War, an Outdated Idea: Everybody Loses

Mankind yearns, almost obsessively for progress. It has driven humanity from the earliest hunter gatherer societies to the modern world of mass communication and convenience. Any improvement comes at a cost. Sometimes, it’s possible to assess the cost in strictly monetary terms, sometimes the suffering makes the real price incalculable. History gives us a roadmap for the future, if we bother to look. Normally, we don’t. As Voltaire said, “History never repeats itself, man always does.”

According to the “Scientific American” there is evidence to support the theory that man first started riding horses 5,000 years ago. It changed everything. Man could travel at speeds never imagined. It opened the way for communication and trade networks with tentacles reaching across cultures that had been isolated, and sedate. It was a great awakening, allowing the mingling of distant beliefs and abilities, it was revolutionary.

Of course, as with almost any radical, life altering innovation, it had a dark side. Nomadic communities, whose very existence relied on mobility, could use the newfound speed to raid pastoral settlements, taking what they wanted and destroying everything else.

Approximately 3,000 BC, the Yamnaya people of the Eurasian steppes north of the black sea, used their newfound equestrian abilities to invade and conquer Europe. From modern Iran to the Isles of Great Britain the large muscular horsemen left a trail of DNA that leaves no doubt as to their presence. Events from so long ago lack any documented proof, but there is no question that they were there, and the civilization that existed at the time changed significantly, and possibly violently, because of their presence. There are theories suggesting that the nomads bought communicable diseases for which native populations had no immunity. Either way the cost in lives was enormous and it left a stain on Europe that lingered for centuries.

They were only the first, at least probably the first. Over the years many tribes have taken advantage of their unique mobility to subjugate and rule other cultures. There were the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Huns, the Mongols…

In 100 CE Heron, the inventor of Alexandria designed and built the first steam “engine.” It was a sealed container filled with water, above a heat source, steam would rise through pipes connected to a free floating ball. Pressure, built and released through directional tubes caused the ball to spin. Heron thought it an attraction serving no practical purpose.

That changed on February 21^st, 1804. Richard Trevithick harnessed the power of steam to drive a piston and turn metal wheels, moving a large, heavy vehicle a short distance. Soon steam was spinning a ship’s propellers, or a boats paddle wheel. Mobility altered the course of history. One small step for man…

Ships sailed the oceans, iron rails snaked across the continents, carrying people and freight more quickly and reliably than ever before. The world shrank. It was a large-scale solution with far reaching implications. It lacked scalability, it wasn’t practical for individuals or small groups.

It did provide for the rapid deployment of armed men to a battlefield. At least, by comparison to the old method of bringing men from distant places to central area. Assemble them piecemeal and marshal them in a large area and march them to a distant place, where if things worked out, they would find another large group of men and try to kill them.

In the late days of the 19^th, and early days of the 20^th the general staffs of the armies of the great powers in Europe drew up elaborate timetables and rail schedules. Train cars were allocated, and schedules planned down to the timing of the train wheels passing over various crossings. Once it began there was no stopping it. Europe twitched and spasmed in the death grip of competing orders of battle. No nation was willing to be the last one to mobilize, tardiness was tantamount to national suicide. The trains delivered World War I right on schedule.

Rushing to the frontiers men collided in an historic disaster.

During the darkest days of World War I, men faced each other along a line of trenches stretching across most of western Europe. It was, theoretically possible to walk from the border of Switzerland to the English Channel without raising yourself to ground level. It was a meat-grinder. Men died by the thousands for the privilege of moving their trench line one way or another a few feet. It was a war of impersonal killing. Death from a distance. If allowed to continue it might have consumed the entire population of Europe.

The answer was a metal box using an internal combustion engine, riding on steel tracks. The M1 allowed soldiers to advance at a top speed of 3.7 miles an hour. It was hot and terrible inside. Exhaust fumes and the deafening noise of the 6-cylinder, 13-liter, water cooled engine made the cabin a Dantesque hell. However, being inside was still infinitely better than being outside, in the filthy, flooded trenches, where a new menace waited. As though shredding by machine gun fire or horrible dismemberment by an artillery shell, or slow suffocation from mustard gas weren’t enough, now doughboys faced crushing by the steel tracks of a 28-ton monster, powered by an internal combustion engine. Machines were taking over modern war.

General staffs around the globe went to work drawing up plans using the new motorized beasts. Tanks became faster, (the Panzer 1, the first tank used by the Wehrmacht in the invasion of Poland was able to move at 24 miles per hour) more maneuverable, more heavily armed and armored, and available in significantly greater numbers than the Mark 1 in WW I.

Heavier than air airplanes, mostly used for reconnaissance in World War I, their limited power would only allow a pilot and occasionally an observer, became an important component in the plans. Interwar improvements made them more efficient and lethal. They could carry bombs and machine guns, delivering deliver death and destruction from above suddenly and violently.

Germany was the first to test the war plans built around the new technology. BlitzKrieg, lightning warfare. Using tanks and attack aircraft the Wehrmacht rolled across Poland in 39 days. The German army shattered Polish defenses along with most everything else. It’s hard to smash your way across the length and breadth of a nation without rolling over a few innocent bystanders.

But nothing is new forever. The Allies began preparing a “defense in depth.” Miles and miles of defensive military might whose purpose was to grind the enemy advance to a halt. It was terrible and bloody and any town or village that happened to be in the zone became part of the destruction. And the people living there were just victims of circumstance. For the first time since the Thirty Years Wars civilian deaths were higher than military casualties, more than double. On and on, the war chewed up swaths of land, in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

It was an expensive war, devouring tanks, airplanes, artillery pieces, soldiers, and civilians, by the thousands. Despite being doomed the Axis powers were unwilling to drop their weapons and go home, for some reason no army is willing to just give up. The war seemed to be endless.

Everything old is new again. In a move back to the Middle Ages, Bomber Command, Europe decided to renew the Chevuachee. An ancient practice of sending cavalry charges against the softer targets, farms, villages, small cities, instead of fortified castles. Attacking industrial targets, manufacturing facilities, freight yards, and transportation infrastructure became common practice. If these targets happened to be in the center of crowded cities, well, that’s the cost of war, at least the cost of losing a war.

On February 13^th the British Bomber Command dropped 2,700 tons of bombs on Dresden, Germany. It was a mixture of high explosives and incendiary. Aided by strong winds it created a fire storm, that consumed the city, and at least 25,000 people, though many believe it may have been more than 100,000 due to the refugees fleeing from the advancing Russian army. Aerial bombing became, in one night, a perfect weapon. A way to kill a lot of people without sacrificing army units. It was only a matter of duplicating the results.

It happened. The hydrogen bomb.

E=MC², the world’s most famous equation, explained the power of the atom.^[1] The energy released burning a candle will equal the amount of wax consumed. If you measured the light, heat and smoke emitted it would be the same as the wax burned, E=M. If you release the power of the atom the energy released would be the same as the matter consumed, times the speed of light, (186,000 miles a second) squared. Obviously, it would only take a small amount of matter to generate enormous amounts of energy.

By the time the war was winding down in Asia it was a foregone conclusion that they would drop hydrogen bombs on population centers. A bomb that powerful needed a large target. A shipyard or military facility would have been too small to show the awesome effects resulting from releasing the power of the universe. The only real question was which cities would be meteorologically available. Based on casualty projections from the invasion of Japan it made some sort of sense. High command didn’t factor in the lives of Japanese civilians. War literally became hell.

Washington DC and Hiroshima Japan are 7,208 miles apart. Most of the people who decided to drop the bomb had never seen the city, not even from the cockpit of a Superfortress bomber. War had moved into an office space. Not for everybody, though.

Changes in technology, from splitting the atom to climbing on a horse, have often come with a terrible cost.

Now, we sit at the crux of a moment. Artificial Intelligence is blossoming, spreading, worming its way into everything we do. It even helped me write this column, sort of, suggesting modifications to sentences, and keeping an eye on spelling and grammar. AI has the potential to help doctors save lives, it can improve decision making in economic industries, streamline production facilities. It’s a revolutionary force, with the ability to change the world and improve lives in ways most of us don’t understand. It learns from its own mistakes. The question we need to ask is “Have we learned from our mistakes?” The world is not that much different than it was 5,000 years ago, or in 1905, certainly, looking at the leadership today, it is almost identical to the late years of the 1930s. If we make the same mistakes, they will certainly be our last.

^[1] It has implications far beyond the simple explanation here, but the math is still valid for this purpose.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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