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Technology And War
By Alex Roland
American Diplomacy takes pleasure in offering to its readers an article of considerable interpretive importance by the military historian Alex Roland.
Prepared for and presented at the Summary Conference on the Study of War held in June 1997 under the auspices of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, with the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, the paper is intended as part of an extended study of the phenomenon of warfare in the nuclear age.
Professor Roland invites your comment. You may address him by e-mail at aroland@acpub.duke.edu
"The hydrogen bomb not only made single weapons more destructive, [it] also made massive destructive power affordable, at least to the superpowers. Neither [the Soviet Union nor the United States] could have otherwise afforded to amass the nuclear arsenals they did, with a combined explosive force equivalent to more than five billion tons of TNT. Finally, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile ensured that these weapons could be placed on any target in the enemy's territory without interference. "Nuclear weapons thus became the first weapon in human history that the holders dared not use. "~ Alex Roland
Introduction
As warfare became more lethal in the second half of the twentieth century, it killed fewer people. Casualties from war fell by 82 percent between 1950 and 1995. 1
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As a percentage of world population, they are now at a level comparable to that of the first half of the nineteenth century.
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One explanation for this paradox may be found in Quincy Wright's A Study of War (1942). 2 Wright did not predict a decline in deaths from war. He did, however, identify technology as the principal shaper of war in the modern world.
It is the thesis of this paper that technology accounts for the declining death rate from war over the last fifty years. Death rate, in turn, is taken to be the most important barometer of war. The argument will be made using Wright's analysis as a point of departure. His understanding of the relationship between technology and war will be tested against the experience that followed publication of his study.
The paper is organized in four sections:
Quincy Wright
Quincy Wright and his colleagues at the University of Chicago undertook their study of war in response to the shock of World War I. Though the Great War had its most profound and lasting impact in Europe, where most of the casualties were suffered, it nonetheless stunned thoughtful observers around the world. Its duration and cost were largely unexpected; the casualties in less than five years of fighting exceeded those of the entire nineteenth century. And it called into question the optimism and hubris nurtured by the Pax Britannica.
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These in turn had been fueled by increasing mastery of the forces of nature, by the sheer power of modern technology and industry.
Scholars of every persuasion asked themselves how a disaster such as World War I could have come upon the modern world unbidden. Books offered answers from the biology of war, the psychology of war, the sociology of war, the economics of war, and still other explanatory categories and agents of causation. Some of these studies focused on the conduct of war, a few on the consequences of war, but most on the causes of war. Their authors wanted to understand how World War I could have happened. The answer for some lay in human nature; they challenged the Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of man. Others sought the explanation in human institutions.
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The interdisciplinary nature of this scholarly assault on the puzzle of World War I naturally resonated with the social sciences faculty at the University of Chicago. Barely a quarter of a century old when World War I broke out, Chicago was already famous for intellectual rigor, innovative scholarship, and interdisciplinary study in the social sciences. Beginning in 1929, it would become more famous still for the educational reforms instituted by its young president, Robert Maynard Hutchins.
In this environment, Quincy Wright proposed a study of war to his department chairman, political scientist Charles E. Merriam. 3 Wright, himself a political scientist and a pacifist with a PhD in international law, had joined the Chicago faculty in 1923. His proposal to Merriam three years later led to meeting of Chicago colleagues from the departments of political science, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology, and philosophy. Out of this meeting grew a five year plan for an interdisciplinary study of war relying mostly on University of Chicago faculty and graduate students. In the end, sixty six studies were completed. Forty five of these were accepted as theses for Master's or Doctor's degrees at Chicago. Ten were published as books, seven as the substantive basis of journal articles. Wright himself wrote the synthetic A Study of War, gathering in its appendices much of the other work.
Wright advanced a four tier model of the evolution of war. Each tier he associated with a stage in human evolution, with a primary driving force behind war, and with a scholarly discipline. The relationships are represented by the matrix in the following table:
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The transitions from one stage to the next, Wright believed, were caused by changes in communication: speech, writing, and printing respectively.
The model served several purposes for Wright:
Wright's assertion that changes in communication drove the transitions from one stage to the next seems to have been based more on conceptual neatness than solid evidence. It works reasonably well in the transition from primitive to civilized eras; writing is often linked to the emergence of civilization. Similarly, the introduction of movable type in the West in the fifteenth century corresponds closely to Wright's periods scheme of the modern. There is less evidence, however, that the transition in human evolution from "animal" to "primitive" correlated with speech.
Furthermore, the model now raises the question of whether the so-called "communications revolution" of the late twentieth century marks another transition in Wright's scheme, perhaps to the post modern. If so, then Wright's model supports the claim that there is a "revolution in military affairs" under way, driven by an "information revolution."
However flawed Wright's periods may be, his model nonetheless provides a powerful framework for evaluating current claims about the transformation of war effected by technology in the second half of the twentieth century. Those claims, it will be seen, turn on the same question of disjunctures or discontinuities in history that Wright sought to identify in his model.
Wright argued that it was possible to trace the origins of war to any one of his four stages. It was perfectly appropriate, he felt, to speak only of modern war and to see it beginning around 1500. But it was also appropriate to view war as an artifact of civilization, and thus trace its roots to the Mesopotamian Valley in the fourth millennium BCE.
Wright's model is layered and cumulative; therefore, the earlier one begins, the richer one's understanding. Animal war was shaped by biological and psychological drives for food, sex, territory, dominance, and activity. 4 When communities arose, these drives did not disappear. Rather, they were submerged beneath the more dominant drive to maintain the "social solidarity" of the group.
The resulting tension between these biological and social drives is not trivial. Wright concluded that the
artificial drives [of society] developed by education and habit may be in conflict with natural drives existing from heredity. The effort at reconciliation leads to the psychological and sociological peculiarities which constitute culture. 5
The model grows more complicated still when primitive societies shifted to civilization. Now the dominant drive behind warfare is the international state system, i.e., the anarchic relationship between autonomous societies. In this equation the influences of biology and sociology do not disappear. They simply attenuate. Biology remains a force, but it has the least power. Social drives are more important than biological, but less important than international politics. The nature of the interstate system has more explanatory power than either of the other two.
Finally, in the fourth stage, technology dominates. Or at least Wright would say that technology became the most important category of analysis. For him, the inventions of the late Middle Ages marked the transition to the modern. Gunpowder was, of course, the most important for warfare. In its wake came other technologies that applied chemical energy to military purposes. The side-gunned sailing ship gave way to the steamship. Land transport was transformed by railroads and then by the internal combustion engine in trucks and tanks; the same engine made possible submarines and airplanes. Weaponry increased in range, accuracy, and lethality. The "utilization of sources of power other than those of man and beast in hostile operations has transformed the character of such operations," said Wright, "and made them war in the modern sense." 6 It was not so much that technology defines or even drives modern war. Rather, the global implications of technology lent new significance to war.
Releasing power stored by other than human or animal muscle . . . has made war more destructive, more likely to spread, and consequently of more general interest. Resort to war anywhere has tended to become a matter of concern to all governments. . . . Animals have fought from inherited drives, primitive men have fought from group custom, people of historical civilization have fought for group interests, but people of contemporary world civilization fight for a better world order.
This conceptualization of war appears to have been shaped by Wright's own predilections for international politics and by his deeply held belief that salvation lay in world government.
Wright qualified his characterization of the modern to escape the crude determinism implied by his formula. He believed that drives could be most readily identified in animal and primitive war; "among civilized people. . . there is seldom an immediate causal relationship between any one drive and a war." 7 Still, he identified food, sex, territory, adventure, self preservation, domination, independence, and society (i.e., subordination of the individual to the state) as drives toward war in historic societies. 8
While animal war is a function of instinct and primitive war of the mores, civilized war is primarily a function of state politics. It seldom springs spontaneously from the behavior patterns of the masses but from the calculations of the leaders. The drives of the masses as organized into behavior patterns at a given time are significant because they may be worked upon to create an army and war spirit in the civilization.
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Similarly, though "modern" was defined for Wright by technology, he nonetheless associated it with decidedly non-technical characteristics: humanism, liberalism, pragmatism, and relativism.
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The modern world, he believed, was increasingly shaped by these Western values. By incorporating them in his analysis, he avoided espousal of a mere technological determinism. Indeed, he identified the "drives of modern war" as political, economic, "cultural," and religious.
These characteristics might well be compared with present notions of modernity and the causes of war. Recent scholarship still dates modernity from 1500, but associates it with secularism, capitalism, rationalism, and social fluidity. Science and technology often appear in this literature as off-shoots of rationalism or capitalism or both; war and militarism are off-shoots of capitalism. In this literature, technology and modern war are seldom construed as causally related. Rather, they are both second-order consequences of modernity.
"Modernity," however, is a slippery term. Its definition is constantly changing.
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Wright's conceptual model displays an internal contradiction that he was never able to overcome. The four-tier framework suggested that technology played the same role in modern war that instinct played in animal war, i.e., that it drove and defined war in its time. This was tantamount to saying that it caused war, that it was deterministic.
But Wright recoiled from such reductionism. He insisted first of all that it was only the most important feature of modern war, that all the other drives present in previous ages still played a role as well. Furthermore, Wright argued that other characteristics of the modern era--humanism, liberalism, pragmatism, and relativism--"drove" modern war. But categories such as these were not continuous throughout his modern period. They have more explanatory power for the early twentieth century than they do for the seventeenth century or the late twentieth century. So his claim for the explanatory power of technology when applied to modern war dissolves in his own appreciation of the complexity of modern war, of its imperviousness to single cause explanations. His model suggests a kind of technological determinism which his own analysis cannot support.
There are, furthermore, other faults to find with Wright's study.
After fifty years, the book is more remarkable for its continuing strengths than for its obsolescence. Nowhere is this more true than in its appreciation of the significance of technology.
In addition, Wright and his colleagues foreshadowed subsequent developments in recognizing that no discipline speaks for technology. Engineering, of course, works on technology, but seldom studies it as a social phenomenon. Technology assessment is most often a subset of engineering, concentrating on the impact or results of technology. The study of technology has spawned identifiable fields within traditional disciplines such as history, sociology, and even philosophy. And new fields, such as the social study of science and technology have appeared. But there remains no scholarly discipline devoted exclusively to technology.
To understand the relationship between technology and war it is necessary, therefore, to draw eclectically on other disciplines. Wright and his colleagues did so in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper will do the same.
The Transformation of Conventional War
War has changed significantly since World War II. Measuring that change and assessing the role of technology is best achieved by surveying warfare in two categories, conventional and nuclear war.
The transformation of conventional war in the second half of the twentieth century was shaped by the experience of World War II. This was a war of industrial production. The allies won because they fielded more combatants and support troops and provided them with more material than their enemies. As had been true in World War I, the conflict ended when the losing side had insufficient people and material to feed into the maw of modern combat.
Ernest and Trevor Dupuy 19 have estimated that
In economic terms, World War II was about five times as expensive as World War I and produced twice as many military deaths, three times as many total deaths.
In 1945, it appeared that the next war would be different. In that conflict, most authorities agreed, quality would count more than quantity.
Thus was born the hot-house atmosphere of Cold War research and development. In the West, the major powers carried over into peacetime their wartime associations with R&D, both in industry and academia. The military services themselves institutionalized research and development in committees, staffs, consultants, and their own research laboratories. While the United States government and industry together had spent about $1 billion a year on research and development in 1940, the Defense Department alone spent $30 billion in 1985. The ratio of defense R&D expenditures to defense production expenditures rose from five percent at the end of World War II to a peak of over fifty percent in the mid 1970s. American industry, by comparison, spent about two to ten percent of its budgets on research and development. 20
In the United States, President Dwight Eisenhower labeled the resulting infrastructure a "military-industrial complex." Many observers added "university" to that title; others added Congress. All the names suggested a convergence of interests that contributed to an unprecedented and alarming arms race and a concentration of society's scientific and engineering talent on instruments of war. 21
This convergence also raised the specter of a militarization of society.
All such critics feared that the drive for superior arms was subverting society to warlike purposes. The technology of war was becoming deterministic, not just of warfare itself but of society as a whole. (These two kinds of determinism will be examined in section four of this paper.)
This qualitative arms race reversed the military's traditional conservatism toward new weaponry, a conservatism that had characterized even much of Wright's modern era since 1500.
Some critics have seen in the phenomenon evidence of planned obsolescence, the expectation that the life expectancy of a weapons system would be determined by the speed with which the next generation could be developed and introduced.
The trend toward planned obsolescence was compounded by the logic of large-scale development programs. Strategic weapons, such as ballistic missile submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and President's Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative have long lead times and consume vast resources. Even conventional arms, such as the M-1 Abrams tank and the C-5A transport aircraft are years in the making and profligate in their demands on resources. 27 These arms are not weapons, but weapons systems. Their conceptualization is driven by systems theory, itself a byproduct of techniques of operations research developed in World War II. 28
Large-scale technological systems have dynamics of their own that tend to drive events, and they are furthermore susceptible to exogenous forces that shape the technology they produce. 29 Weapons formerly produced in a single arsenal or shipyard now required vast networks of laboratories and contractors. The Wright Brothers built the first U.S. military aircraft in less than five years and sold it to the government for $25,000. 30 The B-1 bomber required twenty-nine years of development and cost the government $280 million apiece. 31 Management of these large-scale development systems became so complex that it spawned its own methodologies. "Concurrency" in the Atlas missile program sped completion of the missile by developing its different components and support systems in parallel. PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) on the Polaris Submarine provided a management scheme to control complexity and facilitate integration of component parts. 32 The officers who oversaw the development of such weapons and who operated them in the field found themselves transformed from warriors to "managers of violence."
Even B-52s, a mainstay of the American strategic arsenal, were pressed into service to rain down still more destruction on an intractable enemy.
The wizardry brought to bear by the Americans on this "electronic battlefield" frustrated and demoralized the enemy. The arsenal exacted a horrific toll. It did not, however, win the war. In this case, at least, superior technology lost to superior strategy.
The reasons for this exceptional failure of modern military technology lay in China.
Against the tide of late twentieth century warfare, against the predictions of Quincy Wright, and against the seemingly deterministic forces of ever greater technological sophistication in warfare swam Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist revolution. While other countries tried to join the Western arms race, or at least emulate it, Mao insisted that industrialization need not determine the course of war. It was possible, he said, for people to prevail over machines.
Mao called his method People's War. With it he restored human agency to the battlefield of the late twentieth century. He provided the great counterpoint to the inexorable trend of late twentieth century warfare toward ever greater reliance on technology. It is instructive to consider Mao's achievement in some detail, because this single exception casts the rest of late twentieth century warfare in a clearer light. Except for Mao, all other warfare since Wright's analysis appears to have been moving in the direction Wright foresaw.
Mao had developed his theory in the face of two different enemies, both of whom deployed arsenals and material resources he could not hope to match. First, the Kuo min Tang Party, with aid from the United States, drove Mao's peasant army on the Long March into the mountains of northwest China. There Mao wrote "On Protracted War" and then joined forces with his erstwhile enemy to fight the still more powerful army of Japan. 36 "On Protracted War" argued that a communist revolution could be based on a rural peasantry, not necessarily an urban proletariat, as Marx and Lenin had preached.
Mao's strategy for employing this peasant army to defeat a modern industrialized force such as Japan was based on three pillars:
Mao's plans were overtaken by events in World War II, but his methods succeeded in the civil war that resumed with Chiang Kai-Shek. More importantly, People's War triumphed in the later conflict between North Vietnam and the United States. The North Vietnamese enjoyed sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and their own country. Allies supplied them with weapons. They had the will to persevere in the face of punishing assault. And public opinion in the United States and around the world gravitated toward their position. No technology the United States could bring to bear was able to overcome these advantages. As Mao had predicted in "On Protracted War," an underdeveloped, agrarian society could defeat a wealthy, industrialized state by winning political victory in the court of public opinion. The individual guerrilla found a way to resist the dominance of high technology on the modern battlefield.
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This jarring setback forced a major re-evaluation of American military thought, especially ideas about the tools of war. The Army was particularly diligent in examining this experience and measuring its implications.
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The result was AirLand Battle, an operational concept directed at Soviet forces in Europe but informed by experience in Vietnam.
The Army concluded from Vietnam that it needed not less technology but more. It was not that smart weapons were bad; rather, they were not smart enough. The research and development revolution born in World War II had not been misdirected; it had stopped short. Furthermore, believed the Army, the weapons that might have won the Vietnam War would be just the weapons that could win the most dangerous conventional war facing the U.S., a confrontation with the Soviet army on the plains of Europe. There, the overwhelming superiority of Soviet numbers would challenge the qualitative superiority of American technology. In main battles tanks, heavy artillery and mortars, and armored vehicles, the Warsaw Pact outnumbered NATO more than two to one in the mid 1980s. 39
AirLand Battle envisioned combat in which American forces would win out over superior numbers by establishing intelligence superiority. It would use that knowledge to attack the enemy where he was most vulnerable.
Watching these developments from the Soviet Union, military theorists came to believe that a "military-technical revolution" was under way. They saw AirLand Battle as a suite of technological capabilities that could place the United States on a different plateau from the Soviet Union and indeed from all other countries of the world. The Soviets did their best to keep pace with American developments, thereby spurring the Americans to even greater achievement. Soviet talk of a "military-technical revolution" sparked similar discussions in the United States. Originally confined to military circles, these discussions spread within the community of defense intellectuals in the 1980s and began to achieve some political visibility in the last stages of the Cold War.
The notion of a military-technical revolution did not, however, achieve real purchase in the United States until the Cold War was actually over. Then a convergence of events lent new urgency and credibility to the idea, sparking a debate that continues in Washington even as this paper is written. The debate has enormous consequences for the future of war and for the continued relevance of Quincy Wright's description of war in our times.
Four developments weighed heavily in the public debate over a military-technical revolution:
First, the phenomenon itself was renamed "the revolution in military affairs." This terminology appears to play better in the West, for reasons that will be discussed shortly.
Second, the Cold War ended. This might have taken the steam out of the debate, but instead it sparked a renewed interest in the future of warfare, in the military implications of a shift from a bi polar to a unipolar world, and in America's of policing a violent world. 40
Third, the Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated the ability of the latest technology to blind, silence, and disarm an enemy in advance of battle. For many observers, the Gulf War was the epitome of the revolution in military affairs.
Fourth and finally, Alvin and Heidi Toffler published War and Anti-war in 1993. This exercise in futurology argued that information technology would command the battlefield of the future, rendering obsolete the arsenals of the twentieth century. The thesis resonated with the Soviet perception of a military technical revolution, but it focused especially on computers and communication and employed the more fashionable terminology of a "revolution in military affairs."
The Tofflers' analysis echoed and updated that of Quincy Wright to the late twentieth century. Like Wright, the Tofflers embrace a technology-based period structure of human history. Wright's four great periods in human evolution were separated by advances in communication. The Tofflers' four periods are separated by broader technological disjunctures: the agricultural and industrial revolutions and finally the information revolution. In a previous book, The Third Wave , the authors had argued that these revolutions had led to three different levels of civilization--the agricultural, the industrial, and now the information age.
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In War and Anti-War , they argued that the same three revolutions had produced war of muscle power, war of machines, and now war of competing information technologies.
Like Wright before them, the Tofflers flirted with technological determinism.
A 1996 conference at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, posed just that question to a group of invited historians and political scientists. Many of the participants chose to address the question by comparing the "revolution in military affairs" with other military revolutions known or proposed to have happened in history. Eight such comparisons were presented or invoked at the conference, identifying twenty-five military revolutions in history. (See table below) Of these, nineteen were technological. Of the nineteen, sixteen had occurred in Wright's modern period, that is, since 1500. Only three, however, had occurred since World War II: the R&D revolution begun in that war, the revolution in microelectronics/genetic engineering, and the information revolution. One military revolution since World War II, Mao's People's War, was not technological.
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This list of revolutions has no more authority than the various scholars who contributed. Their disagreement about what constitutes a military revolution cautions against placing too much faith in the concept. Nevertheless, some consensus does emerge:
Though five of the scholars believed such a revolution to be under way, they were unable to convince MIT political scientist Barry Posen, who was invited to summarize and comment on the proceedings. He concluded, as I do, that the nuclear revolution (to be discussed below) has masked a continuing, rapid transformation in conventional war that had its roots in the R&D revolution following World War II.
It appears that the term "revolution in military affairs" has more rhetorical and political force than explanatory power. If information warfare, or some other combination of high-tech weaponry, has in fact forced a disjuncture between previous war and contemporary war, it is difficult to see exactly when that break took place or what distinguishes war in 1997 from warfare in, say, 1987.
Nor is it clear exactly what class of weapons makes the difference. When the Pentagon compiled a list of critical military technologies in 1992, it identified twenty-two. 42 More than half were microelectronics technologies, but not all were information technologies. Some, such as air-breathing propulsion, composite materials, and biotechnology, are not directly related to the rapidly evolving developments in solid-state electronics that underlay military technologies such as smart bombs, global positioning satellites, and computers. The ultimate weapon of the Gulf War may have been the stealth aircraft that attacked Saddam Hussein's command and control network, but of course this had less to do with microelectronics than with composite materials and geometric design. It is not even clear if the Tofflers' "information revolution" is based on revolutionary developments in solid-state physics, microelectronics, computers, communication, or all of the above. 43
If this conventional weaponry has not produced a "revolution in military affairs," it has nonetheless transformed both conventional war and civilian society. Conventional weapons of tremendous power and reliability can now be delivered with unprecedented accuracy to an enemy's weakest points. Even if these weapons have not reached the point where they can defeat determined and resourceful People's warriors, they can nonetheless exact an even higher toll than the United States inflicted in Vietnam. Against an enemy that chooses to fight conventionally, as Saddam Hussein did in the Gulf War, the consequences can be overwhelming.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it grows ever more difficult to imagine the circumstances in which great powers will risk this kind of punishment in conventional wars with other states similarly armed. In short, the spread of high-tech weapons increases the lethality of war while also lowering the incidence of conventional war among advanced states.
Meanwhile, the same technology that enhances the destructiveness of these weapons also spreads into civil society. As the passions of the Cold War cool and the incidence of conventional war abates, future generations may look back on the late twentieth century as a period in which the armed forces were the primary patrons of technological development.
Throughout history, science and technology, like art, have relied on patronage to supplement the incentive of the marketplace. War and preparation for war have been the great patrons of the mid and late twentieth century. Computers, airplanes, the space program, microelectronics in general, lasers, nuclear power (for better of for worse) have all relied upon military research and development for their rapid evolution.
Beginning in the 1980s, the United States has consciously pursued "dual-use" technologies, areas of development with applications in both war and civil society. Just as warriors have found themselves transformed into managers of violence, so too has the line blurred between military and civilian technologies.
The Nuclear Revolution
While conventional military technology seems to have experienced rapid but nonetheless continuous evolution since World War II, nuclear weapons have been different. They introduced a discontinuous increase in destructiveness: a single weapon could now deliver the destructive power of a whole wing of airplanes carrying conventional arms. When thermonuclear warheads were mounted on ballistic missiles, they were unstoppable. They revolutionized warfare.
The revolution was not, however, immediately apparent, even though some analysts such as Bernard Brodie and Walter Millis argued that such a revolutionary transformation had occurred. Instead it seemed that nuclear weapons would represent just one more step in the escalating destructiveness of modern war. Two of the first three weapons produced were actually used in warfare, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower considered using them again during the Korean War. The "Ban the Bomb" movement of the 1950s was motivated in part by the assumption that atomic weapons would surely be used again, sooner or later. History offered no example of a weapon foregone because it was too destructive.
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The prospects changed as new technologies increased the threat from nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons thus became the first weapon in human history that the holders dared not use.
The bizarre logic of nuclear deterrence was driven by technology. Nuclear weapons were useful only if they were not used. To deter an enemy, a nation had to reveal at least some secrets, such as the power, accuracy, and reliability of its weapons. War was prevented not because one side or the other felt it would lose, but because neither side could be sure that it would win; uncertainty produced stability. Security, in the end, came not from superiority but from mutual vulnerability. Peace exacted the psychological stress of living on a "balance of terror."
For all the fears and dangers of this extraordinary situation, the logic worked. Two superpowers, with conflicting goals and philosophies, came within military reach of each other and chose not to fight.
Twice during the Cold War they seemed to come to the brink of open military conflict. First in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and again during the 1973 Arab Israeli War, the United States and the Soviet Union placed their military forces on heightened alert and contemplated a conventional clash of arms which might quickly escalate into strategic nuclear exchange.
In both cases, however, they escaped the autonomous logic that had dragged the European nations into World War I.
Indeed, there is considerable evidence that the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated throughout much of the Cold War to ensure that their political and diplomatic differences would not pull them into the war that neither wanted.
Furthermore, the superpowers imposed constraints on their client states, those who ran the proxy wars with which the Cold War conducted its fighting. The Soviet Union allowed the United States to bomb North Vietnam, including the harbor at Haiphong with Soviet ships in port. The United States resisted direct intervention in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. Both sides tempered the passions in the Middle East that might have otherwise forced them to intervene on behalf of their clients. Nuclear war shaped and limited conventional war throughout the second half of the 20th century. The superpowers and the coalitions they led did not want any conflict to in a way that would draw them into confrontation. However brutal and gruesome war remained in the late twentieth century, its was surely less deadly than Quincy Wright and his colleagues had any reason to expect when A Study of War appeared in 1942.
At the end of the twentieth century, nuclear war seems less likely than at any time since the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon in 1949. Likewise conventional war between major industrialized states appears similarly improbable, both because of the continuing salutary effect of the nuclear umbrella and the expense and destructiveness of modern conventional weapons. The military technology itself drives this happy turn of events. But also at work is the simple lesson from the Cold War that international conflict can be resolved by means other than war.
Technological Determinism
To argue that technology may be responsible for the melioration of war is to flirt with technological determinism. Quincy Wright faced the same quandary in the 1930s. He escaped into studied ambiguity, claiming that technology was the defining characteristic of modern war. This position aligned him with Leo Marx's suggestions that technology is the distinguishing feature of modernity. But Wright did not claim that technology caused modern war. Causality he associated with politics, economics, culture, and religion.
We can only guess if he would have agreed with the thesis of this paper that the technology of nuclear weapons has caused the dramatic decline in casualties from war experienced since 1945. In a "Commentary on War since 1945," published in the second edition of A Study of War in 1965, Wright discussed the constraints on war imposed by nuclear weapons. But he did not know if the "suicidal" consequences of nuclear war would be proof against the use of the weapons by accident, miscalculation, or preemptive first strike. He did not yet recognize the steep decline in casualties that was under way.
Thirty years after that essay, the trend is more pronounced, the results more striking. The great powers have enjoyed what John Lewis Gaddis has called "the long peace" and what others have called "the nuclear peace." 46
The latter term captures the thesis of this paper. While Wright sought to understand the causes of war, this paper seeks to explain the causes of peace. The main cause in the late twentieth century has been technology.
Because this thesis verges on technological determinism, it calls for a brief examination of that concept and its applicability in this case. Technological determinism is at least as old as Karl Marx. 47 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, it spawned an extensive scholarly literature that has moved beyond Marxian materialism. Usually it assumes one of two forms, both of which apply to nuclear weaponry. 48
In the Cold War, this phenomenon took the form of the military industrial complex. The research and development necessary to create the instruments of the Cold War demanded an infrastructure that would shape the rest of society.
Paul Kennedy captured this phenomenon concisely in the introduction to his history of British sea power:
An outpouring of funds for armaments will divert capital from 'productive' to 'unproductive' investment; will reduce the monies available for commercial research and development; will drain increasing numbers of engineers, physicists, mathematicians and other scientists from export industries into defence related fields; and may, indeed, create whole sectors of industry which rely solely upon Pentagon funds and have opted out of those commercial markets now increasingly dominated by the Japanese, the West Germans and others. Furthermore, large scale arms spending will only increase the federal deficits. . . and thus further erode the American economic base. 52
This is the determinism that breeds new mandarins and Pentagon capitalism.
Technological determinism as a late twentieth century phenomenon has spawned a reactionary literature. Some scholars, such a Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, have called for resistance to autonomous technology, for the restoration of human agency.
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For them, machines should adapt to people, not the other way around. Still more scholars have asserted that technology is not autonomous or deterministic at all. They insist that all technology is socially constructed, driven by social, economic, and political forces that are human in origin and thus by definition subject to human control.
An example of this argumentation, and the curious circularity that it can produce, is Donald MacKenzie's history of ballistic missile guidance, Inventing Accuracy . 54
And so it went. Perceptions about weapons drove the arms race and the arms race drove politics. The same events can be seen as both deterministic and socially constructed. Improved guidance may be construed as a consequence of inter-service rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force, abetted by the commercial ambitions of their contractors. Alternatively, the services may be seen as driven by an imperative to field superior technology. The military industrial complex may be the infrastructure dictated by the demands of modern weapons, or it may be the agent of individuals and institutions using the arms race to achieve political and economic goals.
Attempts to arrest this seemingly autonomous escalation, to restore human agency to weapons development, have not been limited to scholarly treatises. Such concerns bred legions of agents during the Cold War, citizens of the world who took it upon themselves to reverse the deterministic drift of this technology. The only SANE course, in their view, was to eliminate these weapons.
55
The strength and urgency of these protests ebbed and flowed with the vicissitudes of the Cold War, achieving peaks of visibility and support in the "Ban the Bomb" movement of the 1950s, the anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the green movement of the 1980s. Through it all the Union of Concerned Scientists published the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its annual doomsday clock on the cover, measuring the moments till Armageddon. More temperately, but just as seriously, other scholars gathered regularly at the international Pugwash conferences to look for ways out of the nuclear dilemma. No technology has ever attracted the worldwide alarm and opposition that has been directed at nuclear weapons, with the possible exception of the collective industrial developments that ravaged the world's environment in the twentieth century.
The end of the Cold War has drained some of the passion and the volume from the anti-nuclear movement. It has not, however, silenced it. Some observers think the danger has only grown with the fracturing of government control over the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union. Others believe that the world is even more unstable in its present form than it was in the bi-polar Cold War. Some view with alarm the apparently undiminished pursuit of nuclear capability by rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, and Libya. And many believe that as long as the weapons exist, no matter whose hands they are in, the risk of nuclear war persists.
I close by arguing just the opposite:
It is my contention that nuclear weapons, the apotheosis of the war/technology nexus in the late 20th century, the crux of what Walter Millis called the "hypertrophy of war," have in fact been a boon to humanity. It is my belief that historians will look back centuries from now and see the late twentieth century as a watershed in the history of warfare.
I have outlined this argument elsewhere and I will not repeat it all here. 56 I will simply note that a remarkable development has occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. If the destructiveness of war is measured in human casualties, and if those casualties are plotted through modern history, then World War II stands out clearly as a turning point of historic proportions.
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This does not mean that war is disappearing as a social institution. Far from it. But conventional, mechanized, high tech war between great powers, the kind of war that killed on an unprecedented scale in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and conditioned our current apprehensions of war, is indeed disappearing. It is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which two industrialized states would now risk the ruinous destruction of all out war with each other—not even conventional war, let alone nuclear war.
What could have caused this dramatic reversal in the trend of modern history? The whole catalogue of modernity might be invoked: rationalism, secularization, democratization, humanism, individualism. A case may be made that the Western, democratic nation state, having become the dominant model for governments around the world, has produced a "democratic peace."
58
Perhaps nineteenth century liberalism, which sought to replace conflict with reason and negotiation, has finally taken hold in the late twentieth century. Maybe, as David Hackett Fischer believes, the current distribution of the world's wealth fends off cataclysm.
59
But none of these explanations accounts for the timing of the current decline in casualties.
Quincy Wright concluded in 1965 that the causes of war identified in his study still obtained: perception of threat, ideology, frustration over unsatisfactory conditions, belief in the utility of war or threats of war, and the necessity of violence to achieve higher goals of justice, law, and rights. He embraced, in short, the multiple causality of his previous position, insisting that "no single cause of war can be identified." He did, however, allow that "the most persistent condition of war" was "the inherent difficulty of organizing peace." By implication, he professed little faith in the world government to which he had earlier committed himself. Without embracing technological determinism, he nonetheless allowed, as this paper asserts, that "modern weaponry has made war too dangerous for nuclear powers to use as an instrument of policy."
60
Is fifty years a long enough time to suggest that nuclear peace is anything but a hiatus between wars?
Was not the peace of Westphalia simply a long interlude between the wars of religion and the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon?
What may be said to have conditioned that lessening of war other than exhaustion and revulsion?
What about the Pax Britannica following the Napoleonic wars? Surely that was not driven by technology. Surely it bred a hubris about "modern" civilization that made World War I seem impossible.
What reason is there to believe that the present peace is any less fleeting and illusory?
In 1965 Wright could identify no fundamental changes in human institutions, politics, psychology, and ideology that would support the optimistic hypothesis advanced in this paper. He could, in short, find nothing to suggest that peace would hold.
But it did hold. It seems likely to hold for the foreseeable future. The most plausible explanation, the one that accords most closely with historical experience, is the bomb.
Mankind has simply found the weapon that it had anticipated and predicted for centuries, a weapon so terrible that it deters war. We have now seen the first major confrontation in world history in which two great powers with profoundly conflicting objectives were within each other's reach and yet forbore a contest of arms. They did it not because they were more enlightened, more rational, more democratic, more humanistic, or more philosophical. They avoided war because they feared each others' weapons.
If that is technological determinism, then may it endure.
©Contents copyright 1997 by Alex Roland.
Alex Roland, professor of history at Duke University since 1987, has held the departmental chair for the past year. He has been a visiting professor of military history at the U. S. Army War College and a resident fellow in the history of science and technology at MIT. His publications include Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (1991).
~Ed.
Endnotes
Note 1: Alex Roland, "Keep the Bomb," Technology Review (August/September 1995): 67-69 Back.
Note 2: Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2 vols., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1942] rev. ed. 1965). Back.
Note 3: Wright generously attributed the initiative behind the project to Merriam. Ibid., p. 409. But archival research at the University of Chicago reveals that Wright himself began the process with an undated, five page memorandum to Merriam, written sometime before 8 May 1926. See John Hepp, "the Birth of Interdisciplinary History: Cooperative Research in the Social Science at the University of Chicago in the Jazz Age," 9 January 1994, unpublished paper in possession of the author. The following account relies on this paper and on Wright's reporting of events, pp. 409 13. Back.
Note 4: Wright, A Study of War, p. 43. Back.
Note 11: Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 5; Peter Osborne, "Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category," New Left Review 192 (March/April 1992): 65 84. Back.
Note 12: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990 1992 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Marek Thee, Military Technology, Military Strategy and the Arms Race (London: Croom Helm, 1987). Back.
Note 13: James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Brighton, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Back.
Note 14: Leo Marx, "Communications," Technology and Culture 33 (April 1992): 407. Back.
Note 15: Jack Levy, "The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence," in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, ed. by Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 209 333. Back.
Note 16: Personal conversation with the author, Cambridge, MA, 3 April 1995. Back.
Note 17: For example, the book was correct in 1942 when it stated that "most writers are clear that race refers to a biological rather than to a cultural classification of human beings." Since then, however, the evidence has pointed overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Back.
Note 18: Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Back.
Note 19: R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 1198. Back.
Note 20: Jacques S. Ganlser, Affording Defense (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 215. Back.
Note 21: Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940 1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149 229. See also Arthur P. Molina, The Social Basis of the Microelectronics Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); and Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military Industrial Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 22: Dwight Eisenhower, farewell address, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960 1961 (Washington: GPO, 1961), pp. 1038 39. Back.
Note 23: Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969). Back.
Note 24: Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970). Back.
Note 25: Alex Roland, Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 145. Back.
Note 26: Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Back.
Note 27: All these cases, except the C 5A, are covered in Fen Osler Hampson, Unguided Missiles: How America Buys its Weapons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). Back.
Note 28: The British call this "operational research." For an account of these developments centered on British experience, see Guy Hartcut, The Silent Revolution: Development of conventional Weapons, 1945-1985 (London: Brassey's, 1993). Back.
Note 29: Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 30: Peter L. Jakab, Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). Back.
Note 31: Nick Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B 1 Bomber (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Back.
Note 32: John Lonnquest, "The Face of Atlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1953 1960," PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 1996; Harvey N. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). Back.
Note 33: Bruce Palmer, Jr., The Twenty five Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). Back.
Note 34: Paul Dixon, The Electronic Battlefield (London: Morian Brothers, 1976); Frank Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield (New York: Free Press, 1986). Back.
Note 35: Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York, 1989). Back.
Note 36: Mao Tse tung, "On the Protracted War," in Selected Works (5 vols.; New York: International Publishers, 1954), II, pp. 157 243. Back.
Note 37: The victory of People's War in Vietnam had enormous implications for the future of war. The increasing disparity in wealth between the industrialized states and the less developed countries may forebode future war between the haves and have nots. In such a conflict, Mao's strategy may loom large. Back.
Note 38: Theodore Ropp has said that the U.S. Army knew that it had lost the Vietnam War. The Air Force thought it had won the war. And the Navy did not know it had been in a war. Personal communication to the author. Back.
Note 39: Laurence Martin, The Changing Face of Nuclear War (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 61. Back.
Note 40: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Back.
Note 41: Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980). Back.
Note 42: Board on Army Science and Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council, Star 21: Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty first Century (Washington: National Academy Press, 1992), pp. 277 80. Back.
Note 43: For yet a different interpretation of what is at work, see James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 44: Opponents of nuclear weapons might have taken some heart form the world's experience with chemical weapons. Gas warfare on a large scale had been introduced in World War I, but generally eschewed in World War II. The threat lingered, but the reality was in fact encouraging. Back.
Note 45: Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1993 , 15th ed. (Washington: World Priorities, 1993), p. 11. Back.
Note 46: John Gaddis, "The Long Peace," International Security 10 (1986): 99 142. Back.
Note 47: The argument for Marx as a technological determinist appears in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics out of Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT press, 1978), pp. 77 85. Back.
Note 48: See Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Back.
Note 49: Winner, Autonomous Technology. Back.
Note 50: Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 51: Robert W. Rydell, "The Fan Dance of Science: American World's Fairs in the Great Depression," Isis 76 (December 1985): 531. Back.
Note 52: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: The Ashfield Press, 1983), p. xxiii. Back.
Note 53: Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society , trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, [1954] 1964); Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). Back.
Note 54: Donald McKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Back.
Note 55: SANE was, in fact, the name of one of the many organizations the grew up in the Cold War to oppose nuclear weapons. Back.
Note 56: Alex Roland, "Keep the Bomb," Technology Review (August/September 1995): 67 69. Back.
Note 57: Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures , various editions, 1974 1993. It should be noted that any bias that may exist in these figures operates in the direction of high estimates. Ms. Sivard, for example, includes the "disappearances" in Argentina in the 1970s, a category that Rudolph Rummel would include within "democide," the killing of people by their own government. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994). Back.
Note 58: Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 59: David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Back.
Note 60: Wright, A Study of War , pp. 1514 1519. Back.
Table Notes
*: Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 18-19. Back.
**: The military revolution has experienced a revival of interest in recent years. See Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast: M. Boyd, [1956] 1988); Geoffrey Parker, "The 'Military Revolution, 1560-1660'--A Myth?," Journal of Modern History 48 (1976):195-214; and The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1991); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Transformation of Early Modern Europe, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). Back.
***: Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-war; Daniel Deudeny, "Binding Power, Bound States: Geopolitics, Statist Realism, and Republicanism," pp. I9-I11; Alex Roland, "Comparing Military Revolutions," Brian R. Sullivan, "What Distinguishes a Revolution in Military Affairs from a Military Technical Revolution?"; Eliot Cohen, "A Revolution in Warfare," Foreign Affairs, 75 (March/April 1996): 37-54; Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., "The Revolution in Military Affairs and Military Capabilities: Broadening the Planning Parameters of Future Conflict"; and Emily O. Goldman and Richard B. Andres, "The Geopolitical Effects of Revolutions in Military Affairs." All papers cited without provenance were presented at the conference on "The Revolution in Military Affairs," Monterey, CA, 27-28 August 1996. Back.
