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"Evolution
of Weaponry"
Weapons
as Devices to Overcome Physical and Psychological Limitations
Psychological
Enabling Factors
These physical needs for force, mobility, distance, and
protection interact with each other in the evolution of
weapons, but man's psychological limitations are even more
influential in this process. Lord Moran, the great military
physician of World War I and World War II, called Napoleon
the "greatest psychologist," and Napoleon said that, "In
war the moral is to the physical as three is to one." Meaning
that psychological advantage, or leverage, is three times
more important than physical advantage, and modern studies
supports Napoleon's contention.
The
Resistance to Killing:
At the heart of psychological processes on the battlefield
is the resistance to killing one's own species, a resistance
that exists in every healthy member of every species. To
truly understand the nature of this resistance to killing
we must first recognize that most participants in close
combat are literally "frightened out of their wits." Once
the arrows or bullets start flying, combatants stop thinking
with the forebrain (which is the part of the brain that
makes us human) and thought processes localize in the midbrain,
or mammalian brain, which is the primitive part of the brain
that is generally indistinguishable from that of an animal.
In conflict situations this primitive midbrain processing
can be observed in the general, widespread existence of
a powerful resistance to killing one's own kind and in particular
the fellow adult males of one's own species. During territorial
and mating battles, animals with antlers and horns slam
together in a relatively harmless head-to-head fashion,
rattlesnakes wrestle each other, and piranha fight their
own kind with flicks of the tail, but against any other
species these creatures unleash their horns, fangs, and
teeth without restraint. This is an essential survival mechanism
that prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial
and mating rituals.
One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology
is the observation that this resistance to killing one's
own species is also a key factor in human combat. Brigadier
General S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his
work as the Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations
in World War II. Based on his innovative new technique of
post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his landmark
book Men Against Fire that only 15 to 20% of the
individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons
at an exposed enemy soldier.
Marshall's findings have been somewhat controversial, but
every available, parallel, scholarly study validates his
basic findings. Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers
in the 1860s and his observations on ancient battles, Keegan
and Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout
history, Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low
killing rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments,
Stouffer's extensive World War II and postwar research,
Richard Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in
the Falklands War, the British Army's laser reenactments
of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates
among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and
countless other individual and anecdotal observations all
confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that man is not,
by nature, a close-range interpersonal killer.
The existence of this resistance can be observed in its
marked absence in sociopaths who, by definition, feel no
empathy or remorse for their fellow human beings. Pit bull
dogs have been selectively bred for sociopathy, bred for
the absence of the resistance to killing one's kind in order
to ensure that they will perform the unnatural act of killing
another dog in battle. Breeding to overcome this limitation
in humans is impractical, but humans are very adept at finding
mechanical means to overcome natural limitations. Humans
were born without the ability to fly, so we found mechanisms
to overcome this limitation and enable flight. Humans also
were born without the ability to kill our fellow humans,
and so, throughout history, we have devoted great effort
to finding a way to overcome this resistance. From a weapons
evolution perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed
as a series of successively more effective tactical and
mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome
their resistance to killing.
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1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
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