The Worth of War (6 page)

Without training and discipline, it is very difficult to induce soldiers to engage in violence. Most individuals, including soldiers, are not especially violent, nor are they particularly adept at the use of violence.
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Most suffer from fear, uncertainty, and remorse when they become involved in a violent confrontation.
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As Sociologist Randall Collins concludes from his studies of fights and disturbances, most hostile confrontations between two or more individuals are characterized by “bluster and gesture” that do not lead to actual violence.
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Collins attributes this outcome to what he terms “confrontational tension and fear.” That is, faced with the possibility of engaging in or becoming the targets of violence, most individuals experience a high level of tension and often an overwhelming sense of trepidation which
leads all sides to prefer face-saving—or even humiliating—ways of backing down and avoiding violence. In the case of military combat, according to Colonel David Grossman, a surprisingly high percentage of troops fail to use their weapons against the enemy.
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A famous study conducted by S. L. A. Marshall, the US Army's chief combat historian during World War II, concluded that only about 15 percent of the army's front line troops had actually fired their guns in combat. Even face-to-face with enemy forces, the majority of soldiers took no hostile action whatsoever.
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Studies of other armies and other wars seem to bear out Marshall's findings.

Armies seek to overcome this fear of confrontation with indoctrination and training that help to inure their troops to the fear of violence. One example is the case of contemporary modes of US military training. Beginning in the Vietnam War, as Grossman reports, the US military introduced major changes in its training methods designed to increase the number of soldiers who actually fired their weapons in combat. These changes include training that simulates actual combat situations, so that soldiers will be conditioned to reflexively fire their weapons. Rather than teach soldiers to shoot at stationary targets, soldiers today in such programs as Marine Corps Basic Warrior Training are conditioned to fire reflexively and instantly at olive-drab, human-shaped targets that pop up randomly and unexpectedly on the training field. If the target is hit, it falls, providing instantaneous positive feedback. Soldiers are rewarded for successfully “engaging” (a euphemism for killing) their targets and penalized for failing to do so.

The result of weeks of operant conditioning on the training field is that in actual combat soldiers react automatically as though they are still shooting at training targets. In the US and other armies using such training methods, 90–95 percent of the soldiers fire their weapons, in contrast to the 15–20 percent who fired in earlier periods of history.
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During the 1982 Falklands War, for example, British troops trained via conditioning faced much larger Argentinian forces trained using traditional methods. The result was an unequal contest in which almost all the British troops fired their weapons while most of the Argentinians
did not. One British veteran said he “thought of the enemy as nothing more or less than Figure II (man-shaped) targets.”
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Their high rate of fire is one reason American military forces have been so effective in recent decades. Indeed, in Iraq and Afghanistan, US casualties were mainly caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or “booby traps” rather than exchanges of rifle fire—from which American troops almost invariably emerge victorious.

Armies have also discovered that leadership is a critical factor in providing the discipline that will induce individuals to engage in violence. Like the subjects in Stanley Milgram's famous experiments on obedience, soldiers are more likely to fight when given orders by a respected authority figure who is physically present to observe and encourage them. In the absence of authoritative leadership, soldiers will often find reason to avoid violent confrontations with their foes. Take, for example, the accounts compiled by Grossman of the
ad hoc
truces that sometimes developed between British and German soldiers facing one another during World War I. Out of sight of their officers, these nominal opponents might leave their trenches, play soccer with one another, and exchange Christmas gifts, only to resume combat when officers intervened. In the Roman legions, centurions wielding distinctive staffs stood behind every group of eighty legionaries, watching and encouraging them, and making certain that they would endeavor to kill their opponents.

Engineering

The origin of the term “engineer” is an individual who designs, builds, and operates military equipment. More generally, engineering could be defined as thinking rationally about the physical world and devising techniques for the construction and manipulation of physical objects. The armies of the Roman, Chinese, and other ancient empires employed many complex forms of military hardware, The Romans, for example, made use of a variety of catapults, many adapted from Greek designs, including the “polybolos,” a catapult with the capacity
to fire bolts repeatedly without the need to reload. It was, in effect, the ancient equivalent of a modern machine gun. Roman military engineers also built forts, roads for the rapid deployment of forces, and carefully fortified camps for Roman forces on the march. Every legion included engineering officers responsible for the production of fortifications and siege equipment, and every Roman soldier carried a spade in addition to his weapons. Though the actual weapons carried by individual Roman soldiers were not much better than those wielded by their opponents, the Romans produced enormous quantities of swords, knives, spears, pikes, and other instruments. The Roman advantage in the realm of light infantry weapons was quantity more than quality.

The construction of fortifications was the highest art of military engineering through ancient times—until the modern era, when then increasing power of munitions made most fixed fortifications vulnerable to artillery and aerial attack. Improvements in artillery were brought about in the sixteenth century by the application of chemical and metallurgical discoveries to the design of weapons and gunpowder. During the same period, Galileo studied the trajectory of projectiles and discovered that such trajectories were parabolic. Niccolò Tartaglia experimented on the relationship between the angle of fire and the range of a projectile, ascertaining that a forty-five degree angle produced the maximum range.
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A result of these developments was that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the powerful siege guns first introduced by the French rendered most medieval fortifications obsolete.
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European military engineers responded with new fortress designs that were able to withstand battering by artillery. The best known of these individuals was Sébastien Vauban, who became Europe's leading authority on both the construction of fortifications and the design of methods for the capture of these selfsame fortifications.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the growing importance of military engineering and military technology led European governments to invest resources in these pursuits. The Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662, and the French
Academie Royale des Sciences
began in 1668. Both focused on military science and engineering,
including ballistics, gunpowder, naval navigation, and military cartography.
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Military engineering gradually became a major factor governing the outcomes of battles, campaigns, and wars.
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Today, of course, the military forces of every major power vie with one another to design and produce weapons systems capable of projecting military might on land, at sea, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace.

Supply and Logistics

Napoleon is reputed to have observed that an army marches on its stomach. Maintaining military forces, particularly on the march or in combat, can require large quantities of transport, food, fuel, weapons, spare parts, ammunition, and other supplies. Since ancient times, military strategists have pointed to the issue of supplies and logistics as central problems of warfare. Sun Tzu advised generals to, “Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy.”
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“A wise general,” he continued, “makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy's provisions is equivalent to twenty of one's own.”
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In the ancient world and even in early modern times, armies seldom possessed enough supplies and materiel to remain in the field for more than a brief period, and battles seldom lasted longer than a day or two. Most, though not all, armies were small by modern-day standards since large armies could seldom be supplied and sustained for very long. Recall that William the Conqueror commanded a force that totaled only 7,000 soldiers at the Battle of Hastings. Many troops had already left William's army because of a shortage of supplies.

Typically, if the outcome of a battle was not decided quickly, the combatants were forced to return to their homes, perhaps hoping to renew hostilities at some future date when they might be able to rebuild their stores of supplies and arms. Only the greatest of the ancient empires—Egypt, China, Persia, Rome—had the capacity to provision sizeable armies for weeks or months in the field. Even these forces relied upon their ability to purchase or, more often, to seize supplies and provisions from towns and settlements along their route of march.
Alexander the Great, for example, was able to keep his army on the march by planning his line of advance to take advantage of the presence of cities from which supplies could be extorted.
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Centuries later, Genghis Khan's Mongol armies excelled in the realm of logistics, often bringing enormous herds and flocks with them as they moved forward. The Mongols also organized huge camel caravans to carry supplies to their soldiers. Superior logistics was one of the keys to Mongol military prowess.
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Nevertheless, Mongol armies in the field could by no means be fully provisioned from their home bases and depended upon their ability to capture food and other supplies along their route of conquest.

Indeed, theft from local granaries had always been an essential component of military tactics, and remained so until the twentieth century. Armies led by such generals as Napoleon, Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, Robert E. Lee, and, to some extent, even Moltke and Guderian depended upon food and supplies requisitioned, scavenged, and stolen from the country through which they passed. It was the problem of feeding soldiers in a poor and inhospitable land that led the ancient Greeks to develop and master their characteristic tactic of quick and decisive shock battle. Wars involving contending armies of Greek hoplite foot soldiers were typically resolved in an hour or so of combat.
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Only with the development and elaboration of their logistical “tails” could armies be substantially enlarged and freed from the need to end wars quickly or to find local supplies along their route of march. Part of the solution to this problem, of course, entailed the use of new modes of transportation such as railroads and, later, motor transport and aircraft, which increased the range and speed of movement of military forces and made it possible to bring large quantities of supplies to distant armies for long periods of time. The military potential of railroads, for instance, was initially suggested by the German economist Friedrich List in the 1830s and quickly demonstrated by the Russians, Austrians, and French in the 1840s.
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But rail transport technology alone did not change the character of warfare. It was the organization of bureaucratic entities able to make use
of the rails that freed armies from their historic dependence upon local supplies and made it possible for them to fight for years in hostile lands. In the 1860s, for example, the Prussian Army constructed an elaborate organization to take advantage of the possibilities manifested by the railroad system. By 1870, each Prussian Army corps was served by a “train battalion,” with 40 officers, 84 doctors, and 670 wagons, which carried the corps' provisions, food, ammunition, baggage, medical supplies, and a field bakery.
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These helped to bring about the success of the Prussian military effort against France.

During the American Civil War, logistics, ordnance, and military engineering were raised to high arts, especially in the Union Army under the leadership of Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who supervised railroad construction and military contracting and procurement. General Ulysses S. Grant also took a special interest in these matters.
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When on the offensive, the Confederate Army adhered to the traditional tactic of seeking to capture food and other supplies along the route of march. The need to scavenge limited their mobility and the length of time Confederate forces could remain in the field, especially if their route of advance was blocked by northern troops. The Union Army, on the other hand, was the first in history to be fully supplied in battle over long distances and for long periods of time by railroad.
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The Union Army also developed a substantial quartermaster's department and detailed men from each line regiment to handle supply problems. By the end of the war, the Union Army's administrative and logistical tail had reached a nearly modern length and helped to bring about the North's victory in what became a long war of attrition, in which supplies counted as much as fighting spirit and generalship.
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At the conclusion of the Civil War, the armies were demobilized and their wartime capabilities soon lost. Six decades later, when the United States entered World War I, it had little or no capacity to equip or supply a large army for a protracted fight. To address this problem, the Wilson administration established the War Industries Board (WIB) to convert the nation's economy to war production. The WIB was
mainly a failure, and the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was compelled to purchase virtually all of its equipment and supplies from the British and French. During the course of the war, the AEF bought from the French nearly 5,000 artillery pieces, 10,000 machine guns, 40,000 automatic rifles, millions of rounds of various sorts of ammunition, and more than 4,000 aircraft.
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Perhaps overlooking the fact that no American horse soldiers had been dispatched to Europe, the WIB did see to it that more than 300,000 gas masks for horses would be shipped to the AEF.