The Worth of War (8 page)

One important technique imported by civilian and private agencies from the military planning sphere is systems analysis. Systems analysis began as a method of comparing the costs, benefits, and risks of alternative military programs and plans.
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Military planning required the study of large-scale systems, integrating many different types of
components to produce a desired result. This same form of analysis proved extremely useful in the design of civilian systems. The lessons drawn from military planning, for example, regarding the interactions between human motivations, technology, economic forces, and so forth, applied also to the design of health care delivery systems and other civilian applications—sometimes with mixed success.

As it developed in the military sphere, planning, especially planning in the realm of grand strategy, became the domain of specialized planning institutes or “think tanks” that gathered experts and spent years analyzing strategic problems, often at the behest of government agencies. The first of these was Great Britain's Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington. Since its founding, RUSI has studied broad questions of security policy, primarily at the behest of the British government.

In the United States, a number of institutions within the military engage in long-term or strategic planning. These include the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, and the Strategic Studies Institute. In addition, the US government has established a number of quasi-public, quasi-private Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). These include the RAND Corporation, MITRE Corporation, and the Institute for Defense Analysis. Often making use of systems analytic techniques, these and other FFRDCs have brought military planning and research methods to bear on civilian problems. RAND began as a consultant to the US Air Force and continues to undertake defense-related analysis and planning. At the same time, however, RAND has conducted major studies of American health policy, labor markets, corporate governance, and welfare policy. In a similar vein, the MITRE Corporation, which was created to provide planning and systems analysis for the Defense Department, expanded the scope of its activities to include planning and engineering support for civilian agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Administrative Office of the US Courts, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The notion of using military-style strategic planning for civilian purposes is also evident in the concept of the policy institute or think tank. These are private institutions in the United States as well as a number of other nations that engage in policy research and planning with civilian as well as military applications. Often, the research is supported by government contracts. In Britain, the Centre for Strategic Research and Analysis undertakes both military and civilian planning for the British government. In the United States, similar functions are performed by Hoover Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and a host of others. Similar think tanks are found throughout the world.

Recruitment, Training, and Discipline

Military methods of recruitment, training, and ranking or grading workers on the basis of their aptitudes and performance were imported directly from the military sphere to civilian life. Take, for example, the use of intelligence and aptitude testing or scores on achievement tests to help determine new workers' assignments. This common personnel management practice was introduced by the military during the First World War to assess the aptitudes and leadership potential of military recruits. Similar techniques were subsequently adopted by civilian agencies and firms in the civilian economy.

More generally, as Max Weber observed, military discipline was the model for factory and other forms of civilian production. “Military discipline,” Weber said, “gives birth to all discipline.”
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By this Weber meant that modern modes of production, like military service, require workers to learn to tolerate processes and tasks they naturally find unpleasant, such as to arrive for duty at the specified time, take their assigned place, and precisely execute received orders regardless of their personal preferences and perspectives. Just as military discipline requires the soldier to subordinate his personal feelings, whether these are fear or excessive enthusiasm, the discipline of the workplace requires the worker to focus on “the job,” that is, his or her place in
the overall productive machinery of the firm, rather than pursue some other motive. The workplace analog of recruit training is personnel or human capital management, the group within a firm or agency responsible for the selection, training, and evaluation of workers with the goal of maximizing each worker's job performance. In the factory, as in the military force, says Weber, “the individual is shorn of his natural rhythms…in line with the demands of the work procedure.”
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Engineering

As noted previously, the term
engineering
originally referred to the design and manufacture of military machines and equipment. The first engineers built fortresses, battering rams, and catapults, as well as bridges and roads to facilitate troop movement. In his multi-volume work
De Architectura
, the first century BCE Roman military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio described the construction of a variety of Roman military engines such as siege engines and ballistae.
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In his accounts of Roman engineering, though, Vitruvius also describes various structures and pieces of equipment built by military engineers that also had obvious civilian uses. These include hoists, cranes, and pulleys, as well as sundials and water clocks and the
aeolipile
, a primitive steam engine. Obviously, the skills developed by military engineers were easily transferrable to civilian projects. Vitruvius himself played an important role in the construction of Rome's aqueducts and was involved in the design of central heating systems for villas.

Until recent times, the same engineers built civilian and military works, but in the eighteenth century those engineers who focused primarily on civilian projects began to call themselves civil engineers to distinguish themselves from those whose interests were mainly military. Civil engineers build structures of various sorts, design transportation systems, water and sanitary systems, power grids, and communications systems. Nevertheless, the origins of engineering are military. Civil engineering might be seen as a spillover from the martial curriculum.

Logistics and Production

From military logistics, societies directly learn how to maximize the production and distribution of goods. Just as Roman roads carried both troops and commerce, so America's Eisenhower-era National Defense Highway Program was a dual-use project. This is most evident in the realm of mass production. The practice of assembly-line production using interchangeable parts, the basis of contemporary factory systems, derives directly from methods devised to maximize the production of military weapons and supplies. Perhaps one of the earliest examples of mass production in the bronze-triggered crossbow produced in China during the Warring States period. The military success of the Qin Empire in 221 BCE was due in no small measure to its ability to mass produce crossbows with which to arm his troops.
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Several centuries later, the Venetian Arsenal, a state-owned shipyard and armory, mass-produced warships using prefabricated parts at the rate of one ship per day. In the nineteenth century, what came to be known as the American system of manufacture was introduced in America's Springfield and Harpers Ferry arsenals for the rapid production of guns—using interchangeable parts. Subsequently, of course, mass production with interchangeable parts became the basis for all factory production and, hence, the bedrock of civilian industrial economies.

THE LESSONS OF WAR

War is brutal and terrible and, as General Lee suggested, we should not grow fond of it. The fact that war is terrible, however, does not mean that nothing is to be learned from it. Indeed, societies have, over the centuries, learned a number of valuable lessons from war. Fundamentally, they learned to be realistic. They also learned how to rationalize authority, to plan, and to develop engineering and production skills. The cost of these lessons was high. Lessons learned were sometimes forgotten and had to be relearned. Nevertheless, the curriculum of war, perhaps more than any other text, brought about the development of a more modern world.

Just as it promotes rational thinking, war is an important factor in the incubation and diffusion of technology. Modern war, of course, relies heavily upon technology. The US military makes substantial use of computers, precision-guided munitions, remotely piloted aircraft, orbital satellites, and so forth. Today, the US Army is testing a robotic dog with the capacity to accompany troops and carry their supplies over rough terrain. The robot, whose official military name is “Legged Squad Support System” or LS3, responds to voice commands and will eventually be armed and able to engage opposing forces. The LS3 may resemble some device from a science fiction film, but military use of advanced technology is nothing new. Cutting-edge technology and war have always gone hand-in-hand. Though robotic dogs might have been beyond their capabilities, ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese engineers also developed complex weapons, armor, siege equipment, and a host of other military tools that shocked and frightened their less sophisticated foes.

Some weapons may have no civilian use or immediate counterpart. The land mine, for example, designed to detonate if disturbed by pressure or vibration, is a simple and useful weapon with no obvious civilian application. But, of course, the same chemistry and materials science and production technology used to design and construct land mines is also used to synthesize chemicals, fabricate containers, and assemble a variety of pressure-sensitive switches used every day in the civilian world. Technology is technology. The same skills and techniques employed in the design and manufacture of weapons are also used to design and build bridges, televisions, automobiles, cell phones,
and the other devices upon which civilization depends. Technology is inherently dual use.

Given the ubiquity and, one might say, life-and-death importance of warfare in human history, it is probably not surprising to discover that a good deal of human ingenuity has been devoted to the development and perfection of ever more potent instruments of destruction. As in the case of the land mine, many of these swords, despite biblical prophecy, cannot directly be turned into plowshares. War and preparation for war, nevertheless, have played a major role in the incubation and dissemination of civilian technologies. In a sense, perfecting the sword has also helped to perfect the plowshare and vice versa. There are three main conduits through which warfare can advance or disseminate civilian technology. These are conquest, imitation, and civil–military technology transfer.

CONQUEST

Military conquest is among the most common routes for the dissemination of technology. When, as has often occurred, societies with superior technologies conquer those with less technological ability, surviving members of the conquered society may be eventually absorbed into the technical culture of their victorious foes. They learn not only to wield more advanced weapons, but also become familiar with the tools, machines, and production technologies of their conquerors. In other cases, technologically more advanced societies have been conquered by their technological inferiors. In these instances, the conquerors have usually taken advantage of the opportunity to appropriate the technologies of those whom they defeated. In a ricochet effect, they sometimes use those technology to expand their conquests and increase the technological capabilities of still other societies.

An important example of technological dissemination through conquest is the case of the European subjugation and colonization of vast stretches of the world between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries. This conquest was made possible by the Europeans' superior armaments which, in turn, reflected Europe's general technological advantage over those whom it defeated.

Of course, nothing guaranteed that it would be the Europeans who conquered the world. The Chinese might have seemed more likely candidates for this role. At the end of the fifteenth century, China possessed technology and weapons more advanced than those to be found in Europe. Ships commanded by Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho cruised the Indian Ocean and certainly had the potential to cross the Pacific. The Chinese might have found and conquered the New World.
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In early modern Europe, however, complex patterns of competition between merchants and among princes meant that new technologies were generally likely to be viewed as a potential source of profit by the former and a potential advantage in Europe's unrelenting arms race by the latter.

Competition produced a virtuous cycle of ongoing improvement in both military and civilian technologies, with each helping to advance the other. Merchants, for example, supported the construction of larger and more sturdy ships, which in turn provided princes with better gun platforms for naval artillery, which in turn expanded the trade routes accessible to the merchants, and so on.

In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China, by contrast, the mandarins who effectively ruled the empire saw both commerce and technology as socially disruptive forces. They believed that both needed to be tightly regulated to preserve the peace of the empire and their own power. This perspective was exemplified by the imperial decision of 1433 to end explorations of the Indian Ocean, followed by a 1436 decree prohibiting the construction of seagoing ships.
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Hence, China entered a period of stagnation as Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch, and French vessels explored the world and employed their superior arms to subjugate the various indigenous peoples. Over time, though, European armaments and more general technology were absorbed by the surviving descendants of the various defeated groups, erasing much of Europe's technological and military advantage.

The Spanish adventurers who landed in Mexico and South America in the early sixteenth century encountered the enormous Aztec and Inca empires. For reasons discussed in the
previous chapter
, both empires had been badly weakened by civil war and revolution. In addition, the Spaniards unwittingly brought with them smallpox and other diseases that ravaged populations never previously exposed to them that, accordingly, lacked resistance. Nevertheless, a handful of Spaniards would not have been able to defeat and overthrow the Aztecs and Incas if they had not also possessed weapons far superior to those of their unfortunate adversaries.

At the 1532 Battle of Cajamarca, for example, superior weaponry along with military skill and guile allowed Francisco Pizarro and his force of 168 Spaniards to defeat a veteran Inca army of some 80,000 warriors, killing many thousands and capturing the emperor Atahuallpa. Not a single Spaniard was killed in the encounter. The armaments wielded by the Incas included wooden clubs and maces, slings, spears, bows, and stone or copper axes. For protection, Inca soldiers wore wooden helmets and carried wood and leather shields. Officers wore padded cotton tunics as a kind of body armor. Horses were unknown in the New World, so all Inca troops were on foot.

The Spaniards, for their part, wielded steel, double-edged, three-foot-long swords as well as steel daggers that easily cut through Inca helmets, shields, and quilted armor. In battle, moreover, the Spaniards wore steel armor that gave them considerable protection from Inca weapons. The Spaniards also possessed firearms, including arquebuses (an early musket design) and several small cannons. These firearms were useful, but even more important than firearms were the horses and lances of Spanish cavalrymen. Some sixty of Pizarro's soldiers were mounted and armed with long wooden lances tipped with iron or steel points. Riders and their horses wore armor and the cavalrymen, like the foot soldiers, carried steel swords for close combat. A rank of armored Spanish horsemen with lances fixed had little difficulty sweeping through large groups of Inca foot soldiers. On open ground, the Incas had no defense against cavalry.
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Spanish foot soldiers, also armored and
carrying steel swords, were well able to wreak havoc among the dazed survivors of the cavalry charge. Similar disparities in weaponry made it possible for Cortés and his force of 600 Spanish soldiers to overthrow the Aztec empire and for other conquistadors to wrest control of virtually all of South and Central America from native peoples.

Again, weapons were not the whole story. Native peoples were weakened by European diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and influenza. In the case of the Aztecs and Incas, imperial policies had led to civil wars and rebellions that seriously weakened both empires. Neither Pizarro nor Cortés would have prevailed if the enemies of the Incas and Aztecs had not contributed tens of thousands of warriors to fight alongside the Spaniards. Superior weaponry, though, was critical. Had the Spaniards not demonstrated the power of their weapons, potential native allies would have been reluctant to join them.

In North America, too, superior weapons paved the way for conquest and settlement by Europeans. Muskets and swords and, eventually repeating rifles and Gatling guns, overpowered native resistance. In the North American case, of course, indigenous people were gradually able to acquire and use European weapons to defend themselves. For reasons that will be discussed below, however, this proved to be of little use in checking the European invasion.

The superiority of European weapons relative to those wielded by the Incas, Aztecs, and other peoples of the Western Hemisphere reflected the larger technological gap between the Old and New Worlds. The cultures of the New World were somewhere between the stone and bronze ages in terms of technological development. Their European invaders had long mastered the production of iron, and were regularly combining carbon with iron to manufacture steel weapons and implements that were far superior to the brittle stone or soft bronze counterparts available to the peoples of the New World. It was European maritime technology, moreover, that made possible the long voyages that brought the conquistadores and later groups to the New World. These technologies included the lateen sail able to power large boats, the compass and astrolabe for navigation, and the hinged, stern-mounted
“pintle and gudgeon” rudder that allowed large ships to be maneuvered even in heavy weather.

A second wave of European conquests, these beginning in the seventeenth century, depended less on steel and more on gunpowder. Firearms were introduced early in the fourteenth century in both Europe and China, and while the Chinese invented gunpowder, it was the Europeans who invented—or, at least, perfected—the gun.
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The first gunpowder weapons were artillery pieces of various sorts which, by the mid-fifteenth century, were sufficiently powerful to knock down stone castle and town walls that had previously been considered impregnable. Initially, artillery pieces were made of bronze and were so expensive that only the largest and wealthiest states could afford them. By the mid-sixteenth century, though, European manufacturers had learned how to build cannons using iron rather than bronze, which significantly lowered the price and increased the availability of these weapons. The original cannons had been enormous, but rapid improvements in gunpowder, ammunition, and design led to canons that could be carried to the battlefield on horse-drawn carriages and quickly moved as needed to support infantry and cavalry.

While large guns came first, small firearms that could be used by individual soldiers were not far behind. The earliest effective hand weapon, the arquebus, was a muzzle-loaded long gun fired by a matchlock mechanism. The soldier loaded one or more pieces of metal shot into the gun's barrel, took aim, lit the match, and pulled the trigger to bring the match into a flash pan, which would ignite a predetermined quantity of gunpowder and fire the weapon. As this description suggests, the arquebus's rate of fire was slow, albeit faster than that of the crossbow. However, this weapon had many advantages relative to the longbows and crossbows it soon replaced. Bowmen required years of practice to develop any degree of accuracy, but very little skill or training was required to fire the arquebus successfully. Metal shot from the arquebus, moreover, could easily penetrate even the best armor at a fairly long range, and a soldier armed with an arquebus could carry enough ammunition and powder to fire his weapon repeatedly during an engagement.

By the 1530s, the Spaniards, who were among the first to make use of the arquebus in battle, developed a formation called the
tercio
, or Spanish square, to take advantage of the new weapon. Initially, the tercio consisted of between 1,500 and 3,000 infantrymen, some designated as pikemen and some as arquebusiers. A third group consisting of swordsmen became less important as the lethality of firearms gradually improved. The pikemen were arrayed in a hollow square. Their eighteen-foot-long pikes, tipped by four-foot-long iron or steel spearheads were designed to hold off cavalry charges and to mount shock attacks against opposing infantry.

This formation had been invented by the Swiss who, with infantry phalanxes armed with pikes and halberds—hooked weapons designed to drag horsemen from their saddles—had brought an end to the battlefield supremacy of the feudal cavalry.
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In the Spanish tercio, the halberdiers were replaced by arquebusiers who could direct fire at opposing cavalry and infantry. The pikemen protected the arquebusiers from being overrun by cavalry charges and, in turn, launched shock attacks against enemy formations. At the same time, engineers were assigned to throw up field fortifications to shelter the tercio from its opponents' gunfire and shock attacks. Improvements in the design of armaments during the course of the sixteenth century led to the substitution of muskets for arquebuses. The musket, also a long gun, was more accurate and easier to load and hence able to maintain a more rapid and effective rate of fire than the arquebus. Muskets, in turn, put an end to the need for pikemen. Infantry armed with muskets, and supported by cavalry and artillery, became the mainstays of European battlefields after 1600.