War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict

Introduction: The Meaning of War in a Technological Age

introduction ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ The Meaning of War in a Technological Age Geoffrey Jensen Many military writers view the impact of modern technology on warfare with a mixture of fascination , dismay, and grudging respect, as if the dawn of a new age brought with it an inevitable but nonetheless tragic decline in the very skills and values that once made the waging of war an esteemed art. As William H. McNeill has written, the “technology of modern war, indeed, excludes almost all elements of muscular heroism and simple brute ferocity that once found expression in handto -hand combat.” The supreme danger in this development, he continues , lies in the unpleasant truth that the “industrialization of war, scarcely more than a century old, has erased the old realities of soldiering without altering ancient, inherited psychic aptitudes for the collective exercise of force.”1 Such concerns are not new. In fact, even before the atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the English military theorist J. F. C. Fuller compared military invention to “a Frankenstein monster,” warning that it was “destroying man’s own work, his own culture, his own civilization, his past, his present and his future.”2 And Fuller—who was anything but a pacifist—had been preceded in this gloomy outlook by Friedrich Engels, who, together with the other founder of modern socialism, Karl Marx, so dramatically forecast the downfall of capitalism. Despite their ostensible enthusiasm for 1 violent revolution, Engels and many socialists actually came to fear the growing destructive power of modern war and the threat it posed to Western civilization. A world war that took advantage of all technological and industrial advances, Engels reasoned, could annihilate everything in its path—including the achievements socialism and the working classes had managed to attain.3 Of course, technology of some kind or another has always been an essential ingredient in war, and advances in armaments raised concerns long before Engels. The Spartan king Archidamus, for example , reacted with alarm when he witnessed for the first time a weapon that could shoot darts through the air. “O Hercules,” he is said to have exclaimed, “the valour of man is at an end.”4 Needless to say, Archidamus’s appraisal was extremely premature, and such later innovations as the crossbow, new kinds of defensive fortifications , and even gunpowder failed to remove individual skill and bravery from their prominent positions in military affairs. With the Industrial Revolution, however, technology’s role in war and society seemed to reach a new level, threatening far more than the valued position held by individual heroism and skill in the “art of war.” Humanity’s new productive—and thus destructive— capabilities influenced not only military organizations and actions but also their relationships to crucial political, economic, and cultural developments. As the American Civil War soon demonstrated, victory in war could depend as much on each side’s ability to harness industrial resources as on battlefield skills. In some cases, at least, technologies of production, weapons, communications, and human and material management seemed to make traditional military abilities and values largely irrelevant. New technology could also have the effect of alienating soldiers from their comrades and from their own actions on the battlefield. Indeed , the concept of alienation, understood in its broader, psychosocial sense as well as in the strictly materialist terms associated with Marx, easily applies to the character of modern war. If, as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and other classical sociologists argued, industrialization brought with it a decline in traditional social norms geoffrey jensen 2 and community values, then this development must have had an impact on armies. As war entered what one historian calls the “age of systems,”5 individual soldiers, like factory workers, were more likely to perceive themselves as nothing but cogs in the wheel of a vast, complicated machine, in which their individual actions and heroism were even less important than before. At the same time, new technology and the growing importance of artillery in battle alienated soldiers even further from some of the modes of destruction they employed and their consequences, much as urban workers felt increasingly estranged from the products of their labors. As the invention of new weapons and tactics led to the phenomenon of the “empty battle- field,” the notion of soldierly community suffered yet another loss to the onslaught of technology. Whereas classical armies had often worked in single, dense masses conducive to moral cohesion, new...