Military Power and the Advance of Technology

General Purpose Military Forces for the 1980s and Beyond

Seymour J. Deitchman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367169671
• eBook ISBN: 9780429725364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book deals with the basic facts of the military-industrial complex, examining its institutional dynamics and constitutional barriers to change. It shows how simplistic journalistic prescriptions and trivial observations fail to do justice to the enormous complexity of an industrial economy.

Part 1
The Gradual “Revolution” in Military Technology

1
New Technologies

From the time military forces came into being they have continually improved their weapons and tactics. But only rarely has the appearance of new kinds of weapons and tactics brought about revolutionary change in the course of warfare. The Greek phalanx, developed further by Philip of Macedon and used by Alexander the Great and the Roman legions, was one such change. The light cavalry and the archers of the Asian plains, sweeping every foe before them almost into modern times, represented another. A third derived from the breeding of plow horses capable of pulling implements through the wet, heavy north European soil and the invention of the stirrup, both of which supported the creation of heavy armored cavalry. Additional examples of this kind of military invention and its impact include the use of the English longbow, which defeated that cavalry; gunpowder, which led over the centuries to the development of artillery, powerful small arms, and the machine gun; the tank; and sea-based tactical aircraft for naval warfare.¹ Although the effect of some of these developments was immediate and drastic (as with the Greek phalanx and naval aircraft), the impact of others was more gradual, taking place over decades or even centuries. The old and the new existed side by side in differing proportions until the new completely replaced the old.

World War II was a period of sudden change in the military arts and sciences, and we have since been in the midst of another. The most recent and ongoing period is somewhat enigmatic, because the revolutionary weapons and tactics have been demonstrated only on a relatively small scale in wars peripheral to the mainstreams of history and without decisive impact. Yet the capabilities have become known from these modest demonstrations and from field tests. They are represented in the holdings of all major and many minor military powers. In a few instances they have become the property of primitive guerrilas and terrorists. Experience suggests that any future major war will be as different from World War II as that war was from World War I and all others that preceded it. However, it is difficult to separate fact and balanced assessment from the portentous anxieties, fears, and hyperbole resulting from popularization and advocacy. Thus no clear view of the current situation exists. Realistically, short of a major military conflagration, it is impossible to obtain a clear view but perhaps it is possible to clarify the points of argument and the nature of the uncertainties. The major outlines of military developments for the tactical forces that emerged from World War II are well known, but we will review them to establish a frame of reference for what follows.

Operation of land forces by the end of the war was characterized by the massive use of armor and tactical aircraft in land battles. This usage broke the stalemate in which the infantry had found itself at the end of World War I—a stalemate that had been building since the American Civil War, and that was caused by the advent of the machine gun and improvements in artillery, culminating in the evolution of huge armies facing and mauling each other from trenches on a static line. In 1939, maneuver, which had in general characterized pre-1914 warfare, again became possible, but the fields of battle and the scope of the manuevers were greatly expanded. We can appreciate the difference by comparing the decisive battle of Waterloo in 1815 with the movement of the U.S. Third Army across France in World War II.

The field of Waterloo comprised an area approximately 2.5 miles by 0.5 mile.² The respective armies of the Allies and the French numbered about 70,000 men, and the essential maneuvers by Napoleon, Wellington, and Blucher covered distances on the order of 12 miles. The battle, including preliminaries, took place over a period of three days, with the major action on one day. By contrast, Patton's army of about 200,000 men broke out from the Cotentin Peninsula on August 1, 1944, and in six weeks moved nearly 350 miles across France, stopping at a position roughly centered on Metz at the French-German border.³ This was but one of the mass movements of armies using armor in World War II. Another example is that of the Soviet double envelopment of the German Sixth Army before Stalingrad. The two prongs of the envelopment were separated initially by about 125 miles, and each covered distances of 75 to 100 miles before they met at Kalach in the Sixth Army's rear.⁴ Thus, in a century and a quarter, mechanization of ground forces and their support by air forces had changed the areas covered by critical battles from roughly the size of a township in the northeastern United States to the size of entire countries or more.

On the oceans, World War II saw the final demise of the gun-carrying ship of the line as the main conveyor and purveyor of naval power.⁵ Instead the airplane and the submarine became key naval weapons. As tactical aircraft had limited range, the fleet provided a floating air base (the aircraft carrier) to bring the aircraft within range of their targets, and aircraft were used to attack opposing fleets and to carry firepower ashore from afar. Other ships mainly provided the carrier protection from surface fleets, enemy aircraft, and submarines; large-caliber naval gunfire came to be used primarily for shore bombardment prior to invasion.

Submarines, emerging in World War I as a scourge of the seas, were used mainly to attack shipping, but they also found a role on the periphery of naval battles that covered hundreds or thousands of square miles of ocean, picking off or dealing a death blow to an occasional warship. For example, the carrier Yorktown was finally sunk by a Japanese submarine after the battle of Midway. Sometimes such submarine action could be decisive, as it was in the battle of the Philippine Sea when U.S. submarines sank two major Japanese aircraft carriers, but this kind of contribution was rare. Ordinarily, submarines and small combat ships, at least by the end of World War II, could not challenge a large surface fleet.⁶

There was, in addition to surface-ship anti-submarine warfare, extensive growth of air power to defeat the submarine. Obviously airplanes, once available, would be used for any mission where their speed and range could help accomplish objectives that could not be otherwise realized. Shore-based long-range aircraft were used to search for and deliver weapons against submarines; aircraft from escort carriers (essentially, converted merchant ships) were also used for search and attack when possible. Submarines in the Atlantic proved especially vulnerable to anti-submarine operations from carriers because the submarines had to surface in order to refuel at sea and recharge their batteries for underwater operations. Although previously the Navy had been concerned mainly with forces on the sea, World War II saw major developments in the delivery and use of naval power from under as well as over the sea.

Differentiation of the tactical air forces into units having various missions and capabilities (which still exist today) actually began in World War I. Aeronautics was the area of greatest technical advance between the wars, and even the staunchest advocates of the use of aviation in warfare could hardly have conceived, in the early 1920s, of the combat missions this innovation would make possible just twenty years later. Force development included the specialization of airplanes into heavy and light bombers, fighters, and diverse utility aircraft that performed such tasks as observation and transportation. Fighters, such as the P-51 Mustang, were further specialized into interceptors, fighter-bombers, and long-range fighter escorts to accompany heavy or light bombers on their missions. Tactical aircraft were used to attack enemy forces approaching, as well as on, the battlefield, to destroy transport lines and facilities, and otherwise to inhibit military movement. They also commanded the airspace over the battlefield and over friendly territory to keep enemy aircraft from carrying out similar missions. Toward the end of World War II, the first, rather primitive versions of jet aircraft, which were ultimately to make great advances in speed, combat ceiling, and load-carrying capability, were just beginning to appear.

World War II also saw the emergence of two areas of technology that, together with aeronautics and submarines, were to revolutionize the conduct of warfare in the twentieth century: nuclear weapons and the evolution of the wireless of the 1920s into modern electronics. Keeping pace with these major technological advances during the war and since has been the development of diverse propulsion systems, including aircraft turbojets and fanjets, nuclear propulsion for submarines and surface ships, high-energy chemical fuels for rockets, and the turboshaft engines that made the helicopter a fully practical machine.

The impact of nuclear weapons on strategic war is widely recognized. With advanced delivery platforms, military forces can now deliver—at intercontinental distances with one vehicle—explosive power greater than that delivered by a 1,000-plane raid in World War II. Less commonly recognized by other than military specialists is the extent to which nuclear weapons have also changed the conditions of tactical warfare between armies, between aircraft, and between fleets. The problems of escalation and of damage to the civilian population, analogous to the problems of strategic use, are those most often cited in discussion of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But these weapons have also made possible the delivery of enormously greater firepower in a smaller space and in a shorter time than was possible before their development. This potentiality has created as yet unsolved problems in the conceptions of maneuver and concentration of forces as well as in the management of space and time on and over the battlefield and at sea. It has also created the prospects of casualty rates and rapid destruction of ground, air, and naval forces that threaten the viability of such forces. These matters will be examined later.

Developments in electronics have given military forces other ways of "seeing"—radar, sonar, and many additional means of target detection and location, from radio direction finding to the sensing of heat-emitting radiation at infrared wavelengths. The growth of electronic technology has also led to our current ability to construct small, simple (relative to the human brain), electronic "brains," which are essentially computers and associated circuits that can integrate position and target data determined from the sensors and use these data to carry out control functions. Advances in electronics have been joined with the advances in performance made possible by parallel developments in aerodynamics and propulsion systems, and the combination has been supported by underlying technology in such areas as materials, chemistry, structures, and acoustics. This synthesis has permitted the development of guided weapons for diverse purposes varying from shooting down aircraft to attacking military vehicles or fixed installations at long range from the air or from the ground.

The combination of sensing in the electromagnetic spectrum and control through solid-state electronic devices has both captured the popular imagination and stimulated fears, which are expressed in discussions of the electronic battlefield and smart weapons, of war machines out of control.⁷ On the other hand, we are told that our fascination with the advanced technology is leading to unnecessarily complex war machines that won't work at all.⁸ A detailed examination of both the opportunities and constraints implied by all these technological developments and their impact on forces, tactics, and strategy is in order.

Advances in guidance as well as in vehicle performance, together with the destructive power of nuclear weapons, permitted the evolution and realization of ideas of strategic bombing that were developed in the World War II attacks on England, Germany, and Japan. On a smaller scale this conjunction of capabilities in high-speed tactical aircraft and short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles has made it virtually impossible for military forces to escape major damage if nuclear weapons are used on the battlefield. The opportunity to incorporate such capability in the tactical air and ground forces and the need to account for their presence have, in turn, influenced the size of military units, their form, and their tactics for combat with conventional high-explosive weapons.

Development of guidance systems for weapons is, in still another evolutionary step, being reflected in new means by which military forces can exert greater conventional-weapons firepower. One of the important effects of joining sophisticated weapon guidance with more powerful high-explosive warheads has been a great increase in the destructive power of individual weapons, such as guided bombs or surface-to-air missiles. Not only does the greater explosive energy have more direct effect, it can more often be placed closer to its intended target. Now that the initial hurdles of learning how to effect this synthesis have been overcome, the rate of invention of such increasingly powerful weapons has also increased. In the cases where the sophistication of the weapons can be realized with the ruggedness and simplicity of the telephone (such as in certain anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles), the most primitive of soldiers can use the weapons virtually as effectively as the soldiers of technologically advanced societies. The monopoly of the industrial nations over the means of modern warfare is weakening, largely through their own efforts.

At sea the development of nuclear propulsion for submarines has freed the submarines of the need to operate on the surface at all. This has eliminated a major vulnerability, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• PART 1 THE GRADUAL "REVOLUTION" IN MILITARY TECHNOLOGY
• PART 2 USING THE GENERAL PURPOSE FORCES
• PART 3 ABSORBING TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
• Notes
• Index