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Through out the bloody reign of mankind, we have sought out newer better and more sophisticated ways of killing each other. From the stone and the club to the club with a stone in it to the club with a sharpened stone. The search went on and sometimes I wonder if it had not been for that overwhelming desire to kill each other we humans share if we wouldn’t till still be sitting in those caves.
Metallurgy to make weapons medicine and surgery to repair our soldiers to fight again is war as the driving force of humanity? Lets put the issue on scale and see how we balance out shall we? Lets put all the gold and treasure spent by humanity on weapons and on the other side of the scale all the talk about peace. Humiliating isn’t it? But still not content mankind soldiered on until in 1945 when they developed a weapon capable of obliterating themselves off the planet. After the war we talked again about using the new weapon for peace, yeah right. Like children playing with matches it is only a question of time before we burn ourselves.
But never satisfied we developed in better doomsday devices to more effientectly annihilate the planet. The post WW2 cold war left the west in a dilemma almost as old as mankind himself, how to overcome numerical superiority of our adversaries. The Greeks developed tactics the Romans used trained and full time professional soldiers the Mongols horsemanship Hannibal brought Elephants this was something new in warfare The first true terror weapon, the average European having never seen and elephant was terrified. But the terror was short lived; it has always been so and always will be the solution to high technology weaponry is never as expensive as the original weapon.
The metal sword made the club obsolete the bow made the spear obsolete England ruled Europe with the long bow but gunpowder change everything. Fortresses and castles taking decades to construct and mountains of gold could be reduced in hours with one cannon. From that point on the technology dictated the tactics of the battle; generals are notorious for looking back ward instead of forward. The American civil war was an exercise in the stupidity of military thinking, the Union forces fighting a Napoleonic campaign against cannon and rifles. Southern generals however were forced by numerical inferiority to try news ideas the ironclad, the submarine and for the siege of Richmond trench warfare. Union forces had the Gatling gun at their disposal but made little use of it opting to stay with outdated tactics regardless of slaughter. Custer rode off to the little bighorn with field cannons leaving behind two Gatling guns.
The Wright Brothers tried to sell the US Army Wright flyers and finally received and order for two. The Wrights were the toast of Europe and received orders from every country they visited. At the start of WW1 European air forces numbered in the hundreds of planes while the American air force numbered in the tens. Yet the tactics of WW1 were dictated by the airplane the submarine and the machine gun. Each weapon was less expensive than its predecessor. The airplane making ten cannons more accurate than a hundred the submarine was as lethal as a battleship at a fraction of the cost and the machine gun at the cost of a dozen rifles could do the work of hundred gunners.
At the end of WW1 the incredible carnage stirred even the hardest heart and humans naively tried to enact a lasting peace. Unable to understand their own warlike nature they were doomed to failure. The defeated Germans were limited to a 100,000-man standing army. They used this time for planning they used that 100,000 number as a skeleton developing a general staff and officer organization for the army to come. They thought long and hard about where they went wrong and how to win the next war. Unique in history an army planning how to use technology and tactics in the next war instead of the last.
They took the development of the tank the airplane and motor vehicles to make the front irrelevant. If you could pierce the front and capture the enemies headquarters and supplies the battle was over the actual defeat of the forces became unimportant if the head could be decapitated or forces surrounded. At the start of WW2 German equipment surpassed any in the field Germany fielded the first integrated high tech army all tanks were equipped with radios throughout the war they modernized and updated equipment eventually fielding the worlds first operational jet fighter squadrons.
But the Germans were not defeated with technology they were defeated with numbers German panzer tanks were far superior to anything fielded by the US or British but panzers were hand built while Sherman’s were mass-produced. The Germans referred to Sherman’s as Tommy cookers but the Germans were overwhelmed at four or five to one.
The Russians developed a remarkable tank the T54 using slanted armor and a high-powered gun it was easy to produce and again the Germans were overwhelmed with numbers. But even more important than tank development was the development of anti tank weapons
For a hundredth of the cost of a tank a tank could be destroyed with the shoulder fired rocket launcher. Cheap, portable easy to operate and again the counter measure defeats the high technology. The Soviets were run out of Afghanistan because of US supplied shoulder-fired missiles the ability of an untrained soldier with a 1500 dollar missile to knock down a ten million dollar aircraft and trained crew. In Yugoslavia a stealth fighter was shot out of the sky dependant on its high technology to stay hidden the Yugoslavs were using obsolete Russian radars and the US had assumed no one used this system anymore and they assumed wrong at a 45 million dollar loss.
We see in the current occupation in Iraq the insurgency using an artillery shell and a garage door opener to destroy millions of dollars in high tech equipment, turning such equipment from and asset to a liability. Since the invasion in 2003 the US Army's combat losses include at least 20 M1 Abrams tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armored personnel carriers, and 250 Humvees. The number of vehicles lost in battle comes to nearly 1,000 after adding in heavy and medium trucks and trailers, mine-clearing vehicles, and Fox wheeled reconnaissance vehicles. Nearly all these losses were caused by low tech improvised explosive devices.
The pentagon estimates the replacement cost for equipment in Iraq to be 17 billion dollars just for fiscal 2008 Estimates for the military replacing military equipment over all range in the 100 billion dollar range. These numbers are separate from the President budget proposals and estimates are growing daily. While troops rotate home equipment does not, as long equipment use stays high the costs will continue to grow exponentially The army conducted an analysis of how such stresses affect fielded equipment, and concluded that a single year of deployment in Iraq would cause as much wear and tear as five years of peacetime use.
Now we are saber rattling Iran with two aircraft carrier groups sitting of their coastline. Despite assurances that no attack is impending the world worries that we might, and if the US does Iran would be perfectly within their rights to retaliate. The US Navy operating in the confined space of gulf waters could find it self deluged by tens of anti ship missiles fired in a barrage at a carrier battle group along with air attacks and diversionary attacks. Each aircraft carrier costs around 4.5 billion dollars while the attacking missiles $100,000 each. Not including the loss of men and aircraft.
They dependence on superior technology will eventually fail history has proved this time and again from Rome to Baghdad what is required is not superior weaponry but superior diplomacy. The Fallacy of dependence on high tech weapons is to bet a million dollars against a hundred if you win you gain little but if you lose you lose much. Your opponent on the other hand can gamble again and again like a slot machine player just waiting for a jackpot. We not only should know this lesson we’ve proved it ourselves with our aid to the muhajadeen in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion.
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