There is an old saying that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. History suggests something slightly worse: sometimes they fight the last war with the new war’s weapons.
And that can be catastrophic.
Military technology has repeatedly changed faster than military thinking. A new weapon appears that can kill farther away, faster, or more accurately. Yet the men commanding armies often continue using tactics developed for an earlier age. The weapon changes. The doctrine does not. And ordinary soldiers pay for the delay.
The problem is ancient.
David Had the Better Weapon
Consider David and Goliath.
We remember the story as the ultimate victory of the weak over the strong. But militarily, David may not have been quite the underdog Sunday school made him out to be.
Goliath was equipped for close combat. He had armor, a sword and a spear. Against another heavily armed warrior, he was terrifying.
David declined to play that game.
He carried a sling.
An experienced slinger could hurl a stone at considerable speed and strike from well beyond the reach of a sword. David did not defeat Goliath by being stronger. He defeated him by refusing to fight according to Goliath’s rules.
Goliath brought a knife to a gunfight several thousand years before there were guns.
That pattern would repeat itself.
The Knight Meets His Unpleasant Future
For centuries, the mounted knight dominated European warfare. He was essentially a medieval tank: heavily armored, expensive and frightening when charging toward you.
Then increasingly effective missile weapons complicated matters.
At battles such as Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, English longbowmen helped devastate French forces containing heavily armored men-at-arms.
The lesson was uncomfortable for Europe’s warrior aristocracy.
Courage was still useful. Armor was still useful. But neither made a man immune to a projectile arriving from a distance.
Gunpowder eventually made the point even more emphatically.
A knight might spend years learning horsemanship and swordsmanship. A firearm could turn a relatively ordinary infantryman into a mortal threat after considerably less training.
Technology has a nasty habit of democratizing death.
The Musket Changes. The Charge Doesn’t.
By the American Civil War, firearms had undergone another important transformation.
The old smoothbore musket was inaccurate at substantial distances. Armies therefore massed soldiers together, marched them relatively close to the enemy and fired volleys. Under those circumstances, tightly packed formations made sense.
Then came widespread use of rifled muskets firing Minié-style bullets.
Rifling made infantry weapons potentially effective at much greater distances. Yet Civil War officers had inherited much of their tactical thinking from the age of Napoleon.
The result was a terrible mismatch.
Soldiers sometimes advanced shoulder to shoulder across open ground against defenders armed with weapons far more effective than those for which the old tactics had originally evolved.
Fredericksburg offered a particularly brutal example. Union troops repeatedly attacked Confederate positions around Marye’s Heights in December 1862. The result was slaughter.
Gettysburg produced another famous example.
On July 3, 1863, approximately 12,000 Confederate soldiers stepped from the woods and advanced across open fields toward the Union center in what became known as Pickett’s Charge.
They displayed extraordinary courage.
They also demonstrated that courage is not a substitute for ballistics.
The Civil War was being fought with increasingly modern weapons by commanders whose tactical inheritance still contained a good deal of Napoleon.
And technology was not finished with them.
Then Someone Invented the Machine Gun
If the rifled musket should have made frontal assaults questionable, the machine gun should have made them nearly unthinkable.
Yet in 1914, European armies marched into the First World War wearing colorful uniforms and carrying assumptions formed in earlier conflicts.
Then they encountered machine guns, rapid-firing artillery, barbed wire and increasingly sophisticated defensive positions.
The mathematics had changed.
One machine gun could produce the firepower once requiring many riflemen. Artillery could devastate concentrations of troops before those troops ever saw the enemy.
The answer should have been obvious: stop sending masses of men across exposed ground.
Unfortunately, military institutions are not always famous for immediately recognizing the obvious.
So men climbed ladders from trenches and walked into machine-gun fire.
At the Somme, Passchendaele and countless less famous places, Europe discovered the horrifying consequences of combining industrial technology with preindustrial notions of battlefield courage.
The machine gun did not merely make an old tactic less effective.
It made the old tactic suicidal.
The Airplane Changes the Map
The airplane created another revolution.
At first, aircraft were mainly scouts. Then somebody had the predictable thought: if we can fly over the enemy, perhaps we should drop something unpleasant on him.
Soon aircraft were fighting one another, bombing positions and directing artillery.
By the Second World War, air power could determine entire campaigns.
The battleship, once the ultimate symbol of national power, suddenly had reason to fear a relatively small aircraft carrying a torpedo or bomb.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor demonstrated the reach of carrier aviation. Three days later, Japanese aircraft sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse at sea.
The age of the battleship had not disappeared completely.
But its résumé suddenly looked considerably less impressive.
Tanks: The Machine Gun’s Answer
The tank itself had emerged during the First World War partly because armies needed a way to cross trenches, wire and machine-gun fire.
Initially clumsy and unreliable, tanks improved dramatically.
By 1940, German forces demonstrated that tanks were most powerful not simply as armored replacements for infantry but as part of fast-moving formations coordinated with infantry, artillery, communications and aircraft.
France possessed substantial military resources and some excellent tanks.
What it lacked was an equally effective way of employing them against the German operational system that confronted it.
Again, the important invention was not merely the machine.
It was understanding what the machine made possible.
Radar: The Weapon That Didn’t Shoot
Some transformative military technologies don’t kill anyone directly.
Radar was one.
During the Battle of Britain, Britain’s radar network helped detect approaching German aircraft early enough for RAF fighters to be sent where they were needed.
That sounds almost mundane today.
It wasn’t.
Britain had changed the problem from:
Where is the enemy?
to:
The enemy is coming from over there.
In warfare, knowing where the other fellow is before he knows where you are can be worth an astonishing number of guns.
And Now, the Drone
We are watching another transformation today.
A relatively inexpensive drone can find a tank costing millions of dollars. Another drone can attack it. Small unmanned aircraft can conduct reconnaissance, correct artillery fire, strike individual vehicles and force soldiers to conceal themselves from threats coming from above.
The war in Ukraine has made this transformation impossible to ignore.
For much of military history, hiding from the enemy meant staying out of his line of sight.
Now the enemy may be a buzzing object several hundred feet overhead equipped with a camera.
The relationship between cost and destructive power is changing again. Sophisticated armored vehicles, artillery pieces and even ships can be threatened by systems costing a tiny fraction of their price.
David has returned.
Only now his sling has propellers and a video camera.
The Most Dangerous Weapon May Be an Old Idea
There is a temptation to read military history as a story about inventions: the bow, gunpowder, rifles, machine guns, tanks, airplanes, radar, missiles, satellites and drones.
But perhaps the more important story concerns the interval between invention and understanding.
Technology changes what is possible.
Human beings continue behaving as though nothing has changed.
The French knight still charges.
The Civil War infantryman still advances in formation.
The First World War soldier still goes over the top.
The battleship admiral still trusts armor.
The tank commander still assumes that if he cannot see the enemy, the enemy cannot see him.
Eventually tactics catch up.
But there is often a terrible period in between.
And during that period, generals sometimes describe repeated failure with noble words: courage, sacrifice, discipline, honor.
Those qualities are real. The soldiers displaying them deserve our admiration.
But we should be careful.
Sometimes what history remembers as extraordinary courage was required only because someone farther from the battlefield failed to understand that the battlefield had changed.
That may be the enduring lesson of military technology.
The most dangerous moment in warfare is not necessarily when a new weapon appears.
It is when the new weapon has appeared, but the old idea has not yet disappeared.