User:Fabien Labeyrie/The Shock Of The Old

The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

This book by David Edgerton deals with History of technology, questioning the necessity of always going further. The following notes resumes the ideas contained in the chapter called WAR.

An erroneous idea about military technologies

We have this idea the military relies on civilian industries. It is often said the atomic bomb has been created thanks to academic sciences. If we go to the great national science and industry museums of the world [...], we will find aircraft, radar and atomic bombs, but as applications to war of civilian sciences and technologies, no rifles, tanks or artillery.

It suggests great war innovations originates from the civilian domain, helping war to be quicker and more human, however it's not true. Most of the great inventions have been created during war time, where the government gave huge budgets to scientists, focusing the research on what they thought could help then win the battle. It was gas warfare in the First World War, radar and atomic weapons in the Second.

The military is stuck in the past

We believe war belongs to the past and has nothing to do with enlightened sciences nor with a modern world which advocates democratic, industrial and free trading of nations. Levis Mumford wrotes : "The army has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds. This thought is extended by facts soldiers resisted to inventions. During the Great War, sailors used to dismiss the power of aviation and officers refused to accept the implementation of motorised warfare.

As a result, the army spends more money on improving old materials rather than shifting to a radically new technology.

Yet technologies didn't help in winning wars

Whereas not the main goal of a war, the killing and the killing of civilians became a means of victory. Paradoxical as it is, none of the great technological inventions during war gave a hand to fulfil that purpose. The greatest killers were the well-established weapons, guns and rifles such as the AK-47, the most widely used assault rifle in the world.

What made the infantry so powerful is the potential to control and confine people, making them starve to death in a barbed wired zone. Neither the poisonous gas or the air-planes have this power of control. However the weapons are refined and can shoot farer, bigger and with more accuracy, the casualty rate in a given period of combat fell, because the opposition is more spread out, making it difficult to be dominated. If the overall level of casualties increased, it's due to longer period of combat, thanks to daily supplies.

The majority of the great battleships and the several built atomic weapons remain mostly unused. Plus there are several examples of victories against economic and technologically superior adversaries. To name a few, the Japanese Bicycle Blitzkrieg in Malaya or the most widely known Vietnam war.