"In future there will be no battleships, bombers or tanks, only automatic weapons and infantry."
By Patrick Shaw Stewart, Jan 1998


The ideas in this essay are not new: I got most of them from an article in Scientific American in about 1982. - Patrick

The history of warfare shows a series of technical revolutions, where a new method or device is introduced, which allows one side to defeat all its enemies. If the opposition were not able to get hold of the new methods, the superior side would often win almost every battle and spread its culture throughout the world.

One of the first important bits of war technology was the phalanx, invented by the ancient Greeks. This was a formation of heavily armed spearsmen, where each man was protected by his shield and by his neighbors. Alexander's conquest of what was then the civilized world was made possible by using a "grand phalanx" formation. The Romans took this method further by introducing large rectangular shields and javelins. Later, after the collapse of Romans discipline and order, warfare was again transformed by the arrival of the knight in armour mounted on a war charger. By the time of Charlemagne, a formation of armoured horsemen was nearly unstoppable. A knight was almost the medieval equivalent of a modern battleship or tank.

However, armour became a useless encumbrance when muskets and artillery were introduced. At the same time, hitherto impregnable castles became vulnerable to artillery, and holding out against a long seige by superior forces became impossible. Later still, war was transformed by the invention of the machine gun. By the First World War, cavalry were almost useless. Again, the stalemate of trench warfare in the First War was broken by the introduction of the tank. However, the full potential of armoured vehicles was not shown until Hitler's lightning war or "Blitzkreig".

Often these technical innovations were ignored by the great powers for many years, until they suffered crushing defeats at the hands of lesser powers with superior technology. For example, American settlers already routinely used rifles for hunting before the American War of Independance. The British army stubbornly refused to adopt the new weapon, but the rifle has a far longer range than the musket. The British suffered such heavy losses that they hurridly had to employ German mercenary riflemen.

Why are we seldom taught the importance of technology in war at school? I assume because history is usually taught by people with no scientific training, and because most people find the private lives and characters of great generals more interesting than the principles of the gattling gun. It may therefore be due to the bias of education systems that new technology is often available for many years before its potential is recognised. For example, Hitler realized that the tank and armoured vehicles could move so fast that a small nation could be conquered in days. Why did the French and British not see this too, and why did they cling to the fighting methods of the previous war?

War has changed a great deal since Hitler's war. It has become incredibly technical, relying on complicated electronic means of attack and defense. However, the basic military units have remained the same in most military peoples' minds: aircraft carriers, destroyers, bombers, fighters and tanks. Have the full implications of computers for war been understood? I believe not.

In the mid 1960s, an Israeli gunboat in the Medditeranean was sunk by a slow, strange- looking missile. It was fired by one of the Arab nations, but made in Russia. This demonstration of the power of unmanned intelligent weapons should have caused a revolution in military thinking. But, along with the Exocets of the Falklands war, the evidence has largely been ignored. The power of technology began to be accepted by the public in the Gulf War. However, I suggest that that war could have been won far more cheaply, with far fewer casualties on both sides by using many more unmanned, intelligent, weapons.

War is largely a matter of economics. It is a matter of who can afford the largest number and the best weapons. The choice of weapons is therefore crucial. An intelligent missile capable of destroying an aircraft carrier is extremely expensive. However, an aircraft carrier is far more expensive, costing around a thousand times more than the missile. You can therefore afford to make a 999 missiles for every aircraft carrier that your enemy makes, and still save money. Now, the proponents of old-fashioned manned weapons claim that the modern (computerized) defenses of, for example, an aircraft carrier can cope with any missile, by using its own anti-missile missiles. This is true, but they cannot cope with 999 missiles at once. They can probably shoot down 99% of the attacking missiles, in which case the carrier will be destroyed by the ten missiles which get through the defenses. One would be enough. Aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. The side which invests in missiles rather than boats is ahead in terms of both casualties and money. We were very lucky that the Argentines had not learnt this lesson before the Falklands war. The strange thing is that since then we have not learnt it either.

The same argument applies to tanks and aeroplanes. Here the cost ratio is less extreme, with a missile costing around 100th of the cost of its target. If Britain and America had spent 90% of their budgets on unmanned weapons and 10% on conventional arms instead of the other way around, Saddam would have been forced to surrender in days. It would have been obvious that we could systematically destroy all his tanks and planes, and that there was no point in trying to use them. After that is would have been like pointing a gun at an unarmed man - you can enforce your will without having to use the gun.

I will give just one example of a "smart" weapon that was described to me many years ago by my cousin, who used to work for a defence company in the USA. Let us say that the enemy is approaching with a mass formation of tanks. You fire a missile over the battlefield, which releases a dozen or so "pods". Each of these lands by parachute, then listens and waits. When it hears a tank approaching it calculates the nearest point on the tanks' route. When the tank reachs this point the pod fires a metal disk at it rather like a frisby. This has a sensor on the bottom of it, and as it passes over the tank it explodes. A shaped charge sends a jet of molten metal down which pierces the tank's armour, and kills the crew.

What will war be like in the future? It will be more humane. It will waste people's time and energy, but not lives. Wars will be fought between unmanned machines, while manned machines will become museum pieces. Pilots in bunkers, working machines rather like flight simulators, will play an elaborate game of space invaders. Cheaper machines will be controlled by people (perhaps even kids?) working simple computer terminals. Meanwhile, the real machines that they are controlling will battle it out underwater, on the sea, on land, in the sky and probably most importantly, in orbit around the earth. Communication satellites will have crucial strategic importance. In back rooms, teams of programmers will work frantically around the clock, writing code, debugging it, and rewriting it. At the end of a few weeks of this, one side will have some fighting machines left while the other side will have none. The side with the machines will be the winners. Their enemies will have to obey orders, just as you obey the orders of people with guns. In all of this, very few people will be killed, except by accident. For example, missiles that have been destroyed might lands on people's home.

When the mechanized war is over, ordinary infantry with guns will move in to take over a country.

On balance, I am enthusiastic for these new weapons. This might suggest that I would seek to encourage a trade in these arms. Actually, I think that the current system which allows weapons to be sold to potential enemies is irrational, immoral folly. But that is another issue.