There Will Be War Volume VII
Created by Jerry Pournelle
Associate Editor John F. Carr
Copyright
There Will Be War Volume VII
Jerry Pournelle
Castalia House
Kouvola, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental
Copyright © 1988, 2017 by Jerry Pournelle
All rights reserved
Cover: Lars Braad Andersen
Version: 001
Contents
Introduction: Call to Battle
The Tank Lords, by David Drake
We Hold These Rights, by Henry Melton
Battle Cry, by Tim Sarnecki
Test for Tyrants, by Edward P. Hughes
The Roman Centurion’s Song, by Rudyard Kipling
The Islanders, by Rudyard Kipling
Another “Low Dishonest Decade” on the Left, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz
The Last Article, by Harry Turtledove
Wizard Weapons, by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry E. Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane
A Soldier’s Best Friend, by Eric Vinicoff
Who’s In Charge Here? by Stefan T. Possony
The Iron Angel, by Don Hawthorne
Psi-Rec: I Gladiator, by Peter Dillingham
Specialization in War, by Reginald Bretnor
Were-Tigers, by Rob Chilson
Remember the Alamo! by T. R. Fehrenbach
Valhalla For Hire, by Lee Brainard
Debating SDI: Opinion or Fact? by Doug Beason
Consequences, by Walter Jon Williams
Afterword
Castalia House
Acknowledgments
The editors gratefully acknowledge that research for nonfiction essays in this book, including “Wizard Weapons” by Stefan T. Possony, J. E. Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane, was supported in part by grants from the Vaughn Foundation. Responsibility for opinions expressed in this work remains solely with the authors.
The stories contained herein are copyrighted as follows:
CALL TO BATTLE by Jerry Pournelle. This piece was written solely for this volume. Published by arrangement with the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley Ltd. Copyright © 1988 by J. E. Pournelle & Associates.
THE TANK LORDS by David Drake appears here by special arrangement with the author. Copyright © 1987 by David Drake.
WE HOLD THESE RIGHTS by Henry Melton was first published in Stellar #3, edited by Judy-Lynn Del Rey. Copyright © 1970 by Ballantine Books and copyright © 1988 by Henry Melton.
BATTLE CRY by Tim Sarnecki was specially written for this volume. Copyright © 1988 by Tim Sarnecki.
TEST FOR TYRANTS by Edward P. Hughes was first published in New Destinies #1, edited by Jim Baen. Copyright © 1987 by Edward P. Hughes.
THE ISLANDERS and THE ROMAN CENTURION’S SONG by Rudyard Kipling are in the public domain.
ANOTHER “LOW DISHONEST DECADE” ON THE LEFT by Peter Collier and David Horowitz first appeared in the January 1987 issue of Commentary. Copyright © 1987 by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.
THE LAST ARTICLE by Harry Turtledove was written specially for this volume. Copyright © 1988 by Harry Turtledove.
WIZARD WEAPONS by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry E. Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane will appear as a chapter in the revised edition of The Strategy of Technology. It appears here by arrangement with the authors. Copyright © 1988 by Stefan Possony, Jerry E. Pournelle, and Francis Kane.
A SOLDIER’S BEST FRIEND by Eric Vinicoff was written for this series. Copyright © 1988 by Eric Vinicoff.
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? by Stefan T. Possony was first published in the December issue of Defense and Foreign Affairs. Copyright © 1986 by Stefan T. Possony.
THE IRON ANGEL by Don Hawthorne was written specially for this volume. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Hawthorne.
PSI-REC: I GLADIATOR Copyright © 1988 by Peter Dillingham.
SPECIALIZATION IN WAR by Reginald Bretnor was first published in Special Weapons, Vol. II, No. 1 in 1983. Copyright © 1983 by R. Bretnor.
WERE-TIGERS Copyright © 1988 by Rob Chilson.
REMEMBER THE ALAMO! by T. R. Fehrenbach first appeared in the December 1961 issue of Analog Science Fiction Magazine. It appears here by arrangement with the author. Copyright © 1961 by Street & Smith Publications.
VALHALLA FOR HIRE Copyright © 1988 by Lee Burwasser.
DEBATING SDI: OPINION OR FACT? by Doug Beason was written specially for this volume. Copyright © 1988 by Doug Beason.
CONSEQUENCES Published by arrangement with the author. Copyright © 1988 by Walter Jon Williams.
AFTERWORD by Jerry Pournelle was written for this volume. Copyright © 1988 by J. E. Pournelle & Associates.
Introduction: Call to Battle
Jerry Pournelle
The world is said to be at peace, but as I write this, the United States Navy is engaged in an undeclared but quite lethal little war in the Persian Gulf, while another 200,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Europe. Soviet armies continue their conquest of Afghanistan. The Arab-Israeli borders are quiet, but Iran and Iraq pound away at each other. There is war in the Sahara desert and Southern Africa. Chinese soldiers occupy Tibet. If there are no formal wars, there is no shortage of combat and death; nor is the situation likely to change.
The most fervent wishes for peace do not bring peace. Probably no one wanted peace more than the intellectuals of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, who were told to pack their goods and march to temporary quarters in the countryside. Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times that it was “cultural arrogance” to condemn the Khmer Rouge for its forced march of three million people into the countryside, since they were acting on their own “vision of a new society”; but even as he wrote that, the killing began.
The Khmer Rouge soldiers were very polite. They addressed everyone as “comrade.” They explained that the move was only temporary, to avoid an American air strike. No one knew better until they were in the labor camps.
The educated people, the intellectuals, were killed out of hand. The survivors were deliberately starved until some ate human flesh, and still the killing continued. The victims themselves had to participate in order to eat. As one observer put it, “If there is any ‘cultural arrogance’ around, it lurks in the assumption that Communist ‘reeducation’ is less devastating for little yellow people than it might be for whites.”
They wanted peace; they got the peace of Auschwitz.
One must wish for peace; it is a religious duty to pray for peace; but if that is all one does, one is not likely to get it. A very long time ago the human race learned a bitter truth: if you would have peace, you must be prepared for war. The late Herman Kahn in his classic Thinking About the Unthinkable modified that ancient Roman dictum to “if you would have peace, understand war”; which is what we are trying to do in this series of stories and essays about the future of war. If these books need justification, that will serve well enough.
Since
1945 there has been peace of a sort; at least there has been no global war. The cost of that peace has been pretty high, in money, in combat casualties, and in nations like Poland and Hungary and Cambodia and Vietnam sacrificed to “visions of a new society.”
The costs will still be high in the future. Eternal vigilance remains the price of liberty, of course; but military preparedness also requires eternal rethinking of the basics.
The nature of both tactics and organization may change as new weapons and technologies emerge. Freeman Dyson writes of “David weapons,” such as nonnuclear precision guided missiles (PGM), which may change the nature of wars and armies. He says, “It seems likely that the rapid growth of microcomputer and sensor technology will result in a growing proliferation of sophisticated nonnuclear weapons which will cause armies to take a step back into an older, more professional style of warfare. The new weapons need elite, highly trained soldiers to use them effectively. They do not need the mass armies that provided the cannon fodder of the two world wars. The Falklands campaign of 1982 provides some additional evidence that the winds of change are blowing in this direction. The Argentine air force, a small elite force using precise weapons with daring and skill, did great damage to the invading forces, while the Argentine army, a mass army of conscripts, was crushingly defeated. It seems that modern technology is taking us back toward the eighteenth century, toward the era when small professional armies fought small professional wars.” (Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, Harper and Row, 1984). It is a view that has much merit.
At the suggestion of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), the British strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart studied the historical ratios of forces to space—that is, the number of troops needed to hold each mile of front. From these studies he later calculated that European NATO could be defended by a relatively small, highly trained, and highly mobile force of tanks and crosscountry-capable infantry vehicles, especially if augmented by a civilian militia of the Swiss variety. He also observed:
“Since the Western Powers are faced by opposing armies of greatly superior size, their chance of successful resistance vitally depends on being so mobile, both strategically and tactically, that they can outmaneuver the attacker. It is not only a matter of the small armored units having the utmost battlefield agility, so that they can shift quickly from one fire-position to another, but of divisions being able to switch rapidly from one sector to another to deliver deep in-and-out counterstrokes, with the aim of hamstringing the invader.
“That calls for a new kind of organization. The armored divisions that proved so decisive in 1940 had gone less than halfway towards fulfilling the design I had visualized in 1920. Every vehicle in an armored force ought to have cross-country mobility, and at least sufficient protective armor to keep out bullets and shell-splinters. The present type of armored force is gravely lacking in maneuvering flexibility. Its long road-bound tail makes it almost as rigid as the shaft of a spear. We ought to develop it into a mechanical snake.
“Besides giving the tail flexibility, the tail should be reduced in size. The most potent effect of an armored stroke comes from the sudden concentration of tanks against a weak spot in the enemy’s dispositions… the tactical idea which inspired the creation of armored forces was that of fighting mounted. Our goal in tank specification and design ought to be to produce a mechanized David instead of a Goliath.”
He also wrote:
“Another possibility is to develop remote control tanks for the spearhead. With such unmanned tanks there would be no deterrent moral effect from heavy losses in applying saturation tactics.”
All this was written in 1960 (B. H. Liddell Hart, Deterrent or Defense, Praeger). While details change often, the basic strategic situation, of the West facing numerically superior forces, has not. Some of Liddell Hart’s advice has been taken. Much has not been.
There are reasons, of course. First came Vietnam, which set military planning back a good decade. One benefit of war is that the losers must rethink what they are doing, and many of those who make the wrong decisions are eliminated. Since the crucial decisions about Vietnam were made in Washington, that couldn’t happen. The U.S. learned little from that war. Then, when the war was lost and the military commanders once again looked at overall strategy and organization, they had lost popularity—and their budget. Now we are expected to defend the West with volunteer forces—which gives a good quality of soldier—but do it on the cheap. All too often the Congress has allowed political factors to interfere in the design and procurement of military weapons.
One of Liddell Hart’s prescriptions for Europe was militia to augment Regular troops. Politically we’ve done little to encourage our Allies to adopt militia, and of course they’re reluctant to do it. A long conventional war in Europe would be less devastating than a nuclear exchange, but it is also seen as more likely; and it would be devastating enough for the people on whose land it is fought. If the U.S.S.R. can be convinced that an attack on Europe will inevitably trigger a holocaust that will destroy the world, deterrence succeeds; and a successful deterrent is clearly preferable to even a victorious war.
The nuclear deterrent isn’t completely safe either. The land-based missiles of both sides are vulnerable to a first strike; and an arms control agreement lowering the absolute numbers of missiles increases the likelihood of success of the first strike. (If both sides have only 100 missiles, a 95 percent success leaves only 5 to the loser; if both sides have 10,000, destroying 95 percent isn’t worth the cost.)
PGM can affect the nuclear strategic balance. A missile capable of hitting a tank can hit a missile silo. Even more relevant are strategic defense technologies: since President Reagan ordered serious research on missile defenses, the laboratories have found a dozen promising approaches. There are also clear signs that the Soviet Union began serious research and development of beam technologies for missile interception as early as 1972. In 1976 a U.S. early warning satellite picked up tests of very powerful fusion pulses from the Soviet weapons test complex at Agzir, and air samples collected later showed the Soviet tests released large amounts of hydrogen, and, more significantly, detectable quantities of tritium. Most physicists studying these results conclude that the Soviet Union was testing directed energy weapons as early as the mid-’70s.
They must have learned something. We now know the U.S.S.R. has constructed radars whose only possible use is for battle management of strategic defense against ICBMs. Whether or not the U.S. proceeds with SDI, it is pretty clear the Soviets intend to do so.
The U.S.S.R. routinely launches ten times the number of satellites we do; we don’t really know what they are learning from them. Their naval satellites have 100 kw of power; the U.S. has yet to orbit a 10 kw satellite of any kind.
With the loss of Challenger, the U.S. became effectively blind; and NASA did little to correct that. General Yeager said that we should launch a new shuttle as soon as the weather was warm; instead the bureaucrats of NASA began a program designed to protect their careers—but not to launch satellites. The U.S. space program has been brought to a halt. Since we had integrated our military and civil programs, this has serious consequences. As I write this the U.S. is down to one KeyHole (KH) observation satellite. Since the path of that satellite is well known, and Soviet agents were able to buy the operations manuals for the satellite from American traitors, it’s not hard to see how that satellite can be blocked from learning a great deal; yet we depend on “national technical means” to verify Soviet compliance—or violation—of arms control agreements.
We are blind, and our enemies are arming. We live, in a word, in interesting times.
George Santayana said that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. I add that those who refuse to think about the future may not have one.
Herewith more stories and essays about the future of war and conflict.
The Tank Lords, by David Drake
Editor’s Introduction
I have
on my desk a number of issues of Military Technology, a magazine published in Europe with articles by senior military officers and civilian technologists. The editorial text is impressive. Here’s “Man-Portable Air Defense Systems,” about how Redeye, Stinger, Javelin, Starstreak, and a host of other field deployable anti-aircraft systems can be used to make the battlefield a pretty hostile place for aircraft—provided you get them to the battlefield, and can aim and fire them in time.
The same issue has an article on South Africa’s home-designed and -built helicopters; Main Battle Tank armament including new electromagnetic hypervelocity railguns; liquid propellant systems for artillery; and a lot more. Other issues tell about mines, defense of airfields, new fighters, defense electronics, etc., all illustrated with diagrams and photographs.
More impressive than the articles, though, are the advertisements. Want to buy artillery shells? Chartered Industries of Singapore will be happy to sell them to you. Standard Elektrik Lorenz AC of Stuttgart, West Germany, wants you to buy a RATAC-S portable ground surveillance and target acquisition radar. Kreuss-Maffei Wehrtechnik GmbH of Munich advertises Leopard 2, “the better battle tank.” Reinmetal will sell you cannon, Vickers of England will sell 4.5 Mark 8 naval gun systems, CMM Naval Construction of Amsterdam will sell you a whole mine sweeper, and Croupement Industriel des Armaments Terrestres of St. Cloud in France would just love to take your orders for their AMX 40 tank armament. Everything from helmet-mounted light-amplifying goggles to cruise missiles to armored cars to Kevlar body armor to communications gear (a Swiss company advertises unbreakable code equipment based on “Only One Time Random Keys”) to artillery: it’s all advertised here, and much of it was mere science fiction less than a decade ago.
The wizard weapons are here. We have artillery that can fire patterns over fields ten miles away. When the shells arrive over the battlefield, they deploy into darts held aloft by parachutes as they seek tank-shaped targets. When a target is seen, the round fires and a “self-forging” blob of metal attacks the target. Other weapons home on laser beams, or trail out a wire that lets the operator guide it toward its target. A Belgian firm advertises mines that “cannot be cleared by any known devices.” All this to defeat the Main Battle Tank.
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