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"Evolution
of Weaponry"
Weapons
as Devices to Overcome Physical and Psychological Limitations
Leaders
as a Psychological Weapon:
Milgram's famous obedience research demonstrated the tremendous
influence that can be wielded by an unknown individual in
a white lab coat in a laboratory situation, but on the battlefield
the influence of a respected leader, with the trappings
of true power, wielding authority over life and death, can
far transcend Milgram's results. Marshall is one of many
who have noted that soldiers will invariably fire if an
officer stands over them and demands that they do so, but
this firing will generally decrease as soon as the officer
leaves.
The modern concept of a combat leader usually calls up visions
of a hardened veteran moving behind a battle line of his
men, exhorting, encouraging, punishing, rebuking, correcting,
and rewarding them. But combat leadership has not always
been like this. Armies have always had leaders, but the
Romans were the first to take proven warriors and systematically
develop them into professional leaders, starting at the
lowest levels. Prior to this time leaders were usually expected
to get into the battle and lead from the front, but the
Romans were the first to place leaders behind their men
in an open order of battle. The influence of this kind of
leadership was one of the key factors in the success of
the Roman way of war, and this process of having a respected,
proven, small-unit leader, who moves behind his men and
demands effective killing activity from them (but does not
himself necessarily have to kill) continued to be a key
factor in effective combat in the centuries that followed.
This kind of leadership initially disappeared with the Roman
Empire, but it appeared again sporadically in the firing
lines of English long bowmen and then as a systematically
applied factor in the firing lines of the successful armies
of the gunpowder era and continued into the present.
Groups
as a Psychological Weapon:
Konrad Lorenz observed that "man is not a killer, but the
group is." This fundamental observation of human nature
has great utility in helping to understand the effectiveness
of what are generally referred to as "crew-served" weapons.
These are weapons that require more than one individual
to use, which provides a form of mutual accountability and
a diffusion of responsibility, which is very effective in
enabling killing. Marshall noted in World War II that the
firing rates of individual soldiers was very low, but crew
served weapons (primarily machine guns) almost always fired.
Such weapons have generally done the majority of the killing
throughout the history of warfare, beginning with the chariot,
which was the earliest crew-served weapon. The chariot often
employed a driver and a passenger who generally fired a
bow (which added the factor of distance in the violence-enabling
equation) and was most effective in the pursuit, when their
mobility advantage gave them the ability to shoot large
numbers of fleeing enemy in the back. The powerful group
dynamics of the chariot (along with its mobility) were to
show up again, over 2 millennia later, in the tanks of the
20th century.
The
Greek phalanx was a mass of spearmen in tight ranks, carrying
spears approximately 4 meters long and protecting themselves
with overlapping shields, highly trained to move in a formation
organized in depth (i.e., moving and fighting "in column"
as opposed to "in line") and trained to strike the enemy
as a coherent mass. As such it was a form of crew-served
weapon in which newer members were placed in the front and
were thereby under direct observation and accountability
by the veteran warriors behind them. The phalanx was of
such utility that it has shown up repeatedly throughout
history and around the world.
The first systematic military use of gunpowder was in cannons,
and these crew-served weapons immediately began to dominate
the battlefield. Unlike the early muskets, cannons were
effective killers from the beginning. Not only did they
provide the best form of posturing (i.e., noise-making)
ever to be seen on the battlefield, but they were also a
highly effective crew-served weapon (being generally manned
by numerous individuals and directly commanded by an officer
or a sergeant with sole responsibility for that gun and
its crew) whose crew members almost never showed any hesitation
or mercy in killing the enemy. At close range the cannon
fired "grape shot" into tightly packed enemy formations,
thus becoming, in effect, a great shotgun capable of killing
hundreds of men with a single shot. Napoleon, that "greatest
psychologist," demonstrated his understanding of the true
killing utility of the cannon (and the comparative ineffectiveness
of infantry) by ensuring that his armies always had a higher
percentage of cannons than his enemies and by massing those
cannons at key points in the battle.
In the 20th century the cannon became an "indirect fire"
system (i.e., firing over the heads of friendly combatants
from a great distance away), and the machine gun (with its
"gunner" and "assistant gunner" or "loader") came to replace
the cannon in the crew-served, "direct fire" role on the
battlefield. In World War I the machine gun was called the
"distilled essence of the infantry," but it was really just
a continuation of the cannon in its old, crew-served, mass-killing
role.
The crew-served machine gun is still the key killer on the
close-range battlefield, but the evolution of group-enabling
processes can continue to be seen in tanks and armored personnel
carriers. At sea the dynamics of the crew-served weapon
have been in play since the beginning of the gunpowder era,
i.e., crew-served weapons, distance, and the influence of
leaders.
Conditioning
as a Psychological Weapon: By
1946 the U.S. Army had completely accepted Marshall's World
War II findings of a 15-20% firing rate among American riflemen,
and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently
pioneered a revolution in combat training that replaced
the old method of firing at bulls-eye targets with that
of deeply ingrained conditioning using realistic, human-shaped
pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that
this kind of powerful operant conditioning is the only technique
that reliably influences the primitive, midbrain processing
of a frightened human being. Just as fire drills condition
terrified school children to respond properly during a fire,
and repetitious, "stimulus-response" conditioning in flight
simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively
to emergency situations.
Throughout
history the ingredients of posturing, mobility, distance,
leaders, and groups have been manipulated to enable and
force combatants to kill, but the introduction of conditioning
in modern training was a true revolution. The application
and perfection of these basic conditioning techniques appears
to have increased the rate of fire from near 20% in World
War II to approximately 55% in Korea and around 95% in Vietnam.
Similar high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning
techniques can be seen in FBI data on law enforcement firing
rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning
techniques in the late 1960s.
One of the most dramatic examples of the value and power
of this modern, psychological revolution in training can
be seen in Richard Holmes' observations of the 1982 Falklands
War. The superbly trained (i.e., conditioned) British forces
were without air or artillery superiority and consistently
outnumbered 3-to-1 while attacking the poorly trained but
well-equipped and carefully dug-in Argentine defenders.
Superior British firing rates (which Holmes estimates to
be well over 90%), resulting from modern training techniques,
has been credited as a key factor in the series of British
victories in that brief but bloody war. Any future army
that attempts to go into battle without similar psychological
preparation is likely to meet a fate similar to that of
the Argentines.
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