Russia, the Motherland, the Rodina, never died in the winter. She only slept, Rostov thought. This was the first storm of the winter, perhaps, but the land would survive it. Yes, he had seen enough to know.
And the land had seen many more storms than he.
The two men helped each other across the roof of the train, and down into the warmth of the locomotive.
Psi-Rec: I Gladiator, by Peter Dillingham
Editor’s Introduction
Over the course of this series Peter Dillingham has been building an image of a future we aren’t likely to like much; but he builds it with imagery that you won’t soon forget. I’m proud to present another portion of the Psi-Rec saga.
Psi-Rec: I Gladiator
Peter Dillingham
only seemingly
is the voice of Marsyas
monotonous
and composed of a single vowel
A a a
—Zbigniew Herbert, “Apollo and Marsyas”
I crouch here
alone
in the dust and stillness of this empty arena, in the searing glare of a bloated, hemorrhaging sun, angry, anthropophagous god, in a city that waits to die, world that waits to die, acquiescent, lulled by the constant hum of air conditioners.
Naked, I wait,
await you,
anonymous adversary, anathemata, before their all-seeing video monitors, teeth bared, filed sharp, fangs to pierce and tear, homage to ancient ancestors, those imperial predators, or perversely, Dracula; hands, poor mangled artifacts of lost glory, ascension, the cool white hand of David resting at his side, now armored with calluses, grimly poised to chop and jab.
You enter,
angel,
so lately fallen; a chronicle of linkages, synaptic, a simple psychosurgical procedure, neuron to neuron, rage, savage, homicidal rage begetting quintessential pleasure.
For a while,
Azrael,
they let you wreak havoc among the swarms of rats, packs of snarling, rabid dogs that roam the city; televised orgies of slaughter, massacres, atrocities on deserted streets, your body counts applauded, until, crazed, your hands, lips smeared with offal, insatiable in your lust, you turned your gaze on larger prey, stormed the locked doors of our audience.
Where else,
addict,
did you think they’d send you, but to this amphitheater, this arena?
So rage, now rage,
Absalom, my Absalom!
Your rage acclaims them, affirms them. Your rage abets me, absolves me! Rage, now rage. Rage, rage against the dying of the day.
Specialization in War, by Reginald Bretnor
Editor’s Introduction
Reginald Bretnor’s Decisive Warfare was published in the same year as The Strategy of Technology; volume VI of this series presented his essay updating that work. Bretnor, historian, author, former horse cavalryman in the U.S. Army, is always worth listening to. Here he continues his analysis of the principles of modern war with an examination of simplicity vs. specialization.
Specialization in War
Reginald Bretnor
Military specialization—of weapons and of men expert in their use—is as old as warfare. It has won battles, campaigns and wars—but it has also lost them, for specialization means additional complexity, of production, training, coordination, and supply—and complexity violates one of the accepted basic principles of war: simplicity.
Therefore, ideally, the perfect military force would be homogeneous, structurally simple, and capable as a single unit or in any of its fractions of realizing its full potential at any place in a minimum of time, meanwhile maintaining a minimum vulnerability.
One army in all history came closest to attaining this ideal: the army of the Mongols. It conquered the greater part of the then-known world, and its successes were finally ended, not by the generalship or valor of its opponents, but by divisive factors in its leadership. The empire of Genghis Khan was split up, first among his sons, and subsequently by subtle foreign influences: the Chinese in the East, the Moslems in the West.
The Mongol army was all cavalry, and every Mongol was born and raised in it. He learned to ride the shaggy, tireless Mongol horse before he learned to walk. He grew up proficient in the use of the bow mounted, and of the sword, his principal weapons. Neither he nor his mount was dependent on the ponderous supply-trains to which all other medieval armies were shackled. The horse, when necessary, could forage through the snow for grazing; the man, when necessary, would open one of its veins and drink the blood. As an army, the Mongols were known to move as far as seventy-five to a hundred miles in a day—a rate no modern army can attain as an army. Their organization was simplicity itself: tens, hundreds, thousands. Their discipline was perfect. So accomplished were they in their way of war that they could without hesitation delegate full authority to subordinate commanders.
Nor were their armies vast, overwhelming “hordes” in the modern sense of the word. The Mongol horde, or ordo, was relatively small compared to many other Asiatic armies; the word ordo simply meant “a camp or perhaps general headquarters.” (Squadron Leader C.C. Walker, R.C.A.F., Jenghiz Khan (London: Luzac & Co., 1939).)
These were the people who, in China under Genghis, “rode eight hundred miles, stormed twenty-eight important cities and were repulsed from four others, in approximately one hundred and twenty days” (Ibid.)—starting in midwinter. They were the people who conquered Russia in a winter campaign. They were the people who, riding as individuals, changing horses at the beautifully organized network of post-stations spanning their empire, and sleeping in the saddle, could and did cover three hundred and more miles per day.
Yet even they learned to specialize when specialization was necessary. Their open tribal warfare on the plains of Mongolia taught them nothing about siege tactics and siege engines. Yet all they had to do to learn was to encounter the fortified cities of the Chinese. They learned from the Chinese themselves, using Chinese for labor and driving masses of Chinese ahead of them when they assaulted.
I have deliberately given the impression that the Mongol army was unspecialized, and this certainly is true when one considers only its internal organization. Compared to all other armies before and since, it was the most highly specialized army in all history.
Considering modern science and modern military technology, what sort of force—on land or sea, in the air or in space—could most closely approximate its efficiency and effectiveness today?
THE GOALS OF SPECIALIZATION
We cannot, in the foreseeable future, hope realistically for a rebirth of the all-purpose weapon or the all-purpose warrior, for our immediate military heritage is that of the post-Renaissance armed forces of Europe: infantry, cavalry, and artillery on land, all more or less specialized within themselves and all dependent on continuing production and supply; and at sea, a similar rather simple specialization of ships of war, similarly dependent. The evolution of their military complexity—and of their increasingly ramified specialization—has paralleled that of the scientific and technological complexity of civilian society in our age.
The goals of military specialization are—and will remain—essentially simple: to unbalance the equations of war in one’s own favor:
By moving faster than the enemy
By striking harder than the enemy
By hitting him without being hit
By making oneself less vulnerable than he
World War I offered numerous examples:
The introduction of chemical weapons (vesicants, toxic gasses, flamethrowers)
The return of armor to the battlefield
The use of aircraft in war, both tactically and for “strategic” bombardment
Accelerated development of high-angle-of-fire weapons (trench-mortars, grenade throwers, etc.), and a vast improvement in indirect-fire artillery techniques
And for every World War I example, we can easily think of dozens developed before and during
World War II.
Actually, specialized weapons is too restrictive a term. We must also consider specialized men and specialized enabling devices, especially as the importance of such devices and of the men competent to handle them is now increasing so dramatically. Neither a ship nor an aircraft nor an armored vehicle is basically a weapon. They are devices to move weapons men cannot move, to do so faster than men possibly could, and to do it while themselves remaining, whenever possible, less vulnerable than men are.
A weapon multiplies the physical power of men to express destructive force; enabling devices multiply the area over which, during a given period of time, that force can be expressed and/or the precision with which this can be accomplished. As a consequence, additional specialized weapons and devices must be designed especially to prevent the enemy from multiplying his own power. For the sake of brevity, I shall simply refer to enabling devices as devices, whatever their size and whatever their exact function—the term can include everything from production (a ball-bearing factory would be a good example) through the logistical sequence (ships, trucks, trains) to the ultimate tactical carriers. Therefore we have the following classes of specialized weapons:
Antipersonnel weapons
Antidevice weapons
Antiweapon weapons
Obviously, their functions more or less overlap, but the more highly specialized they are, the less overlap there will be and the more restricted will be their sphere of effectiveness.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
It is interesting to consider their past development, particularly as it sheds light on their probable development in the immediate future.
Weapon-and-device history can conveniently be divided into three periods:
The man (and animal) power age
The mechanical power age
The age of scientific power: 1st phase, chemical-nuclear, electronic; 2nd phase, cybernetic.
These, again, overlap. Our own Civil War, because of its extensive use of railroads and its reliance on an interchangeable-parts technology in arms manufacture and on steam-powered and water-powered factories, can fairly be called the first of the mechanical wars. World War I, basically a mechanical war, was also the first to forecast the age of scientific power. World War II displayed the beginnings of that age in terms that left no doubt as to its nature. Let us take one example: Previously, the power of a man’s eye to see could be multiplied only by spyglasses, binoculars, battery commanders’ scopes. World War II introduced radar, a very different kettle of fish. (It also brought in radio-controlled drones, and proximity fuses, which can perhaps be considered as precursors of today’s “smart bombs” and self-guided missiles.)
There was one development it lacked. Every weapon and device developed for it, on land or sea, simply augmented man’s ability to hit an enemy, to determine the location of an enemy, or to protect himself against an enemy. None of them augmented his ability to think, to solve problems great and small, solve them infinitely faster than he could with his unaided mind, or solve them and carry out the military procedures necessary under circumstances of intolerable physical or psychological stress.
No gunner, no matter how well trained, using only his five senses, can reasonably be expected to intercept a launched Sidewinder or Exocet missile. Nor can a human pilot endure the accelerations required of any vehicle capable of intercepting an ICBM.
But computer-guided antimissile missiles will be able to.
A computer can “think” faster than a man. Correctly programmed, it can act much faster than a man. In the air, or in space, it can survive many times as many Gs as a man (which leads us to some interesting speculations about the inevitable future of manned and unmanned flying objects).
In short, computers multiply the powers of the human mind, completing the cybernetic relationship within a military organism.
THE CYBERNETIC ACE: POWERS AND VULNERABILITIES
Almost ten years ago, in his book Modern Warfare, A Study of Men, Weapons, and Theories, (London: Allen Lane, 1973. An excellent, highly intelligent, well-balanced book, unfortunately now out of print.) Shelford Bidwell wrote, of military cybernetics:
When we speak of “the military machine,” it is with more insight than we may realize. An army is a machine of a special type constructed for a special purpose…
The term used to describe such a machine is a weapon system. It is a most useful and descriptive term, because we have reached a point in the history of weapons at which it is misleading to speak or think simply of the weapon itself… We have to consider all that goes with it… A modern army/air force is a gigantic weapon complex, governed by the laws that govern any such cybernetic network.
Brigadier Bidwell went on to discuss an air-defense setup as a smaller, simpler model, and he said:
It is technically quite possible to make the whole system automatic and to limit human intervention to the orders to stand by, engage, and stop; and even these could be built into the machine, which can be “taught” to act correctly under certain circumstances.
The development of this sort of “military machine” has led, and is still leading, toward armed forces with a smaller and smaller percentage of _un_specialized weapons, devices, and organizations. Every new weapon demands a new counterweapon; every effective new enabling device demands another to offset it; and all of them demand new military techniques, new training.
That is one trend. The other, perhaps no less important, is toward a higher and higher degree of that automation referred to by Brigadier Bidwell.
Specialization must inevitably—except in certain rare instances we will look at later—subtract from the power of an armed force to strike as a whole. To take a now obsolete example: a horse cavalry unit in the field armed with the same weapons as an equivalent number of infantry could not match their firepower in a fluid situation, simply because one man in each set of fours, or one in each squad, depending on circumstances, had to act as horse-holder. Again, specialization can have its more passive negative effects by increasing the vulnerability factor of the specialized element. It is my understanding that H.M.S. Sheffield’s aluminum hull gave her a marked advantage in speed over similar vessels similarly powered, but it also contributed to her destruction off the Falklands; her hull actually caught fire from the intense heat generated when she was struck by an Argentine Exocet missile.
Therefore specialization must, inevitably, involve much weighing and balancing of all the factors involved.
DECISIVE SPECIALIZATION?
The military machine described by Bidwell can be compared to a symphony orchestra, in which each section and instrument is coordinated toward the accomplishment of a mutual goal. What then of those historical instances where a single specialized weapon, or device, or weapons system has been successfully employed to the same end? We have seen that the Mongols were the only people to achieve this on almost a world-conquering scale. But there have also been cases where new, specialized weapons and techniques have achieved impressive battlefield and campaign decisions that almost certainly could not have been achieved without them:
The British longbow at Crécy and Agincourt against the armored chivalry of France
Swiss long pikes and pikemen against Spanish and Austrian cavalry
The Japanese employment of front-loading mortars in jungle warfare in Malaya
The use of radar in the Battle of Britain (not of course alone decisive—an enabling device cannot be—but of decisive importance nonetheless).
It would appear, then, that for any single specialized weapon or device or organization to play a decisive role, even in concert with other elements, it must be employed in sufficient force. History holds instance after instance of the failure to do this resulting in a failure to achieve possible victory:
What might have happened if the British, during the American Revolution, had had the imagination to adopt the extremely practical Ferguson breech-loading rifle, not universally, but at least on a militarily signific
ant scale?
What would almost certainly have happened if Hitler had followed Admiral Donitz’s advice with regard to the use of U-boats in World War II?
And—though I have never seen the possibility mentioned—what might have happened to either of the combatants at Jutland had the other had three or four times as many torpedo-capable light vessels as current naval custom called for?
We could go on about the first use of chemical weapons and tanks in World War I, but here too many other factors enter the picture. No such doubts exist where the German use of armor in World War II was concerned: their initial victories were won because generals like Model and Guderian had the good sense to adopt the ideas developed by British general J.F.C. Fuller prior to 1919, subsequently publicized by him and by Sir Basil Liddell Hart, and subsequently ignored by the French, the British, and ourselves.
What are the prospects for decisive specialization in our cybernetic military future? Let us remember the essential rule: a specialized weapon or device cannot be decisive unless used on an adequate scale against critical objectives. There is another: such a weapon or device cannot be decisive unless it is used. One may get to feeling very secure sitting on a terrific military secret—but the longer one sits on it, the worse its chances of decisive employment are going to be, and the better chance there’ll be of an enemy matching or countering it. Nature has no secrets—only as-yet-undiscovered laws—and science is an instrument that will work for any master who has the wit and the resources to employ it, however nasty he may be.
The cybernetic military organism is today—and will continue to be tomorrow—more directly, and more instantly, dependent on its electronic nervous systems than were any of its predecessors. Therefore the vulnerability of these systems will be critical, and inevitably attempts will be made to devise weapons to exploit this. For instance, any effective “weapon” that could render a computer chip as inert as a chocolate chip cookie, or simply make it function erratically or unpredictably, could—if adequately employed—easily win a modern war. To put it more accurately, it could easily enable its accompanying weapons systems to destroy a suddenly mindless, paraplegic enemy.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 27