|
"Evolution
of Weaponry"
A
Brief Survey of Weapons Evolution
The
Age of Projectile Weapons
Humans had always thrown rocks or fired arrows, but usually
these could be neutralized by armor. With the advent of
the long bow (ca. 1400), for the first time the average
combatant could single-handedly fire a weapon, from a distance,
that would penetrate even the best of available, man-portable
armor. This was a revolution that introduced a combination
of distance and force that would continue in its basic format
up until the present. The long bow began the process of
rendering the knight extinct, but the advent of gunpowder
introduced powerful posturing processes into the equation
that quickly (in evolutionary terms) led to the extinction
of both the knight and the long bow.
Once individual gunpowder weapons were introduced and widely
distributed (ca. 1600), the evolution of close-range, interpersonal
weaponry subsequently moved along a single, simple path
of perfecting this weapon. The early, crude, primitive,
smoothbore, muzzle-loading, gunpowder weapons were pathetically
ineffective. They were almost impossible to aim, very slow
to fire, and useless in any kind of damp conditions. And
yet their posturing (i.e., their noise) combined with their
absolutely overwhelming force (when they could hit something)
was so great that they soon came to dominate the battlefield.
Gunpowder
was invented in China, but China was under a comparatively
centralized government that appears to have seen gunpowder
weapons as a threat to the established order and made a
conscious decision not to develop this weapon. (Over a millennium
later the Japanese would do something similar.) A powerful
argument can be made that this single decision in weapons
development resulted in the eventual subjugation of the
east and the inevitable domination and colonization of the
world by western Europe. In Europe there were constant wars
and turmoil and a complete absence of centralized authority,
which created an environment that pursued a continuous development
and refinement of gunpowder weapons. This process led to
weapons that could be fired in wet weather (percussion caps),
fired accurately (rifled barrels), loaded from a prone position
(breech loaders), fired repeatedly without loading (repeaters),
and fired repeatedly with no other action than pulling the
trigger (automatics).
Almost all of this development of gun powder weapons occurred
in the 19th century. By the early 20th century this developmental
process had reached its culmination. One common myth in
this area involves the increasing "deadliness" of modern
small arms, which is largely without foundation. For example,
the high-velocity, small-caliber (5.56 mm/.223-caliber)
ammunition used in most assault rifles today (e.g., the
M-16 and the AK-74) were designed to wound rather than kill.
The theory is that wounding an enemy soldier is better than
killing him because a wounded soldier eliminates three people:
the wounded man and two others to evacuate him. These weapons
do inflict great (wounding) trauma, but they are illegal
for hunting deer in much of the United States due to their
ineffectiveness at quickly and effectively killing game.
Similarly,
since World War I and until recently the US military's weapon
of choice in pistols was a .45 automatic (approximately
12 mm). In recent years the military weapon of choice has
become the 9 mm, which has a smaller, faster round that
many experts argue is considerably less effective at killing.
What
these new, smaller ammunitions (5.56 mm for rifle and 9
mm for pistol) do make possible is greater magazine capacity,
and this has increased the effectiveness of weapons in one
way, while decreasing it in another.
The
point is that there has not been any significant increase
in the effectiveness of the weapons available today. The
shotgun is still the single most effective weapon for killing
at close range and it has been available and basically unchanged
for over 100 years. Long-range killing technology (missiles,
aircraft, and armored vehicles) have all evolved at quantum
rates, but the basic technology of close-range killing through
transferring kinetic energy has apparently achieved an evolutionary
dead-end in this century.
|
|
|
|
Read
a different article:
|
©
1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
form reserved.
|
