone be surprised, then, that an extraordinarily high

proportion of weapons systems procurement programs which have yielded
15

major advances in military capability were the product of “black"

programs, originated and managed outside the PPBS mainstream? The

bureaucracies that blossomed throughout the defense establishment were

managed by military accountants who, in addition to confusing efficiency

with effectiveness, also inhibited imagination and innovation. One

should not be surprised that black programs, on the other hand, seem to

have been more successful than those which have had to run the entire

PPBS gauntlet.20

At the same time, while the awesome power of nuclear and

thermonuclear weapons was monopolizing the attention of defense

intellectuals and PPBS that of military professionals, emergent new

technologies were beginning to gnaw away at what we might term the

classical, World War-derived, war paradigm and its massive

retaliation-derived supplement. Salient among these technologies in

rough chronological order were: digital electronic computers; new sensor

systems, particularly in the infrared spectrum; new structural

materials, first simple ablatives for ICBM (intercontinental ballistic

missile) warhead heat shields, and then entirely new materials such as

phenolic resin honeycomb, reinforced carbon and fiberglass boron fiber

composites; and, last but most decisive in net effect, transistors and

the miniaturized and more powerful analytical computers which they

spawned. One could add to the list the turbojet engine, which fit the

existing war paradigm very nicely, but which in the form of very small,

highly fuel efficient powerplants for cruise missiles and RPVs (remotely

piloted vehicles) challenges it directly today.

It is worth noting, however, that many of these new technologies

were developed and initially exploited for explicitly military purposes

during World War II. The story of the turbojets' independent development

in Germany and Britain is well known. Ablative materials were discovered

more or less accidentally in the V-2 program and computer technology got

an enormous boost from the demands of cryptanalysis in the United States

and Britain. The guidance mechanism on the later V-2s was the first

reprogrammable electronic analog computer.21

For a time, these innovations fit our bifurcated war paradigm

reasonably well. But of greater importance over the long term, the

application of the paradigm continued to promote effective innovation.

In the 1950s systematic development of jet engine technology combined

with innovative airframe design and far-sighted military requirements to

produce the jet bombers which made nuclear deterrence a strategic

reality pending the development of ICBMs. Those same jet bombers, with

the B-47 as the seminal design, spawned the Boeing 707 and its

imitators, giving air transportation a whole new strategic dimension.22

They also forced the development of air-to-air refueling which gave U.S.

air operations an unprecedented flexibility which no other nation can

match. Ablative heat shields combined with the discovery by NASA

engineers of the aerodynamic and thermal advantages of detached shock

wave reentry to make the ICBM a practical reality.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, the new technologies began to

combine synergistically with unprecedented and largely unanticipated

impact. Perhaps the first concrete indication of the potential of the

new technologies came with the fielding by the U.S. Navy of a massive

underwater passive sonar array to track Soviet ballistic missile

submarines. The use of passive sonar to locate submarines was hardly
16

new; the use of analytical computers with logic and memory circuits

capable of discriminating between the whisper of a nuclear submarine's

passage and the rumbles, squeaks and whistles of the sea was. The

Vietnam War produced yet other harbingers: the Army fielded the first

operational stealth aircraft, the Lockheed YO-3A used for night

observation.23 Navy and Air Force airmen made effective use of

electro-optical and laser-guided bombs (EOGBs and LGBs) to strike

heavily-defended targets with unprecedented accuracy in the Linebacker

bombing offensives.24 These developments, however, took effect in

isolation.

By the late 1980s, the emergent technologies were rapidly

converging to produce an unprecedented array of new capabilities. The

driving force was the transistor: transistors immediately permitted

order of magnitude reductions in size for the same computing capacity,

directly because transistors are much smaller than vacuum tubes which

perform an equivalent function and indirectly because they require far

less power and emit far less heat. Of at least equal importance

transistors are infinitely more reliable than vacuum tubes. The

magnitude of the difference and the speed with which it was exploited is

illustrated by two examples: the SM-64 Navaho, a sophisticated

vertically-launched airbreathing cruise missile of the mid- to late

1950s with a cruise vehicle about the size of an F-15; and the mach 2

capable B-58, which entered service in 1957. The Navaho was an

aerodynamic success and the rocket engine which powered its piggy-back

booster was a direct ancestor of rockets which put man on the moon, but

the unreliability of its vacuum tube circuitry earned it the name

“Never-go Navaho," even as a research vehicle. Like the Navaho, the B-58

was an aerodynamic success and an operational failure, though not for

the same reason; fast as it was, it could not outrun Soviet air-to-air

missiles. The core of the B-58 bomb-nav system was a 1,200 pound

electronic analog computer, the largest ever made, with a ticker tape

readout.25 The guidance and navigation computers of the Tomahawks and

ALCMS (Air Launched Cruise Missiles) used in DESERT STORM, designed to

do the same basic job as those of the Navaho and B-58, are not much

larger than a carton of cigarettes.

But the importance of the size and reliability of avionics

components is not the only lesson to be gleaned from the Navaho and B-58

stories. Each system exploited mature technologies which were at or near

their limits of development and, barring the development of novel

replacement technologies, are likely to remain so. The Navaho cruise

vehicle tested the aerodynamic theories which were the basis for the

development of our current generation of air-to-air fighter aircraft,

pioneering the outward-splayed twin vertical stabilizers which are a

feature of every high performance multi-engined U.S. fighter since the

F-14. The Navaho booster's liquid oxygen/kerosene-fueled rocket engine

represented a significant improvement over earlier rockets in

thrust-to-weight ratio and efficiency, but subsequent advances have been

modest for reasons rooted in unalterable physical reality: the chemical

energy resident in known oxidizer/ propellant combinations and the

molecular weights of their decomposition products.26 As one progresses

to more energetic and efficient fuel/oxidizer combinations, the

difficulties of containment and handling increase exponentially, yet

improvements in performance are comparatively modest.27 For certain

high priority applications, of course, the incremental increase in

performance justifies the increased technical risk and cost, but it is
17

worth noting that the Titan, a mid-1950s design, is still our workhorse

booster for heavy unmanned payloads and the even older Atlas booster and

Agena upper stage remain first-line equipment.28

The same point can be made with regard to the J-79 turbojets which

powered the B-58. The turbofan engines which power today's first line

fighters and bombers are far more fuel efficient than the J-79, but as a

practical matter few of the aircraft they drive are much faster than the

B-58. USAF F-4G "Wild Weasel" anti-radiation attack aircraft powered by

J-79s were first line equipment in DESERT STORM, and if their

fuel-guzzling engines required more trips to the tanker than newer

strike aircraft, the F-4Gs were at no great disadvantage in speed,

ordnance carriage or maneuverability. Simply put, given kerosene-based

jet fuels and aluminum structures, performance improvements for manned

combat aircraft have been marginal since the mid-1960s and are likely to

remain so.29 Granted, exotic engines burning exotic fuels can drive

specialized airbreathing platforms made of exotic materials to much

greater speeds; the largely titanium SR-71 cruised at mach 3.5+ and its

successors will be considerably faster (perhaps already are) but such

vehicles are expensive, highly specialized and require enormous amounts

of skill and care to operate. The one area in which the United States

can anticipate major improvements in aerospace vehicle propulsion over

the short term is in extremely small airbreathing engines for

remotely-piloted vehicles and cruise missiles, and here the improvement

will be in not in speed, but in compactness, fuel efficiency and range.

To return to the main argument, shrinkage of avionics packages

with the advent of transistors was only the tip of the iceberg, for

transistorized circuitry also permitted enormous increases in computing

power. On a mundane level, the increased power of design computers

turned finite element stress analysis from an exotic, time-consuming

routine applied only to the most critical of complex stress analyses to

the workhorse of structural engineering in the mid- to late 1980s. On a

more exotic level, powerful design computers made feasible the complex

multivariable analyses of radar returns as function of aspect, geometry,

reflectivity and structural properties which made stealth aircraft a

reality. The result was a revolution not only in the capabilities and

reliability of existing categories of systems, but an ability to design

entirely new kinds of weaponry.

The tactical results were demonstrated dramatically in DESERT

STORM. In terms of operational impact, the salient capabilities were:

LGBs used in combination with night-capable target acquisition and

tracking devices; sophisticated night-capable tank fire control systems;

the ability to operate at night in general; the operational debut of

stealth in the form of the F-117A; long range cruise missiles capable of

genuine precision, notably the Tomahawk; the widespread use of secure

voice communications and facsimile machines for command, control and

coordination; the massive use of air refueling, as much for operational

flexibility as for simple range extension; the advent of

beyond-visual-range air-to-air combat as an operational reality; and the

operational debut of airborne radar systems like JSTARS, capable of

monitoring the land battle in detail.

The fact that they were deployed against an enemy inferior in many

critical systems and training notwithstanding, the application of these

capabilities in combination struck with unprecedented tactical and
18

operational impact. They also produced unanticipated problems, notably

in the difficulty of applying our intelligence systems and analytical

methods to the unprecedentedly swift tempo of the war.

A handful of predictable errors notwithstanding, American ground

and air forces were remarkably successful in conducting and supporting a

highly mobile, highly lethal, land war without defined fronts. This was

a training achievement of the first magnitude: total U.S. casualties

approximated in number what a cynic might have expected to ensue from

that many men and women driving that far, that fast and at night over

the same terrain without opposition. The quality of American aircrew

training was equally apparent: for the Air Force, at least, the aircraft

accident rate, indeed the total loss rate per flying hour, went down.

One's first reaction on appreciating the full magnitude of what

U.S. and allied forces had achieved in DESERT STORM was to draw a

parallel with Robert Clive's victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757 in

which 850 British troops and 2,100 Sepoys trained to British standards

prevailed over a force of some 52,000 Indians and 200 French

mercenaries.30 Just as well-trained and equipped Western European armies

and navies of the late 18th and 19th centuries were able to defeat

forces not trained to European standards almost without regard to

numerical odds, it is likely then that a balanced U.S. force of all

arms, properly equipped and supported and competently led, could defeat

any number of anything else. Certain of our allies, notably the British,

can achieve similar results when backed by specialized U.S. support in

critical areas such as electronic warfare.

Turning from technology and tactics to strategic limits poses two

questions: to what extent does the revolution in military technology

expand strategic capabilities; and to what extent does the prevailing

war paradigm hold true? Of the two, the second may be the more critical

understanding of the nature of war; and how it is waged will directly

determine not only tactical and operational effectiveness in future

conflicts but also strategic success. The technological and tactical

revolution witnessed over the last decade was undergirded by

evolutionary adjustments in the war paradigm which have the potential to

yield major strategic dividends. At the same time, the threat has

changed in ways which are so fundamental as to require an extensive

rethinking of the strategic equation.

As suggested above, the primary technological constraints to U.S.

strategic capabilities in the two world wars in which this basic war

paradigm was forged involved productive capacity rather than tactical

capability. Note, however, that the tactical capabilities of individual

weapons systems were more important to the outcome of the Second World

War than the First and that the United States and its principal ally,

Britain, were rather successful in anticipating the shift and planning

for it. In this sense, the development of the technologies fielded in

DESERT STORM was more an evolutionary trend than a revolution in

military thought. This encouraging thought must be balanced by a more

sober one: as noted implicitly at the outset, the geopolitical and

social contexts of the two world wars were strikingly similar. Indeed,

some have suggested that the Second World War was merely a continuation

of the First, an argument which makes a good deal of sense. By contrast,

the geographic, economic, political and social contexts of the wars of

the present differ dramatically from those of the two world wars, and it
19

is likely that those of the 21st century will diverge even more sharply

from the conflicts in which the American war paradigm was forged. Not

only has the economic and diplomatic structure of the international

system undergone radical change in the wake of Tiananmen Square, the

collapse of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany; social and

economic expectations around the globe have changed as well.

In sum, the threat has changed substantively but the war paradigm

has not. The ancient warrior, now wielding a bronze piercing axe and

wearing a helmet of Electrum, must face not only enemy champions, but a

host of smaller, more subtle and more elusive foes whose objectives are

not always apparent. The excellence of this hero's weapons and his

strength and skill in using them still count, but he and his smith must

anticipate major changes in the weaponry which he can expect to be used

against him and those he is sworn to protect.

What technologies, then, should the American military expect to

face in the 21st century? Beginning at the top of the spectrum of

technological sophistication and working down, nuclear proliferation

will remain a major concern. Indeed, sub-proliferation might be a better

term, since the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of political

entities below the level of the nation-state is apt to become a reality

soon, if it is not already. The bad news is the relatively easy

availability of plutonium and enriched uranium on the international

black market. The good news is that those most inclined to develop and

use nuclear weapons lack the scientific, engineering and technical

resources to build compact weapons and sophisticated delivery systems.

At least the first wave of “outlaw" nuclear weapons will be relatively

large and crude.

One terminal effect of nuclear weapons, however, which does not

require the detonation of the device in close proximity to the target

demands attention. Electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP, the wave of

highly-charged electrical particles proceeds from the nuclear event like

an expanding bubble at speeds approaching that of light. EMP, which

takes effect as an extremely short burst of very high-voltage electrical

energy, has the capacity to do enormous damage to electrical circuits.

Transistorized circuits, on which the day-to-day functioning of modern

society is increasingly reliant, are particularly vulnerable. A cursory

review of the historical record suggests that the detonation in low

earth orbit or the upper atmosphere of a relatively crude nuclear device

would wreak havoc over a wide area on a host of transistor-dependent

systems, including electrical power generation and transmission;

telephone, radio and television transmission and reception; information

storage and retrieval systems; aircraft avionics; truck and automobile

ignition and fuel control units; and medical life-sustaining and

monitoring equipment.31 Circuits can be protected against EMP by

"hardening," that is shielding, and critical military systems have been

hardened on a selective basis, but hardening is an arcane science and

expensive.

On a more mundane level, the allies experienced great difficulty

with mobile ballistic missile systems in DESERT STORM, and the system

involved was the primitive first generation Soviet SS-1 "Scud." Such

systems have enormous potential for mischief, particularly if mated with

chemical or bacteriological warheads. The problem is not just military,

but political as well, for there are many regions of the world where the
20

launch of such a missile could be credibly attributed to more than one

entity, making the appropriateness as well as the effectiveness of the

military response an issue. Fortunately, the relatively long-range

ballistic systems are, in principle, subject to interception and

destruction by defensive missiles. Since ballistic trajectories are

predictable, the interception problem is relatively straightforward,

though highly demanding of sensor, avionics, booster, fusing and warhead

systems. The problem of terminal defense against ballistic missiles is

solvable given the willingness to commit the necessary resources.

Stealth cruise missiles present a greater challenge. While it is

unlikely that any enemy will be able to approach the U.S. lead in the

design and production of piloted stealth aircraft for the next few

decades, the suppression of radar signatures becomes easier by a

geometric ratio as the size of the vehicle is reduced. It is thus much

easier to make a very small vehicle stealthy, a consideration which

becomes more relevant in light of the advent of the extremely small,

extremely efficient air-breathing engines mentioned above. Moreover, the

United States has provided potential enemies with the basis for a

precision guidance system in the form of uncoded signals from Global

Positioning System (GPS) satellites. The ability to develop long-range,

stealthy cruise missiles with precision accuracy, at least against

stationary targets, is within the grasp of many national aerospace

industries and such vehicles would be exceedingly difficult to defend

against.

All the above concerns address conventional munitions and delivery

systems. More frightening are the less traditional systems. The design

of sophisticated chemical agents does not require massive technical

infrastructure and computer- assisted design capability. Moreover, such

agents need not be lethal in an immediate physiological sense, and the

development of agents with sophisticated psychological effects, whether

transient or permanent, is a possibility that must be considered.

Finally, there are nontraditional targeting and delivery methods to be

considered: chemical agents can be delivered by introduction into the

water supply and food chain as well as the atmosphere.

The same undemanding technical and economic constraints on design

and delivery apply even more powerfully to bacteriological and viral

agents than to chemical weapons. At the lower end of the technology

spectrum, the use of natural selection to develop microorganisms with

desired immunities and lethalities has the potential to produce highly

destructive agents at extremely low cost. At the upper end, the use of

genetic engineering to produce novel agents would still be relatively

cheap. Disease agents offer a wide range of terminal effects which could

be tailored to strategic goals. A highly virulent, fast-acting disease

organism with high lethality could quickly kill off the bulk of the

populace in the target area and burn itself out, leaving a depopulated

area open for occupation. Conversely, moderately virulent, slow-acting

bacterial or viral agents with moderate lethality, perhaps engineered to

produce chronic rather than acute effects, would be at least equally

difficult to counter. The longer the incubation period and the

slower-acting the disease, the greater the difficulty of detection and

the greater the damage done prior to identification. In either case, the

disease organism could be aimed at crops, domestic animals, or perhaps

the environment, rather than directly at populations. Selective

targeting could be achieved through the use of insect or animal vectors,
21

and disease organisms biologically engineered to strike selectively

according to age, gender, race or behavior are entirely possible. Such

agents would have enormous potential for social and political

disruption, particularly if used in concert with a well-crafted

psychological warfare campaign. The remarkably wide acceptance of the

story that AIDS was a capitalist or racist plot hints at the potential

of such a coordinated campaign. More simply, political targeting could

be accomplished by a combination of biological engineering and physical

distribution. It would be a relatively easy matter to develop a strain

of staphylococcus immune to avaiable antibiotics. Inadvertently, this

has nearly been done through the widespread, indiscriminate use of

antibiotics. Such an agent could be used to attack segments of a

national health care system catering to a given socioeconomic strata or

ethnic group and the disruptive effect of such an attack could be

amplified by a coordinated campaign of propaganda and disinformation

designed to exploit the predictably defensive responses of public health

officials.

Returning to electronics, American society, the U.S. economy, and

the world trade system are increasingly dependent on the exchange and

analysis of information by electronic means. Those means are vulnerable

to physical attack, electronic disruption, and manipulation. As with

bacteriological attack, an electronic assault could be mounted with

minimal capital investment: the successes of computer hackers in gaining

access to restricted data bases and planting electronic viruses in data

exchange networks speak for themselves. Intrusion into classified

Department of Defense and contractor databases is an obvious possibility

as is compromise of militarily sensitive command and control circuits,

analytical computers, and classified data bases. These circuits are

presumably well-protected and monitored. However, such an attack would

be the electronic equivalent of a frontal assault, likely to be detected

quickly and repelled. More subtle, and more likely to produce strategic

results, would be a sophisticated attack on selected nodes of the

American social and economic fabric, again accompanied by a coordinated

psychological warfare campaign. An attack on financial market and stock

exchange data bases to subtly manipulate interest rates, profits, and

losses so as to erode the savings--and the confidence--of selected

segments of society is an obvious tactic. International credit, currency

conversion and banking systems are vulnerable as well. As with

biological attack, a slow-acting, moderately virulent "disease" would be

harder to detect and counter than a fast-acting, highly virulent one.

Moreover, a campaign of subtle electronic sabotage would very likely

trigger a defensive reaction from governmental and semi-governmental

regulatory agencies and denials that anything was amiss would add

credibility to charges that the government was deliberately inflicting

injustice.32 Intrusion into the data bases of the Internal Revenue

Service and state revenue systems to introduce injustices and

inequities, perhaps by selectively targeting particular groups for

audits and seizures of assets, has obvious potential as well. Any such

attack would have to be undergirded not only with a deep understanding

of the workings of the markets in question, but of the social, economic

and political dynamics of American society; that having been said, the

potential vulnerability in this area is enormous.

Having surveyed the technological face of the threat environment,

this monograph concludes with a brief examination U.S. capabilities and

posture. Here prescriptions are mainly intellectual rather than
22

technological and tactical. Just as the Chalcolithic hero girded himself

for battle and for the evaluation of new technologies with an appeal to

the gods of war and his village, so, in secular guise do today's

planners, programmers, and budgeters. The gods are, however, changing

and mortals must take account of the change. First, some cautionary

observations.

PPBS made a good deal of sense in an era in which technological

change was incremental and attacks on the enemy war economy and

population base were the primary strategic focus. The assumptions no

longer hold and the "theology" badly needs revision, and the term

theology is used literally. There is no credible demonstration that the

rigorous application of cost benefit effectiveness analysis to the

weapons system acquisition process under the aegis of PPBS has, in fact,

had a beneficial effect. PPBS has been accepted not as a methodology

with demonstrable benefits, but as a verity accepted on faith and the

rational basis of that faith badly needs reexamination. If PPBS is a

false god, the American military may be well-advised to consider the

cost of its misplaced devotion sooner rather than later.

The evidence suggests that a technological plateau has been

achieved in terms of speed, firepower, armor protection and mobility.

Barring the development of revolutionary new structural materials and

technologies of propulsion which violate the laws of physics as now

understood (a possibility which cannot be discounted), current

state-of-the-art aircraft, ships, and land vehicles go nearly as fast

and can expend about as much firepower as will be the case for the

foreseeable future. The significant technological advances will come in

sensors and detection systems; avionics, guidance and fire control

systems; stealth technology across the board; electronic warfare

systems; the biological sciences; “virtual reality" training; and, most

important, analytical computers, particularly for analysis and design.

Planners must be careful to avoid temptations to expend disproportionate

amounts of treasure and energy to achieve incremental improvements to

existing technologies. In the past, sufferers from what I term the

"technological attractive nuisance syndrome" attempted to field the

caseless cartridge, the diesel aircraft engine, and the atomic airplane.

To cite an example of current relevance, if liquid artillery propellants

offer operational advantages over those now in use which are

sufficiently compelling to justify major expenditures of scarce R&D

funds, the point is not readily apparent.33

Granted, there are areas of more of less traditional technology

where we are still an appreciable distance from the edge of the

performance envelope: high speed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft

with sufficiently low rotor downwash velocities for general battlefield

utility and very small RPVs are cases in point. There are also areas

where the incremental advantage is worth the price: hypersonic

atmospheric reconnaissance platforms are an obvious candidate.

Cryptography would seem to have reached a plateau of security, but that

is what the experts have wrongly concluded in the past on several

occasions. Clearly, obsolescent equipment has to be replaced as it wears

out and there are important advances to be made in reliability and

stealthiness in the process, but on the whole, R&D money and energy will

be far better spent on software than hardware.

The United States increasingly depends on imported materials for
23

the production and transportation of war materiel, petroleum being the

most critical requirement in the short term but by no means the only

one. At the same time, as in the Vietnam War, the American military is

apt to go up against adversaries whose war production and population

base reside in other countries. The United States was not successful in

dealing with this problem in Vietnam at any level: tactical,

operational, or strategic. Fortunately, this problem has received

objective analysis from a cadre of historians like Larry E. Cable, Mark

Clodfelter, Andrew F. Krepinevich, and Earl H. Tilford, Jr. Their

analyses warrant careful consideration by scholars and military

professionals.

On a more positive note, there are no serious prospects of the

U.S. lead in the design of high technology weapons systems being

challenged in the near term, or even over next few decades--if it is

careful to preserve it. The analytical and design capabilities which

made possible the Tomahawk, the M1A1 fire control system and the F-117A

were the products of many decades of continuous intellectual tradition

and governmental support. They could not be reconstituted overnight with

the wave of a budgetary wand. Just as the Chalcolithic hero depended on

his smith, so are today's progressively less numerous champions

dependent on their engineers.

In addition, there is a downside to these impressive technological

capabilities: specifically, improved tactical capabilities breed

heightened strategic expectations. The ability to take out a single

building with a single bomb on a single pass fosters not only the

expectation that this can be done routinely, but that to do so is

strategically relevant. On a practical level, to make that capability

relevant one must know with some precision what is inside the building,

why it is important and when it will be there. Note that the answers to

those questions are as likely to be political as military, posing a

significant challenge for intelligence gathering and dissemination

agencies. For the foreseeable future, the United States is more likely

to be engaged in relatively small-scale regional conflicts where

leadership, cultural symbols and political motivation are key factors

than in major conflicts where we can target the industrial base. In the

past, the United States has not always been spectacularly successful in

evaluating such intangible, human factors. It badly needs to improve its

intelligence and analytical capabilities.

The ability to minimize collateral civilian casualties, an ability

demonstrated spectacularly in DESERT STORM, the bombing of the Al Firdoz

bunker notwithstanding, carries with it the assumption that any

collateral civilian casualties are unacceptable, however reprehensible

enemy policy goals and however vicious enemy tactics. Similarly, the

ability to minimize losses to enemy fire throws even minimal losses to

"friendly fire" into stark relief. Military leaders must be forewarned

not to mis-advertise their capabilities. Furthermore, they must educate

their civilian superiors, all the more so because of the political

attractiveness of certain of those capabilities.

High technology weaponry is highly dependent on user skill and

training for tactical effectiveness. DESERT STORM was as much a triumph

of hard, realistic, combat-oriented training as of design engineering.

Indeed, many military professionals would argue that training was more

important, and some have gone so far as to speculate that we could have
24

exchanged systems with the Iraqis and still won. That is no doubt an

overstatement, but the point behind it is valid. Our military services

learned the value of combat-oriented training the hard way in Vietnam

and we now enjoy a huge lead in this area, but such training is

expensive and operations and maintenance budgets will remain under

intense pressure. We must be extremely careful not to throw away our

advantage in this critical area.

Finally, the nature of the strategic, operational and tactical

environment in which our forces will operate in the 21st century must be

rethought and force structures adjusted accordingly. The recent military

technological revolution has provided unprecedented, and for the moment

unchallenged, tactical and operational capabilities. As was demonstrated

in DESERT STORM, the American military can exploit its technological

advantages when faced with a conventional threat. The challenge is to

harness those capabilities to the less conventional kinds of wars which

will surely arise with increasing frequency. The crux of the matter is

not our ability to put bombs on target or men, munitions, and vehicles

on beaches and landing zones; the pivotal issue is the identification of

strategically relevant targets, beaches and landing zones, an area where

improvement is imperative.

The very precision offered by technologically advanced munitions

demands an equivalent precision and timeliness in targeting. That, in

turn, demands timely and accurate intelligence, not only before the

fact, but afterwards in accurate bomb damage assessments. The focus of

the preceding observation was on air operations, but if anything the

demands of ground combat for timely and accurate intelligence are even

greater, if for no other reason because intelligence failure in ground

combat tends to produce more friendly casualties. The need for swift,

accurate intelligence is increased exponentially by the reality of

smaller force structures, justified in part by the capabilities of

precision-guided munitions, an observation which requires a cautionary

note: certain categories of target do not lend themselves to attack by

PGMs, but are best dealt with by massive, nonprecision bombardment.

Mobile ground formations on the move, dug in defensive lines and major

storage and production facilities are cases in point. Despite the

tactical fascination with PGMs, there will always be a need for massed

artillery bombardments and large numbers of “dumb" bombs dropped by

small numbers of large aircraft.

In sum, intelligence must be more subtle, timely and accurate. The

services can no longer afford the luxury of the compartmentalized

intelligence functions which were a logical product of the old war

paradigm, the cold war focus on nuclear weapons. Rather, the

intelligence function must be integrated with operational planning and

execution more closely than ever before. Intelligence must also expand

its focus to address the sorts of nontraditional threats outlined above,

a venture in which exchanges of information with civilian law

enforcement agencies will become pivotal and in which the specialist

noncombat arms will have an important role to play. The sticky

constitutional issues raised by the prospect of close interaction

between civilian law enforcement agencies and military intelligence must

be resolved and indicate the changing face of strategy. The Army, by

virtue of its structure and historical past, will inevitably be at the

epicenter of such changes. The Corps of Engineers would seem a logical

institutional locus for assessments of the vulnerability of urban areas
25

and public utilities to attack and sabotage. Similarly, the Medical

Corps should become centrally involved in assessments of hostile

chemical and bacteriological capabilities and the development of

appropriate countermeasures. Judge advocates must develop hands-on

familiarity with the nitty-gritty of operational planning and tactical

execution so as to be able to provide commanders and planners with

timely, relevant and accurate legal guidance.34 The central importance

of news media coverage of military operations demands that public

information personnel develop a similar familiarity with operational

planning and tactical execution. By the same token, commanders and

operational staffs must become more sensitive to the importance of input

from such specialists.

In conclusion, two basic points are clear: if strategy could ever

be approached as a straightforward technical exercise in the movement of

military formations across country, war on the map as Jomini put it,

followed by an equally straightforward, though considerably bloodier,

exercise in fire and maneuver on the battlefield, that time is long

past. Similarly, if there was ever a time when war could be approached

as an exercise in production line engineering, as the U.S. Army Air

Forces did in preparation for World War II, that time is long past, as

well.35 The maneuver of conventional forces and industrial production

will remain important integers in the strategic equation, but they are

no longer preeminent.

And so this analysis of the technological limits of strategy ends

on a cautionary note about the essentially human nature of war. The

Chalcolithic hero understood implicitly that success in war was

determined not just by strength and technological advantage alone, but

by the effective application of those qualities in human context. The

perceived force of his blow was increased by faith in his gods and fear

of them. Just as the gods of his village presided over his swing,

understanding of policy goals presides over our application of military

force. Whatever the technology, war remains as Carl von Clausewitz

characterized it, a test of will and faith. Do not lose sight of that

reality.

Notes:

1. The dating is speculative; see my introduction to "War,

Technology of," Encyclopedia Britiannica (1992) and Yigael Yadin, The

Art of War in Biblical Lands in the Light of Archaeological Study, 2

vol., London: McGraw-Hill, 1963, Vol. I, p. 40. Though now dated, The

Art of War in Biblical Lands remains the best single source on very

early military technology and is valuable by virtue of having been

written by a competent military professional. The Chalcolithic era, by

definition the period in which man had learned to smelt copper and

precious metals but still relied on stone implements for grinding and

cutting, is generally held to have begun in southern Anatolia and the

Fertile Cresent around the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Though

archaeological evidence for mace heads of stone is abundant, that for

copper is understandably scant since copper mace heads would have been

melted down for bronze after the mace became obsolescent.

2. As indicated in the definition above, I consider technology to

encompass human manipulation of biological processes. In this light, the

development of natural grasses into food grains, perhaps best understood
26

with regard to the Amerindian development of maize, was a technological

achievement of the first order.

3. William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed

Force and Society since A.D. 1000, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1982, p. vii.

4. The start of Narmer's reign is generally dated from circa 3,100

BC. The palate does not tell us what the head of his mace was made of;

my point is the symbolic importance attached to the mace.

5. This was true from a very early stage. Arsenic bronze was soon

superseded by tin bronze and as McNeill, Pursuit of Power, p. 1, notes,

"copper and tin ores are not found in the same regions."

6. See Jon Tetsuro Sumida, "Forging the Trident: British Naval

Industrial Logistics, 1914-1918," in John A. Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars:

Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present,

Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993, pp. 217-249. As Sumida makes

clear, the Royal Navy had much closer ties with industry than did the

Army and was far more experienced at negotiating its interests in the

industrial/ governmental arena; in consequence, the Navy preempted

industrial capacity which would have been dedicated to supporting the

land war in any rationally prioritized scheme, a reality which had much

to do with the munitions shortages on the Western Front. Nor was the

advantage only quantitative: I would point to the generally superior

quality of aircraft procured by the Royal Naval Flying Corps compared to

those procured by the Royal Flying Corps in 1915-16.

7. Ian Marshall, Armored Ships, Charlottesville, Virginia: Howell

Press, 1993, pp. 106-110, for a concise and perceptive summation.

8. See Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War

Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway,

Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988, esp.

pp. 22-34. The estimate of how much sooner Nazi Germany would have

collapsed had the coal-based war economy not been so efficient is my

own.

9. Williamson Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe,

1933-1945, Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 1983, pp.

159-156, makes this point both explicitly and implicitly; see

particularly p. 148, Table XXX, which demonstrates graphically how the

enormous German aircraft losses in the Mediterranean between March and

May 1943 combined with subsequent losses incurred in Italy, at Kursk and

over the Reich to break the back of the Luftwaffe.

10. See: Eric Schantzberg, "Ideology and Technical Choice: The

Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920-1945,"

Technology and Culture, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 34-69.

Comparisons between aluminum and other aircraft structural materials,

notably wood, were by no means as lop-sidedly favorable to aluminum as

most general aviation histories suggest. Until the advent of jet

propulsion, properly designed and fabricated wooden structures were as

efficient as their aluminum equivalents if not more so, that is they

represented a smaller percentage of the weight of the fully-loaded

aircraft. The fastest, and arguably most successful,
27

reciprocating-engine combat aircraft of World War II, the de Havilland

Mosquito, had an entirely wooden structure except for the engine mounts,

landing gear, and flight control attachment points. Wood, however, was

difficult to work with and wooden structures did not hold up well under

high heat and humidity. Lockheed, producer of the most efficient

aircraft structures of the interwar period, converted from wood to

aluminum in the mid-1930s and kept its competitive edge, but this is

more a commentary on the excellence of Lockheed's design team than the

inherent disadvantages of wood. It is worth noting, too, that aluminum

production was extremely energy-intensive, relying on massive amounts of

electrical power--mostly produced by coal-burning power plants!

11. John Batchelor and Ian Hogg, Artillery, New York: Scribner,

1972, pp. 90-99; my main reference is to the Krupp 75mm PAK 41.

12. While pilots were the critical node, the point applies to a

crew generally and to maintenance personnel. Aircrew training was a

major Allied success in both world wars, yet remarkably little has been

written on the subject.

13. Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power: British Army

Weapons and Theories of War 1904-1945, London: George Allen and Unwin,

1982, pp. 141-146; Roy M. Stanley II, World War II Photo Intelligence,

New York: Scribner, 1981, pp. 20-32.

14. For an insightful treatment see Stanley, World War II Photo

Intelligence, esp. pp. 1-14.

15. Attempts to produce the French `75 in the United States were a

fiasco and the American Expeditionary Force was equipped almost

exclusively with French artillery.

16. Notably in the empirical development of methods of reducing

engine-associated drag, the most dramatic application of which was in

the North American P-51, arguably the most successful fighter of the

second half of the war.

17. Daniel R. Beaver, "Deuce and a Half, Selecting United States

Army Trucks, 1920-1945," Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from

the Middle Ages to the Present, pp. 251-270.

18. Remark from the floor, "The Revolution in Military Affairs:

Defining the Army for the 21st Century," Carlisle Barracks,

Pennsylvania, first afternoon session, April 27. Mr. John J. Patrick is

Program Manager at Techmatics, Inc. of Arlington, Virginia.

19. This is the basic point of Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Crosswinds:

The Air Force's Setup in Vietnam, College Station, Texas: Texas A&M

University Press, 1993. In fairness to the planners who laid out the

initial targeting for Rolling Thunder, interdiction of Communist

manpower and supplies occupied a high priority, but this, too, was very

much in the tradition of our air interdiction efforts in Korea and World

War II. We should also note that the Air Force did a number of clever

and successful things in Vietnam which cut against its doctrinal grain,

including the widespread use of aerial FACS (forward air controllers),

the development of the side-firing gunship and the creation of a

specialized long-range combat rescue force. These innovations and those
28

involved in implementing them, however, were never regarded as being in

the professional mainstream.

20. The dead hand of PPBS is, of course, not the only factor

involved: "black" programs are more glamorous than openly acknowledged

ones and enjoy high priorities, thus presumably attracting more capable

engineers and managers.

21. I am indebted to James Tomayko of Omaha State University for

this information.

22. Peter J. Hugill, World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology

and Capitalism, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1993, pp. 290-291.

23. Bill Sweetman, Stealth Aircraft: Invisible Warplane, Black

Budget, Osceola, Wisconsin: Motorbooks International, 1989, pp. 53-55.

24. Tilford, Crosswinds, pp. 150-51.

25. R. Cargill Hall, "To Acquire Strategic Bombers: The Case of

the B-58 Hustler," Air University Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 6,

September-October 1980, pp. 1-20.

26. The basic measurement of rocket efficiency is specific

impulse, written Is, a measurement of the number of pounds of thrust

produced each second by each pound of propellant. Though expressed in

seconds by mathematical reduction, Is is in fact a dimensionless ratio,

the higher the value the greater the propulsive efficiency. The engine

of the World War II German V-2 weighed 2,484 pounds and produced 56,000

pounds of thrust with an Is of 199 seconds. The Navaho booster weighed

1,230 pounds and produced 120,000 pounds of thrust with an Is of 230

seconds. Liquid oxygen and kerosene, the oxidizer/fuel combination used

in the Navaho and still used in the Atlas booster, has a theoretical

maximum Is of 294 seconds. Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, the

combination used in the Space Shuttle's main engines, yields a

theoretical maximum of 391 seconds, but at a considerable cost in

technical complexity and risk. Liquid hydrogen is notoriously difficult

to deal with and, for reasons bound up in cryogenics and the molecular

physics of known structural materials, the technology for a structurally

efficient, reusable liquid hydrogen tank does not exist. Liquid fluorine

and liquid hydrogen, the most efficient propellant combination known,

would yield a theoretical maximum Is of only 410 seconds and the

practical difficulties of containing and controlling liquid fluorine are

immensely greater than those posed by liquid oxygen. Dieter K. Huzel and

David H. Huang, Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines, 2nd ed.,

NASA Special Pamphlet SP-125, Washington, DC, 1971, pp. 21-27, 36.

27. I am indebted to Jeff Cooper, Strategic Director of SRS

Technologies, for pointing out to me the strikingly modest improvement

in rocket engine efficiencies since the late 1950s after my spoken

remarks on April 27.

28. A telling detail which indicates how quickly American

engineers mastered the basic physics of rocket propulsion is the Atlas'

stage-and- a-half configuration in which the vehicle leaves the pad with

three engines firing and subsequently jettisons two of the three. A two
29

stage design, in which a first stage booster with its own tankage is

jettisoned prior to second stage ignition, is inherently more efficient

and was recognized as such, but the Atlas was designed so early in the

game that engineers were unsure that the fuel and oxidizer would ignite

spontaneously in the hard vacuum of space.

29. I do not mean that aircraft technology will remain static, or

that there is no point in investing in improved piloted combat vehicles.

Clearly, such platforms as the B-2 and F-22 represent major advances in

combat capability, but in terms of speed, range, and load-carrying

capability and efficiency, they are not all that different from their

predecessors.

30. For a useful summation, see David Chandler, Atlas of Military

Strategy, New York: Free Press, 1980, pp. 78-79.

31. The key event was the detonation of an American nuclear device

in the upper stratosphere over Johnson Island during the Kennedy

presidency. Having negotiated a nuclear test ban with the USSR, the

administration came under attack by critics who argued that the Soviets

were playing us for suckers and preparing a nuclear test series for

immediate implementation when the ban expired. In the event the critics

were right, we would be unprepared to follow suit. Embarrassed, the

President ordered the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) to conduct an

immediate nuclear test. The only thing the AEC could come up with on

short notice which might produce useful data was a detonation in the

lower reaches of space. To the surprise of all, EMP from the test

wrought electronic havoc generally and blew out street lights as far

away as Honolulu.

32. A telling and relatively recent example of such a defensive

reaction can be seen in statements made by officials of the Red Cross,

the American Association of Blood Banks, and the Council of Community

Blood Centers in January of 1983 that there was no “hard" evidence that

AIDS was being spread by blood transfusions and arguing against the use

of laboratory tests to screen blood donors. At the time, the Center for

Disease Control (CDC) was arguing persuasively that AIDS could, in fact,

be spread by transfusions and contemporary internal Red Cross memos

recently leaked to the press indicate a clear awareness that this was

the case. Having drawn their line in the sand, however, the Red Cross,

et. al., held their ground until March 1985 when they were forced by an

overwhelming weight of evidence to adopt mandatory AIDs testing for

blood donors.

In fact, the circumstances surrounding the debate over mandatory

donor blood testing in January of 1983 were more complicated than the

above summary suggests: CDC argued for a "surrogate" test for hepatitis

B, which it maintained could have been in place by March 1983, on the

grounds nearly all AIDS patients also suffered from hepatitis B. The

counter argument, still supported in May 1994 by a senior Red Cross

official privy to the internal deliberations and decision to reject

testing ("Red Cross knew of AIDS risk, documents show," The Columbus

[Ohio] Dispatch, Sunday, May 15, 1993), was that the hepatitis B test

would have produced a large number of false positives, thus (my

interpretation) excluding many potential blood donors. It was difficult

at the time, and it is difficult now, not to conclude that economic

imperatives outweighed humanitarian and medical concerns in the
30

deliberations of the agencies regulating our blood supply.

The point of the above example is not to portray the officials of

the Red Cross, et. al., as ogres; rather it is to illustrate the deeply

ingrained reluctance of official and semi-official regulatory agencies

to admit error. In this instance, that reluctance was not turned against

them, or the government, to major political effect, in part because the

segment of society most affected by the AIDS epidemic at the time, the

gay community, was ambivalent on the issue. The point is that such

reluctance is real, is endemic, and is a point of potential

vulnerability. The appearance of outbreaks of necrotizing fascitis,

caused by a "flesh eating" strain of streptococcus, first in Britain and

now in the United States, has produced a similar wave of dismissive

statements by public health authorities. See: "Flesh-eating Bacteria

Aren't New to This Area," The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, June 9, 1994.

33. I owe the addition of the diesel aircraft engine to the list

to a comment in 1986 by Mr. Maxime Faget of Eagle Engineering, Houston,

Texas. Faget is generally recognized as the guiding spirit behind the

detailed engineering of the Space Shuttle.

34. I am indebted to W. Hays Parks, Colonel USMCR, Chief Counsel

for the Secretary of the Army, for this point. An example cited by

Colonel Parks of the kind of problem which can be resolved by timely

legal guidance in the planning process involved the initial refusal of

logistical planners during Operation DESERT SHIELD to provide Marine air

units with napalm, based on the mistaken belief that the use of napalm

was in violation of the laws of war.

35. See Barry D. Watts, The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine: The

Problem of Friction in War, Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press,

1984.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William A. Stofft

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Colonel John W. Mountcastle

Director of Research

and Conference Organizer

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Authors

Sir Michael Howard

Dr. John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

Editor

Mrs. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretaries

Mrs. Shirley E. Martin

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition

Mr. Daniel B. Barnett

Cover Artist

Mr. James E. Kistler