Between Flesh and Steel (6 page)

While nuclear weapons were increasing the firepower of war, conventional weapons were undergoing similar developments. From the perspective of military medicine, the advances in conventional weapons are much more important because conventional weapons are far more likely to be used in combat than nuclear weapons are. It is quite pointless to talk of military medicine in a nuclear environment. The scope of destruction would be so enormous as to make any attempts at medical treatment ridiculous in the extreme. Tactical nuclear weapons would almost completely destroy the units struck by them and render the area of impact so contaminated that providing medical care to the few survivors would be militarily useless. Current U.S. medical doctrine is to make no attempt at treating the survivors, leaving them to self-treatment until the battle area is stabilized to the point where medical units can reach the wounded. Even then, treating the severely contaminated or burned would be a low priority. This approach does not pertain to conventional weapons. While killing significant numbers of combatants, conventional weapons still leave multitudes of injured than can reasonably be salvaged with prompt medical intervention.

Napoleon remarked that quantity conveys a quality all its own. The increase in destructive capacities of conventional weapons in the modern era has been so huge that in any other age these quantitative changes would have been regarded as qualitative revolutions in the nature of war. In the modern age, nuclear weapons provide the baseline from which weapons' effects are measured. It does not seem so horrendous, for example, that a single artillery barrage from new artillery weapons can
exterminate whole battalions when entire cities can be eradicated in the time it takes a camera flash to occur. Even the destructive effects of war have become grotesquely relative. In 1980, the U.S. Army estimated that modern nonnuclear conventional war had become between 400 to 700 percent more lethal and intense than it had been in World War II.
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At Fort Irwin, California, where the U.S. Army routinely exercises its troops in realistic battle maneuvers, achieving simulated casualty rates that exceed 90 percent for both the offensive and defensive forces utilizing only conventional weapons is not uncommon. The increases in killing power have been enormous and far greater than in any other period in man's history.

For example, the artillery firepower of a maneuver battalion has doubled since World War II, while the “casualty effect” of modern artillery guns has increased by 400 percent. Range has increased by 60 percent and the “zone of destruction” of battalion artillery by 350 percent.
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Advances in metallurgy and the replacement of TNT with new chemical compounds have increased the explosive power of basic caliber artillery by many times. A single round from an eight-inch gun has the same explosive power of a World War II–era 250-pound bomb. Modern artillery is lighter, stronger, and more mobile than ever before. Computerized fire direction centers can range guns on target in only a few seconds compared to the six minutes required in World War II. Additionally, the rates of fire of these guns are three times what they used to be. The new artillery guns are so durable that they can routinely fire five hundred rounds over a four-hour period without damaging the barrel. Range has increased to the point where the M-110 gun can fire a 203mm shell twenty-five miles. The self-propelled gun has a travel range of 220 miles at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour. Area saturation artillery, in its infancy in World War II, has also become terribly lethal. A single Soviet artillery battalion firing eighteen BM-21 multiple rocket launchers can place thirty-five tons of explosive rockets on a target seventeen miles away in only thirty seconds. The American multiple rocket launching system is a totally mobile, self-contained artillery system that can place eight thousand M-77 explosive rounds on a target the size of six football fields eighty miles away in less than forty-five seconds. Air defense guns also have developed to where a single M-163 Vulcan cannon can fire three thousand rounds of explosives or armor-piercing 20mm shot per minute with 100 percent accuracy within two miles of the gun's position. During World War II, air defense guns could command the airspace only one mile around their position. Modern antiaircraft cannon command thirty-six times that space.
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Tanks have also improved in speed, reliability, and firepower. Modern tanks can travel forty miles per hour over a three-hundred-mile range, or three times that of earlier tanks. A tank equipped with modern gun sights and a cannon stabilization system has a probability of 98 percent of scoring a first-round hit, or thirteen times greater than that of World War II tanks. Modern battle tanks can also fire while on the move, with their probability of hitting the target being almost ten times greater than the probability of a World War II tank firing from a standing position. New propellants and ammunition design have increased the modern tank cannon's lethality as well. The armor-piercing discarding-sabot round leaves the gun muzzle at 5,467 feet per second and can pierce 9.5 inches of armor plate. Tank gun sights now feature lasers connected to computers that can locate a target at three thousand yards in the dark, smoke, rain, or snow.
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Conventional strike aircraft can deliver ordnance at rates undreamed of in World War II. The A-10 carries sixteen thousand pounds of bombs and mounts a 30mm rotating GAU-8 cannon in its nose that fires 4,200 rounds of 20mm ammunition per minute. A two-second burst, for example, places 135 rounds of armor-piercing bullets into a tank target. The AC-130H Spectre gunship is equipped with four 20mm Vulcan cannon with rates of fire of six thousand rounds per minute per gun. The Spectre also carries four 7.62mm multibarreled Honeywell guns with rates of fire of ten thousand rounds per minute. Also aboard this aerial attack platform is a 40mm Bofors cannon capable of firing two thousand rounds per minute and an automatic howitzer that can fire fifteen rounds per minute of 105mm artillery rounds. All of these weapons are linked to a sophisticated infrared sensing system tied to computers that allow the aircraft to detect ground targets while simultaneously directing fire upon them. A one-minute burst from the Spectre's armament systems is capable of reducing an entire city block to rubble.
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The modern combat helicopter has wrought a revolution in tank- and armor-killing power available to the combat commander. These weapons can be configured to kill either troops (Soviet Hind, or Mi-24) or tanks (AH-64 Apache) and are awesome weapons. The Apache carries sixteen Hellfire antitank missiles that need no further direction after they are fired and automatically home in on the target. The Apache also mounts nineteen 2.75-inch rockets and a Hughes 30mm chain gun linked to electronic computers and killer sights. The helicopter has added new mobility and stealth to the battlefield, permitting a division commander to strike with troops or antitank weapons sixty miles to his front, or four times the range possible in World War II.

The infantry, too, has increased its range, mobility, and firepower with new armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles like the Bradley M2. Infantry can bring to bear shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, back-carried antitank missiles, and Jeep- and Hummer-mounted tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided antitank missiles with devastating results.
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The lethality of the infantry has been increased exponentially by its ability to discover and target enemy units and emplacements with great accuracy. Orbiting bombers can now deliver their munitions (guided bombs, missiles, cluster munitions, and so on) with pinpoint accuracy upon targets that individual infantrymen can illuminate with hand-carried lasers. Satellites have revolutionized communications with artillery and air resources, and graphics processing devices used to guide missiles, bombs, and even individual artillery shells have vastly increased their accuracy. Infantry, including irregular forces engaged in insurgencies, are routinely armed with automatic weapons that can deliver an intensity of fire that was formerly reserved for machine guns. Paradoxically automatic weapons do not result in more casualties or lethality when compared to earlier semiautomatic weapons (such as the M-1, M14, and FN rifle) whose larger-caliber rounds and greater accuracy, along with more disciplined training of the infantryman to aim before shooting, were much more lethal and produced a bigger percentage of hits on the target.

To place the increased intensity of the modern nonnuclear conventional battlefield in perspective, one need only remember that in World War II heavy combat was defined as two to four “combat pulses” a day. Modern combat divisions are configured to routinely deliver twelve to fourteen combat pulses a day and to fight around the clock by conducting night operations. A modern U.S. or Soviet division could deliver three times as much firepower at ten times the rate of fire as they could in World War II. By any historical standard, even conventional weapons have become quite unconventional in their casualty effects.
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Lethality in war is always the sum of a number of factors that go beyond the inherent death-dealing capabilities of military technology. Before a new weapon can reach its killing potential, military commanders must discover new fighting methods to use the new weapon in a manner that maximizes its lethality. Once the weapon's killing power is exposed for all to see, however, one's opponent adopts passive and active countermeasures to limit its most deadly effects. This turn requires the commander
to change tactics and combat formations in an attempt to preserve the killing power of the new technology. Inevitably, this dynamic balance of behavior and technology usually results in the lethality of the new weapon remaining somewhat higher than that of the weapon it replaced, but not greatly so. It cannot be stressed too strongly in calculating the killing power of weaponry that any failure to adapt either weapons or tactics to new circumstances can be catastrophic. For example, the armies of World War I failed to alter their battle tactics in light of the machine gun's enormous rates of fire, resulting in horrendous casualties in the war's early days. The similar refusal of British commanders at the Somme to change their practice of massed infantry attacks against entrenched positions led to sixty thousand men being killed, wounded, or captured in less than eight hours.

Analysts have determined the effects of changes in numerous factors—such as rates of fire, number of potential targets per strike, relative incapacitating consequences, effective range, muzzle velocity, reliability, battlefield mobility, radius of action, and vulnerability—on the killing power of various weapons in order to calculate a theoretical lethality index that specifies their deadliness.
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When gauged against the single variable of dispersion, however, the objective factors change radically in their ability to produce casualties under actual battlefield conditions. Paradoxically, the measurable casualty effects of modern weapons when computed over time result in far fewer casualties when compared to the weapons of the past.

When measured against the non-gunpowder weapons of antiquity and the Middle Ages, modern conventional weapons have increased in lethality by a factor of two thousand. But while lethality was growing, the dispersion of forces on the battlefield increased by a factor of four thousand because of mechanization and the ability of fewer soldiers to deliver exponentially more firepower.
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The result, as
figure 1
demonstrates, is that since 1865 CE, wars have killed fewer soldiers as a percentage of the deployed combat force than was the case in previous wars. Except for the Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815), which utilized the tactical field formation of the packed marching column, every war since 1600 has resulted in fewer and fewer casualties as a percentage of the total forces that both the victor and vanquished committed.

The impact of force dispersion on this equation is evident from the data in
figure 2
. As weapons became more and more destructive, armies adjusted their tactics to increase the dispersion of their forces and to minimize the targets available to the new weapons. The overall result has been a decline in battle casualties even as the lethality of weapons increased.

Figure 1. Weapons Lethality and Dispersion over History

Source:
T. N. Dupuy,
The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 288.

Figure 2. Battle Casualties: 1600–1973 CE