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

1. Infantry Armament and the Perception of Tactical Need, 1789–1918

chapter 1 ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Infantry Armament and the Perception of Tactical Need, 1789–1918 Paddy Griffith It has often been said that the need for a new weapon is identified by one set of people; then the weapon is designed and built by a completely different set of people ; and finally, it is used in battle by a third group yet again, who will have had nothing to do with the deliberations of the first two groups.1 Typically the first group will be politicians; the second group will be engineers; while only the third will be the fighting soldiers whose lives actually depend on just how well their tactical needs match up (or don’t) with the weapon that is finally procured.2 There are many opportunities within this fragmented structure for misunderstandings and poor analyses of real tactical needs, and hence for major wrong turns in procurement. These may involve the creation of costly white elephants that are useless to the frontline troops, or conversely, if there is excessive cost cutting and skimping, there may be an assumption that the frontline troops do not need to replace obsolete weapons with anything new at all. Many cautionary tales may be told of the disasters that can occur. The whole history of the submarine from the American Revolution to the start of the First World War is a case of “aspiration unsupported by technical feasibility,” accompanied, unfortunately, by a small yet 19 continuing list of fatalities among those who volunteered for the service .3 There was both a political and a tactical need for this weapon, but the engineers simply could not build one that worked. The same could be said of airpower, which represented an even more politically glamorous achievement, widely trumpeted when the first military balloon supposedly “helped” in the French victory at Fleurus in 1794. In practice, the aerial dimension proved incapable of delivering any meaningful tactical benefit before August 1914, when the early airplanes of the British Expeditionary Force proved to be rather better than cavalry at unmasking the German advance through Belgium and Picardy. Airpower never looked back from that moment onward, although it is difficult for us in the year 2000 to remember that this decisive turning point occurred some seventeen years later than the halfway point in the whole history of combat flying. “Political aspirations” may interfere with weapons procurement in many other ways, for example, when the Congreve rocket was forced on an unwilling Duke of Wellington in 1813–15, with little reference to the true tactical need, merely by virtue of the enthusiastic inventor’s personal influence with the Board of Ordnance. At Waterloo, this weapon proved distinctly two-edged in nature, causing as much consternation among friendly forces as among the enemy.4 It would finally come of age on the battlefield, as a reliable instrument of massed terror bombardment, only after vastly more sophisticated fuses, explosives, and propellant fuels had become available during the Second World War.5 Then again, it was politics that distorted British procurement priorities through much of 1941, when the prime minister became fixated with the belief that if only a few fast convoys could carry a critical mass of tanks to Egypt via Malta (as opposed to the usual much longer route via Capetown), then the whole war in North Africa could be won almost instantly. Churchill believed that the tactical need in the desert was simply for more tanks, and so he strained all the resources of the Royal Navy, of the Royal Air Force (RAF), and especially of the tank-producing factories to provide what he saw as the necessary wherewithal. He failed to understand paddy griffith 20 that the tanks were effectively quite useless, once they arrived at Alexandria, until trained crews had been found to man them, and until they had been laboriously fitted with dust filters and other essential modifications for local conditions of climate and terrain. Then, when the tanks were finally committed to action, it turned out they were incapable of delivering any useful results until the whole “bull-at-a-gate” tactical culture of the Eighth Army had itself been radically reformed—which would not happen until well into 1942.6 Hence it was not merely Churchill who misunderstood the tactical needs of the army—it was the army itself. If it had studied the problem with a little less precipitation but in...