There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

  Obviously, something was seriously wrong. We broke communicator silence and tried to contact the other ships of the Fleet to see if they had experienced the same trouble. Once again we failed—and this time the failure was beyond all reason, for the communication equipment appeared to be working perfectly. We could only assume, fantastic though it seemed, that the rest of the Fleet had been destroyed.

  I do not wish to describe the scenes when the scattered units of the Fleet struggled back to Base. Our casualties had actually been negligible, but the ships were completely demoralized. Almost all had lost touch with one another and had found that their ranging equipment showed inexplicable errors. It was obvious that the Exponential Field was the cause of the troubles, despite the fact that they were only apparent when it was switched off.

  The explanation came too late to do us any good, and Norden’s final discomfiture was small consolation for the virtual loss of the war. As I have explained, the Field generators produced a radial distortion of space, distances appearing greater and greater as one approached the center of the artificial pseudo-space. When the Field was switched off, conditions returned to normal.

  But not quite. It was never possible to restore the initial state exactly. Switching the Field on and off was equivalent to an elongation and contraction of the ship carrying the generator, but there was an hysteretic effect, as it were, and the initial condition was never quite reproducible, owing to all the thousands of electrical changes and movements of mass aboard the ship while the Field was on. These asymmetries and distortions were cumulative, and though they seldom amounted to more than a fraction of one per cent, that was quite enough. It meant that the precision ranging equipment and the tuned circuits in the communication apparatus were thrown completely out of adjustment. Any single ship could never detect the change—only when it compared its equipment with that of another vessel, or tried to communicate with it, could it tell what had happened. It is impossible to describe the resultant chaos. Not a single component of one ship could be expected with certainty to work aboard another. The very nuts and bolts were no longer interchangeable, and the supply position became quite impossible. Given time, we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented. Our magnificent Fleet, crippled by our own science, fought on as best it could until it was overwhelmed and forced to surrender. The ships fitted with the Field were still invulnerable, but as fighting units they were almost helpless. Every time they switched on their generators to escape from enemy attack, the permanent distortion of their equipment increased. In a month, it was all over.

  This is the true story of our defeat, which I give without prejudice to my defense before this Court. I make it, as I have said, to counteract the libels that have been circulating against the men who fought under me, and to show where the true blame for our misfortunes lay.

  Finally, my request, which as the Court will now realize, I make in no frivolous manner and which I hope will therefore be granted.

  The Court will be aware that the conditions under which we are housed and the constant surveillance to which we are subjected night and day are somewhat distressing. Yet I am not complaining of this: nor do I complain of the fact that shortage of accommodation has made it necessary to house us in pairs.

  But I cannot be held responsible for my future actions if I am compelled any longer to share my cell with Professor Norden, late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces.

  Editor's Afterward to:

  SUPERIORITY

  Clarke’s humor masks one of the most vital questions of the decade: how much defense can we afford?

  There are two aspects to the military procurement dilemma. First:

  A gigantic technological race is in progress… a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase “arms race” used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

  There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed “logistic strategy”. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him enormous expenditure…

  A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive.

  —General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

  If we do not engage in this “silent and apparently peaceful war,” we will be defeated. However:

  A common argument against investment in technological weapons is the engineering maxim, “If it works, it’s obsolete.” True, whatever one buys, if you had waited a few years something better would be available; but if this is carried to extremes, nothing will ever be built.

  Whenever a new field of technology opens up, the people who use it must learn how. They must become operationally effective. Had we waited until third-generation missiles were available before we constructed any, we would not be alive today. We certainly would have had no experienced crews to man the missiles we would only now be constructing.

  A time comes when systems must be built, even though we know they will be obsolete in future years…

  The fallacy that prototypes and research are all that are needed should have been laid to rest by the experience of the French in 1939. The French Army had—and had possessed for quite a long time— prototypes of aircraft, armor, and antitank weapons much better than those of the German Army. The French did not have these weapons in their inventory because still better ones were coming. While they waited for the best weapons, they lost their country.

  Military action must be routine. It cannot be extraordinary, planned months in advance like a space spectacular. Operational experience with a weapons system is required before operational employment doctrines can be perfected. Troops must be trained, logistics bases developed, maintenance routines learned, idiosyncrasies—and modern technological gadgetry is full of them—must be dis-covered. This cannot be done if the latest technology is confined to the drawing board or laboratory.

  S. T. Possony and J. E. Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology, 1970

  There is no simple escape from this dilemma. Suppose that you are the Secretary of Defense, and you must recommend a military budget.

  You have several choices.

  1. Make severe cutbacks in the defense budget. This will leave more money in the hands of the taxpayers, and allow more investment in the nation’s economy. Without a strong economy we are finished anyway; while if the economy is sufficiently strong, we will be able to afford a much larger defense establishment.

  2. Invest in military research and development. This can be coupled with (1). Some military research will aid the civilian economy anyway. We mean here real development studies, not merely paper studies and patches.

  3. Buy the weapons available today, so that the troops can become familiar with them and learn to maintain them; so that they become operational weapons systems.

  These choices come up time after time. You have a billion dollars: do we invest that in development of military lasers, or do we buy a new aircraft carrier? The choice is not obvious. Without forces in being, small conflicts become big, and small wars can grow into large ones.

  Ready availability of forces can stop the escalations before they start. During the Eisenhower Administration, the First Lebanon Crisis was ended in 24 hours, at cost of one Marine sergeant wounded by his own pistol.

  As I write this, the butcher’s bill for the Second Lebanon Crisis is not yet known, nor has it ended. Lebanon remains occupied by Syrians, Israelis, and a “peacekeeping force” of US and Italian Marines, and French paratroopers.

  The Iranian situation was vastly complex, but it was certainly affected by our lack of forces in being. One may legitimately debate whether Iran is better off under the Mul
lahs than it was under the Shah, but the fact is that we had insufficient forces in being—including aircraft carriers—to insure the stability of the royal regime. We certainly were unable to stabilize the (very short-lived) “constitutional monarchy” the Shah attempted to leave behind him. Whether or not we should have done so is not at issue: the fact is that we had not the forces in being to do so, and every time when we might have intervened, the requirements had grown beyond our means. Even after Iran fell, we had nothing capable of rescuing the hostages.

  As I write this, one Libyan Crisis has just ended, apparently without bloodshed. The US carrier force in the Mediterranean, plus the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems) aircraft stationed in Egypt, were sufficient. One can only speculate on what might have happened had they not existed, as one can only speculate on what might have happened in the Falklands had England not retained her diminished fleet.

  You have a sum of money. You may spend it on two wings of the best existing military aircraft, and thus have a force within two years.

  You can also spend it to procure two wings of much better advanced aircraft to be delivered in ten years. If you choose the second option, your over-all military capabilities will probably be enhanced due to new technology developed as part of the procurement.

  That’s ten years from now. Meanwhile, you will NOT have the best equipment for the period of 2 through 8 years.

  In combat, there are few prizes for second place, and none at all for what you would have had next year.

  There’s one more problem. You may not really have those choices at all. You may decide to gulp hard, fight your service chiefs, and go for the top technological weapons in the future—only to discover that the money you saved by not buying today’s weapons did not go to military R&D, nor was it left in taxpayers’ pockets where it might stimulate the economy. It went instead for a new social program, one that absorbs money at exponentially increasing rates—one that has become an “entitlement” that the courts will not let the Congress eliminate.

  Toward the close of the 1960’s, a number of analysts, alas including me, considered the “war bonus”: the funds which would be available once the horrendous expenses of the Vietnam War were ended. We thought long and hard about that money: should it be used to modernize the force, to develop new weapons, to attract recruits for an all-volunteer military, or be returned to the taxpayers?

  We need not have been concerned.

  A last note: reasonable and informed people of good will can and do disagree, aye, strongly disagree, on this matter. It is one of the most complex and difficult decisions of our age. No one, liberal or conservative, wants to spend more than necessary on defense. The liberal wants the money for other reasons; the conservative doesn’t believe the government is entitled to the money unless there’s a pressing national need.

  There are, however, persons not of good will who will muddy the waters: who will attack R&D spending on the grounds that the money is needed for operational weapons systems, then attack the operational systems because they are obsolete. They are poltroons; and alas, their name is legion, for they are many.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  FINAL MUSTER

  by Rick Rubin

  “Gold may not get you good soldiers,” Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “but good soldiers can always get you gold.”

  That’s one half the problem. What happens if you no longer need good soldiers?

  FINAL MUSTER

  by Rick Rubin

  Coming out of stasis is a peculiar sensation. Life returns first to your brain, and for a second you are aware that the rest of you is dead—not just asleep but actually without life. You are standing there in your stasis cubicle, heavily loaded with equipment, and your body is dead. But you.don’t fall down, and the juice returns to the big muscles of your legs and arms and chest and then to all of the minor muscles and blood to veins and arteries and finally to every tiny capillary. Then you are awake, and you step out into the world.

  The sun was halfway up the east side of the sky, and across the parade ground I could see the barracks and ordnance buildings and mess halls and other structures of Fort Morris shimmering in the rising heat waves. Lieutenant Rolf Baker, my platoon leader, was standing in front of the bank of cubicles that held myself and three other sergeants. I threw him a salute.

  “Good morning, Sergeant Oskowski,” he said.

  “Good morning, sir,” I said. “They woke us late this time.”

  “Later than you think, Sergeant. Three hundred years late. It’s 2516.”

  “You don’t say! Three hundred years without a war. Who finally upset the applecart, sir?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. I don’t even know who we’re fighting.”

  “It’s pretty unusual for them not to tell us right off.”

  “There’s supposed to be a formation in an hour, Oskowski. We’ll find out then. Better go wake your men.”

  To my left the other three sergeants were coming out of their stasis cubicles. Around us the whole Regimental Combat Team was coming to life, 5000 officers and men stepping out of deep-freeze, ready and able to fight anybody’s war. We mobilize down through the ranks— Colonel Moss our C.O. is unfrozen by the civilian authorities, he wakes four LT. colonels, they wake four more each, and so on down through majors to captains to lieutenants to squad leaders like myself, who wake their squads. We come out of our stasis cubicles fully armed and in prime condition, ready to be fed, briefed and move in less than an hour if necessary.

  In the old Greek myth, the man planted dragon’s teeth, and fighting men sprang up out of the ground. I can never quite get the analogy out of my mind, seeing the regiment come out of their stasis cubicles. The difference is that in the myth the soldiers fell to fighting among themselves, while the 45th Regimental Combat Team comes out a disciplined unit.

  Unfreezing consists of throwing just one switch per man. I went down the row that held my squad throwing the switches, then sat down in front and started checking over my tommygun. Of course it wasn’t actually a tommy gun, the old twentieth-century weapon. More properly, it was a rapid fire blaster. Model 2079—a cross between a flame thrower and a junior-size atomic cannon with a miniaturized back pack for power and a rifle-shaped nozzle—but somehow calling it a tommygun makes it more personal to me.

  My squad started to step out and form up. I let them stretch and yawn and make their tired old jokes. At the far end I noted that two new men had replaced Miller and Chavez, killed at the tag end of the Afro-Asian war 300 years before. I made a note to see if either of the replacements had come in lately. They might throw some light of those 300 long years of apparent peace when we’d stood cold and dead in our stasis cubicles without a war to fight.

  Those inexplicable 300 years faintly disturbed me. At least, something disturbed me, for this muster day felt somehow different from the ones in the past. The time before there had been 75 years between wars—by far the longest period of peace since the founding of the stasis army, but the war we had come out to fight had been the roughest, too. The armies of the Western Hemisphere had fought all of Afro-Asia for three bloody years. It was during the Afro-Asian thing that I got my third stripe and rocker and a squad of my own. Seventy-five years before that, as a corporal, I’d fought Brazuritina, the four-country block of southern South America. And before that the intervals had been shorter yet; fifteen years, seven years, twenty years, ten years.

  So something must have changed out there in the civilian world, or else they must have found another way to fight their wars. In the bright sun of this 300-year-late muster day, it would have been nice to know what had happened. But why should a soldier care? A war is a war. You die as dead from anyone’s weapon, and one war is pretty much like another.

  That typical soldier’s attitude, I suppose, was why they began to store us away between wars. Soldiers make lousy citizens in peacetime. And a good peacetime soldier is likely as not to make a lousy wartime one. So they pe
rfected the system of stasis, and we volunteered to wait out the between-war intervals in our steel and plastic cubicles, each man with name and service record on his cubicle door, waiting for the bands to begin to play.

  My squad formed up rapidly, standing sharp in a ramrod-straight row. I walked to one end and passed in front of them, making a casual sort of inspection.

  “Good morning, Staff-Sergeant Oskowski,” Filippi the rocket and missile man said. “Did you enjoy your beauty rest?”

  “Yes thank you, Private First-Class Filippi,” I said. “I’ve slept ever so much better since I moved out of range of your snoring.”

  “Hullo, Sarge,” Orozco said. He was the flame thrower, a broadfaced boy of Mexican descent, quiet and shy but efficient.

  “Hello, Orozco,” I said. “How’s your cigarette lighter?”

  “Hey, Sarge,” Corporal Ryan the demolition man said. “What’s with the music?”

  The funny thing was that I hadn’t until Ryan mentioned it even noticed the music. For the P.A. system was serenading us with sounds of violins and muted horns, soft chamber orchestra music instead of the marches and war songs we customarily woke to.

  “I don’t know, Ryan,” I said. “And that’s not all I don’t know. It’s a strange muster day—that’s for sure.”

  “What else?” Yamamoto, our vehicle and engineering man, said.

  “I don’t know who we’re supposed to be fighting,” I said. “All I know is what year it is.”

  They waited to hear. I walked down the rest of the line, past Johnson, the other tommygunner, and the two new men, Bill Chestnut, a Sioux Indian and the new squad sniper, and Charles LaBonte, a thin-faced, black-haired man, older than most recruits, assigned to us as a corpsman.