Whenever there is a revolution in military affairs, there is a predictable recurrence of hype. It probably began when the first suit of armor led to the proclamation of the death of the slingshot. Ask Goliath how that worked out.
Take a more recent example. When in 1940 the Germans conquered France in six weeks, it was hailed as a new way of war called Blitzkrieg, that is, all mechanized trucks and tanks along with terror from the sky. Yet the Wehrmacht still depended on foot soldiers and horses. To return to antiquity, something similar is likely to have happened when the Athenians built a new fleet of triremes, as state-of-the-art warships were called in 483 B.C. Their purpose was to fight the anticipated Persian invasion, which came both by land and sea three years later. Led by Athens, the Greek navy won a resounding victory at sea off the coast of Athens at the Battle of Salamis in September 480 B.C. That victory turned the tide, but it still took the Spartan infantryman, however, to deliver the death blow to the Persian expeditionary force at the land battle of Plataea in central Greece in spring 479. Certainly, new technology made a big difference in these two wars.
Yet in 1940 the French had new technology as well in the Maginot Line, a series of all-but-impregnable fortresses on the Franco-German border. France’s mistake was political and financial, in that they didn’t extend the Maginot Line along the Belgian border to the sea: it was just too expensive, especially in the era of the Great Depression. But, of course, the price was low compared to the devastating costs of defeat and occupation that France suffered between 1940 and 1944.
To return to 480 B.C., Persia had new technology as well: a trireme fleet that outnumbered the Greeks at Salamis by almost two-to-one, yet Persia lost the battle. Persia’s failure wasn’t technological but political and analytical. A message from a Greek leader tried to lure Xerxes’ navy into an ambush with a false promise of Greek surrender. The all-powerful Great King, Xerxes, fell for the enemy’s trick and sent his ships into the trap, despite receiving good advice not to do so.
When I hear that the current revolution in military affairs—drones, robots, and artificial intelligence—will remove humans from the battlefield, I can’t help but feel skeptical. Certainly, new technology will change the battlefield, but for every technological innovation there is a countermove, and that often involves simple, old-fashioned human behavior. We saw examples of this on 9-11, when 19 men with box cutters destroyed the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon, and when a few people who were determined to stop them brought down Flight 93 in a field in central Pennsylvania rather than into the U.S. Capitol or the White House. We saw another example on October 7, when the technology-light Hamas launched a devastating surprise attack on Israel, one of the most tech-savvy nations on earth.
The new technologies will surely mean that there will be fewer humans on the battlefield, but it won’t remove them altogether. Americans believe in technology as much as any people on earth. We need to pay particular care not to discount the human factor in war.
Hype kills: don’t fall for it.
