And now it’s “Get the doolies,” and now the Captain’s gone;
An’ now it’s bloody murder, but all the while they ’ear
’Is voice, the same as barrick-drill, a-shepherdin’ the rear.
’E’s just as sick as they are, ’is ’eart is like to split,
But ’e works ’em, works ’em, works ’em till he feels ’em take the bit;
The rest is ’oldin’ steady till the watchful bugles play,
An’ ’e lifts ‘em, lifts ’em, lifts ’em through the charge that wins the day!
The ’eathen in ’is blindness bows down to wood and stone;
’E don’t obey no orders unless they is his own;
The ’eathen in ’is blindness must end where ’e began,
But the backbone of the Army is the Non-commissioned Man!
Keep away from dirtiness—keep away from mess,
Don’t get into doin’ things rather-more-or-less!
Let’s ha’ done with abby-nay, kul, and hazar-ho;
Mind you keep your rifle an’ yourself jus’ so!
Editor's Introduction to:
THE TOOLS OF WAR
by Roland J. Green and Clyde R. Jones
I first met Roland Green at the World Science Fiction Convention held in Washington in 1974. The conversation soon turned to military history and future conflict, and I recognized him as a kindred spirit at once.
Since that time, we have collaborated on JANISSARIES II: Clan and Crown, and have plotted at least one more joint work.
I’ve never met Clyde Jones, who, like Roland, lives in the Chicago area.
Green and Jones discuss a wide range of new weapons, but they cannot consider everything in a work of this length. One area they neglect is space weaponry; but space weapons may yet prove to be decisive.
The chemical-powered laser “battle station” located high in orbit could dominate warfare for some time to come. The Laser Battle Station (LBS) has multi-shot capability; it can burn down an entire fleet of ICBMs, then take on the enemy’s air fleet for an encore.
Indeed, if the laser frequency is chosen correctly, it can have a decisive effect on land and sea warfare. Blue-green lasers can destroy targets on the ground. Such lasers would operate only in clear weather; but the ability to deny the enemy ground movement in clear weather would be well-nigh decisive.
Another potential weapon is Project Thor: orbiting crowbars with guidance systems. A cloud of them could be made to reenter over the enemy’s attacking armored army. The “crowbars” would seek out tanks, striking them with velocities of miles per second; the result would be the certain destruction of the tank.
Such weapons could also be used against ships.
Those interested in space weapons would do well to begin with General Daniel O. Graham’s High Frontier (New York: Tor Books, 1983) as well as the essays in the first two volumes of this series. Also useful is the Report of the Second Meeting of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy (L-5 Society, 1060 E. Elm St., Tucson, Arizona 85719, $10.00, 1983).
Another decisive weapon not here discussed is the “neutron bomb,” also called an Enhanced Radiation Weapon. N-bombs put out most of their energy as neutrons and x-rays rather than as blast and heat. Thus they “kill people without destroying property.” To be precise: A one-kiloton neutron weapon exploded some 2,000 feet above a city would render exposed personnel—such as enemy troops—helpless while doing little more physical damage than breaking windows.
Because there is no blast, shelter from N-bombs consists of having several feet of dirt between you and the bomb. Civilians and troops in deep foxholes would survive; troops aboard armored vehicles would not. At the very least, N-bombs would make blitzkrieg tactics very difficult to employ. They thus appear to aid the defense more than the offense.
N-bombs have given rise to a number of myths, including the notion that enemy soldiers, having received a lethal dose of radiation, would now fight all the harder since they would have nothing left to live for. This is sometimes known as the “zombies-make-great-tankers” theory. It is held by such diverse persons as Kosta Tsipis, an arms-control specialist at MIT; Herbert Scoville, Jr., a key arms-control and disarmament specialist in the Pentagon during the Carter administration; and science fiction writer Fred Pohl.
The theory doesn’t explain how the enemy soldiers know they’re zombies: Given the wide range of human tolerance to radiation, it’s not likely they’d know. Moreover, the theory ignores the enemy troops directly under the weapon, who would be killed instantly; units with 50 percent and higher casualties rarely have high military effectiveness.
For a full discussion of N-bombs, see Sam Cohen, The Truth About the Neutron Bomb (New York, William Morrow, 1983). Cohen, the inventor of neutron weapons, discusses their effects and the political opposition he has encountered for the past ten years. He demonstrates that the Soviet Union almost certainly has neutron weapons.
The Tools of War is not precisely an original title. James R. Newman (who with Edward Kasner wrote Mathematics and the Imagination, probably the most popular book about mathematics ever published) wrote a four-hundred-page book with that title; it was published in early 1942 and is long out of print, although it ought to be available in libraries. I found mine in a Hollywood used bookstore. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of weaponry (Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1942).
Newman’s book gave an accurate description of the weapons to be used in the coming war. Of course it emphasized the battleship to the detriment of the aircraft carrier—but it did at least admit there was some controversy. After all, no military theorist and few Navy officers (other than upstarts like Halsey) really understood that the carrier would be the decisive arm of naval warfare in World War II.
Newman’s book was notable in another way: Much of its text and at least one of its diagrams were lifted in their entirety and inserted, without credit, into the designer’s notes for a well-known war game based on the fall of France. I suppose there is some justification since Newman’s work had one of the best expositions on the Maginot Line, yet was written after the Germans bypassed it.
A final area neglected by nearly everyone is communications. Brigadier S. L. A. Marshall in his Pork Chop Hill speculates that wars of the future may be fought by small patrols able to call in immense firepower from far away. Lieutenant Asfaw of the Ethiopian Imperial Guards showed how that might be done during one of the battles of the Korean War.
In 1963, using Asfaw’s battle as an example, Corlin O. Beum and I designed a weapons system then code-named “Thoth” missiles. They would be launched from cargo aircraft far from the combat zone and guided in to an offset from the observer patrol. We also developed an autocorrelation communication system to aid in Thoth guidance. The weapons system was intended for Vietnam; alas, it was never built because no one believed that that war would last long enough to require such special weapons.
The Thoth missile system could be built today. The missiles and their guidance systems are standard off-the-shelf hardware. The communications systems are a bit trickier.
Indeed, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence—the famous “C-cubed-I” factor—are the key to modern battle. Most C3I systems require space-based components; thus defense of one’s space assets is a key to the future of war.
Meanwhile, Green and Jones provide a good introduction to speculation about the future of arms.
THE TOOLS OF WAR
by Roland J. Green and Clyde R. Jones
The best reason for any study of the weapons of future land, sea and air warfare is also the simplest.
These are the weapons most likely to be used.
No one has dropped an atomic or hydrogen bomb in combat since 1945. No one has ever launched an ICBM at an enemy target or intercepted an incoming enemy warhead.
On the other hand, airplanes and helicopters have been flying in combat somewhere in the world each year si
nce 1945. Every continent has seen tanks in action, if only against rioters or revolutionaries. Warships—from super-carriers down to motor-patrol boats—have sent planes, rockets, shells and torpedoes at enemy targets. Even relatively new developments such as tactical missiles, hovercraft, guided “smart” bombs and lasers have gone from the laboratories to the factories and from the factories to the firing line. Everywhere the infantryman has gone on practicing the basic skills of his craft.
This kind of warfare will continue because we’re not likely to abolish war completely and the only other alternative is still worse. A world that used H-bombs where tanks could do the job wouldn’t last long or be very interesting, except possibly to extra-terrestrial archeologists who came along after the ruins were no longer dangerously radioactive.
This article focuses on the next twenty years of warfare on Earth. Beyond that point, we’re talking about something closer to soothsaying than prediction, and probably about a book rather than an article.
The Possibilities
1. Intermediate Weapons: The neutron bomb has already created an area of what might be called “intermediate weapons,” neither strictly conventional (high-explosive) nor nuclear. We may expect to see at least two more kinds of these weapons before the year 2000, plus developments in chemical and biological warfare.
Cold-fusion Bombs: Thermonuclear weapons with the fusion initiated by a ring of magnets, charges of extremely powerful conventional explosives, or one-shot lasers. Such bombs might be smaller, cheaper, lighter and cleaner than any present tactical fission or fusion weapon. A cold-fusion bomb with a one-kiloton yield could conceivably be fired from a medium mortar or carried in an anti-tank missile.
Directed-radiation Weapons: Actual bombs emitting directional bursts of hard radiation on detonation; magnetic pulse weapons (particularly effective against computers); beamed radiation weapons producing focused, coherent microwaves, radio waves, sound, streams of charged particles, etc.
For the first two we’ll probably need radically improved chemical explosives or cold-fusion triggers; for the third, a breakthrough in reliable, portable, high-capacity energy storage or generation. The last two can be used against equipment rather than people, and against people all may be adjustable to harass, disable or kill.
Chemical and Biological Warfare: Gases and germs each offer their share of potential horrors.
In sheer killing power, lethal chemical agents such as nerve gases hardly need “improvement.” They need to be cheaper, safer to transport and store and more controllable as to the areas they’ll affect and the time they’ll remain potent.
Non-lethal agents, basically descendants of current riot-control gases, are a more fertile field for innovation. We can expect hallucinogens, tranquilizers, blistering gases many times more powerful than mustard gas, and so on quite literally ad nauseam.
As chemical agents become more reliable, they’ll appear in a wider variety of projectiles, mine fields and booby traps. We may even see chemical agents that are themselves booby traps. Consider the possibilities of leaving behind when you retreat fuel dumps treated with a chemical agent which, under the heat of combustion, breaks down to release cyanide gas.
The potential of biological warfare is expanding alarmingly, thanks to recent developments in DNA research. Within the next generation we may see DNA expertise and laboratories within reach of some large corporations and many governments, responsible or otherwise.
In spite of this, we still may not see strategic biological warfare unless the world’s political situation deteriorates so far that there’s no longer a question of whether there will be war, but only of how many survivors there will be. Sowing cholera in the enemy’s water supply or anthrax among his livestock may look like the same kind of total threat as dropping H-bombs, to be met by the same sort of total response.
Like fall-out, biological warfare is also no respecter of borders. Immunizing your own population in advance sacrifices surprise without guaranteeing that a strain of bacteria mutated once won’t mutate again. Even those countries not deterred by their enemies may wind up deterred by the threat of a universal plague or intervention by outside parties. In the end, strategic biological warfare seems likely to wind up incorporated into the same rough and ready system of deterrence that so far has prevented the use of nuclear weapons.
It should be kept in mind, however, that the DNA-tailoring techniques can be used with any sort of organism. Contaminating the water supply of your opponent’s capital city with a virulent strain of the twenty-four-hour flu or Montezuma’s Revenge is not the sort of threat that really justifies his launching ICBMs. At the same time, it will do the efficiency of his government and military command structure no good at all.
2. Materials: The general trend since 1900 has been toward improved strength-to-weight ratios, and usually lighter weight. During the rest of the century we can expect improvements in stampings, castings, and powder metallurgy. We will see improved plastics, semi-organic materials, carbon-fiber reinforced materials (fiberglass as tough as steel), possibly woven metals or whole new categories of non-ferrous and non-metallic substances.
Some materials may prove too expensive to use in large items such as complete aircraft or in small, chronically expendable ones such as boots. Others may not be cost-effective under all circumstances. A one-pound bulletproof helmet with radio, gas mask, goggles, sound amplifiers, laser detector, neck armor, packet of Excedrin and tube of Brylcreem may not be acceptable if it costs ten times as much as an equally effective three-pounder.
In general, we can expect to see small warships, air and ground vehicles, all kinds of weapons and their projectiles, and the fighting man’s personal equipment becoming lighter, stronger, or both. More vehicles and weapons will become air-portable, and the gap in firepower between ground-mobile and air-mobile troops will shrink. This will make air-mobile operations much less dangerous for the attacker and more so for the defender.
The much-burdened infantryman will be particularly happy. After millennia of trial, error and profanity, his individual load may actually begin to shrink, or at least stop increasing. This will reduce many types of non-combat casualties and also one of the barriers to the use of women in ground combat roles. Ground troops should also be able to wear extensive body armor, effective against blast, fragments and some types of small arms.
3. Hyper-explosives: By the year 2000 we could have chemical explosives five to ten times more powerful than today’s. The practical limit is what can survive rough handling, both on the way to the battlefield and on the way to the target.
Propellant explosives are likely to be developed further. As long as the gun won’t explode or the rocket tumble in flight, the more power from a given weight of propellant, the better. Explosives in warheads may be developed more conservatively. Most tactical weapons sooner or later have to be used in close proximity to your own troops. Some, like hand grenades, are designed for nothing else. A certain margin for error is always useful; otherwise you may wipe out one of your own platoons if a single shell drops fifty yards short.
We can be reasonably certain about some of the effects of hyper-explosives. Potentially ship-killing weapons will become still more compact, cheaper and more numerous. All types and sizes of solid-fuel missiles will become more effective. Some form of body armor may become not merely possible but essential for ground troops, and even warship crews. A wide range of currently unprotected vehicles, such as trucks and helicopters, may also have to develop some form of armor to survive.
Beyond this, exactly what happens depends on whether we use hyper-explosives to increase the performance or to decrease their size. Each course offers so many advantages that we are likely to see both.
Increasing weapons performance gives us higher velocities, longer ranges and more powerful warheads. It also permits improving two specific categories of weapons.
One is the rocket-assisted projectile, fired from a conventional artillery piece but given ex
tra range by a small rocket. Current RAPs sacrifice accuracy and warhead size for range. With hyper-explosives, this sacrifice would be reduced.
The other category of improved weapons is the “smart projectile,” the bomb or shell with a target-seeking capability. The target-seeking equipment is expensive and can reduce the load of explosives carried. With hyper-explosives we can increase the performance of smart projectiles enough to justify their much wider use in spite of cost. Hyper-explosives could permit a rocket-boosted eight-inch shell with three maneuverable warheads or a thousand-pound bomb carrying not only multiple warheads and target-seekers but decoys, anti-radar jammers and booby traps.
Shrinking the weapon offers equally interesting prospects. To begin with, the job of the saboteur, terrorist/freedom fighter/guerrilla or commando is going to become easier and the job of his opponents more difficult. The same principle will operate all the way up the scale of weaponry. Three near-certainties are:
—Improved infantry heavy weapons and better armament of all types of ground troops and vehicles armed with infantry weapons.
—Defensive air-to-air missiles and light guns carried aboard helicopters and transport aircraft.
—Heavy artillery pieces and mortars mounted on trucks instead of tracked vehicles. This will increase road speed and reduce cost, weight, fuel consumption, noise and maintenance.
4. Lasers: Reality’s answer to the death ray has a promising future, although it also has certain weaknesses. Lasers require careful maintenance, use a great deal of energy and can be blocked by foul weather, spray, and natural or artificial smoke. They are always more likely to be useful on land than at sea and more useful above the weather than on the ground. Within these limits they are going to be increasingly effective, and even lethal, in combat.
There Will Be War Volume III Page 13