The Worth of War (12 page)

Finally, there is the matter of espionage. Since ancient times, nations have relied upon spies to inform them of one another's plans and capabilities. One important form of espionage is collection of information on the use and manufacture of weapons. In some instances, espionage has provided information that allowed one or another nation to copy complex weapons systems that it might not easily have been able to develop on its own. In the 1940s, for example, Soviet spy rings penetrated American security and copied the plans and designs for American nuclear weapons. This intelligence coup allowed the Soviet Union to build an atomic bomb years earlier than its scientists and engineers might have been able to construct such a weapon on their own.

In recent years, China has been quite active in the realm of technological espionage. Chinese agents allegedly were able to acquire microwave submarine detection technology, space-based intercept systems, electromagnetic artillery systems, submarine torpedoes, aircraft carrier electronic systems, and various other military technologies. Recently, a Chinese citizen, Sixing Liu, was sentenced to seventy months in federal prison for attempting to transfer information about the “disk resonator gyroscope,” a device that allows drones, missiles, and rockets to hit targets without satellite guidance, to the Chinese military. Liu was employed by US defense contractor L-3 Communications, where he had access to the gyroscope.
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Similarly, Chi Mak, another L-3 employee, was convicted of passing information on the navy's quiet drive submarine propulsion technology to China, while another Chinese agent was convicted of acquiring American microwave submarine detection technology for China.

Of course, China is not the only nation that uses covert means to
acquire American military technology. In recent years, Russian agents have been accused of attempting to export US military equipment and technology, and a number of Iranian agents have been apprehended seeking to obtain American technology and hardware for Iran's military and nuclear programs.
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Mid twentieth-century Soviet atom spies generally had to physically obtain or photograph documents and components. While this traditional form of espionage continues to be important, today's spying also includes cyberattacks on computer systems that store useful military and technological information. In recent years, computer attacks, mainly originating in China, have targeted a number of American defense firms, including Northrop Grumman, whose computer systems contain valuable information on American military systems. What, if any, technology was transferred through these attacks has not been made public.
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IMITATION IS MORE THAN JUST A FORM OF FLATTERY

War and preparation for war provide nations with a powerful incentive to identify and copy one another's useful military technologies. Whatever form such imitation takes, with the exception of simple secondary use, imitation of a foreign military innovation may allow—or indeed, require—learning and assimilating whole new sets of technologies with both military and civilian applications. As I observed earlier, copying swords may teach societies how to build plowshares.

Take the case of jet propulsion. Work on jet engines had been undertaken in Britain, France, and Germany during the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, German industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw the possibility of attaching a jet engine to an airplane. Along with an engine designed Hans von Ohain, Heinkel built the He 178, the world's first jet plane. With subsequent technical improvements, the Germans were able to build the world's first jet fighter, the Me 262, which entered combat in 1944. The
Messerschmitt
jet could attain a top speed of about 550 miles
per hour, which was more than 150 miles per hour faster than conventional Allied fighter aircraft. The Me 262 was quite successful in downing Allied bombers, particularly after the introduction of a two-seat version with radar gave it an enhanced ability to fly and fight at night.

The Me 262 was introduced too late in the war to have any appreciable effect. Other air forces encountering the German jet fighter, though, recognized its clear superiority to piston engine aircraft, as well as to the British Gloster Meteor, a somewhat more primitive jet fighter developed by the British. Accordingly, Allied forces made every effort to capture an Me 262 for study, hoping to copy its design and technology. The US Army Air Force had created an intelligence effort dubbed “Operation Lusty,” tasked with acquiring German aircraft and weapons technologies. No Me 262, though, was captured until the end of the war, when both the Americans and Soviets were able to seize a number of the jets in fairly good condition. The United States shipped nine of the Me 262s, along with other German equipment, to an airfield in Newark, New Jersey for study. There the German planes were reverse-engineered and immediately became the basis for America's jet fighter and jet bomber programs.

Within a few years, of course, jet engines were being used to power commercial airliners. With improvements in their power, reliability, and fuel efficiency, they soon replaced piston engines on most large civilian aircraft. The jet engine has dramatically shortened flight times and reduced the costs associated with travel and commerce. Copying the sword produced a very important plowshare. Of course, jet technology had been under development before the war and had not been exclusively intended for military purposes. This point, however, raises the larger issue of how technology is transferred between civilian and military uses, a question to which we shall now turn.

CIVIL-MILITARY TECHNOLOGY TRANSFERS

There is a long-standing argument about whether the military should be seen mainly as a producer or as a consumer of technology. That is, does the military develop new technologies that turn out to have civilian applications or does it make use of—“militarize”—technologies that were initially developed for civilian purposes? It is certainly possible to think of examples of both phenomena. The microwave oven was an accidental spin-off of military radar. The Internet is an outgrowth of the ARPANET created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an entity later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in 1958 by America's Defense Department to develop advanced technologies. ARPA was a response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the world's first orbital satellite, and devised the ARPANET to link the nation's various research computers through a packet switching network that would allow these computers to communicate almost instantaneously with one another. The basic technology for the ARPANET is still the technology underlying the Internet.

At the same time, there are many examples of civilian technology that became militarized. Sonar, the device used by every navy to search for enemy submarines, was initially developed after the sinking of the
Titanic
as a device that might be used to detect icebergs in bad weather. The military value of airplanes was not immediately perceived and was still being debated in the 1930s. And, the tank, it might be said, is essentially a farm tractor that has been modified to carry a bit of armor and a gun.

Though there are many examples of spin-offs in both directions, in general, the military develops rather than initiates new technologies. That is, some technology developed by engineers or scientists who are mainly curious and had no particular application in mind will turn out to have military possibilities. If these come to the attention of military authorities they will invest resources in perfecting the technology and exploiting its military potential. This investment may, in turn, lead to technological improvements that serve the civilian economy in a benign spiral.

Take radar, for example. Nineteenth-century radar experimenters such as Heinrich Hertz found it interesting that radio waves could be reflected from solid objects. Hertz and other scientists who studied the phenomenon had no particular interest in its practical applications. In the 1930s, however, as the likelihood of war increased, military authorities in several nations became interested in the idea of a system that might be able to detect enemy aircraft before they reached their targets. In 1934, the British Air Ministry funded a study that led to the construction of a working prototype system designed to detect aircraft, which became the basis for the radar network that served Great Britain very well during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Today, of course, in addition to its military uses, radar is essential to the civilian aircraft and shipping industries, to say nothing of its role in food preparation through the microwave oven.

In a similar vein, the physicists who studied the secrets of the atom in the late nineteenth century were driven by scientific curiosity, not military possibilities. It was a long time before the potential military applications of atomic energy were understood and brought to the attention of the military. In 1939, a group of eminent German–Jewish physicists who had been forced to flee Germany and emigrate to the United States became concerned that Nazi Germany might develop an atomic bomb. As noted in
chapter 1
, two of these men, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, in consultation with Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which they described the possibility that a new type of weapon of unprecedented power could be built, based upon the principle of nuclear fission. Such a weapon, they said, could destroy a city with one blast. Moreover, the letter went on to say, it was possible that Nazi Germany had already begun work on a nuclear bomb.
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Once nuclear energy had been harnessed, the possibility for civilian spinoffs became evident. Nuclear reactors provide a significant fraction of the word's energy, though concerns about safety and the storage of nuclear waste materials have limited their use.

Roosevelt received this letter several days after the German invasion
of Poland and was sufficiently concerned to authorize the creation of an advisory committee, which in turn funded the beginnings of what became the Manhattan Project, a government-funded crash program that built the atomic bomb. The military did not invent the atomic bomb. Rather, it provided the funding and organization that took a civilian scientific theory and used it to create a weapon.

A similar story could be told about microelectronics. The transistor and the semiconductor emerged from the work of scientists and engineers working in private or university laboratories beginning in the late nineteenth century. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, mindful of the military importance of these developments, the US Defense Department provided an enormous amount of funding for microelectronic research, which served as the foundation for new weapons and communications systems as well as tens of thousands of civilian devices.

Today, the military is investing heavily in robotics and artificial intelligence—technologies that were not initially devised for military purposes but whose military uses were apparent, as in the example of the LS3 discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The military believes that robotic warriors may play a role in future wars.
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At the same time, military-funded research in robotics and artificial intelligence may produce enormous changes in medicine, industry, and society more generally. Perhaps, when military funding boosts some technologies it disadvantages other technologies that are then left behind. Proponents of green energies often make this point. Nevertheless, in most realms, war and technological progress seem to go hand in hand.

All governments rely upon force to compel obedience and keep dissent in check. Some regimes, indeed, seem prepared to treat their own people in a very brutal manner if it suits their purposes. In the twentieth century, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, among others, murdered tens of millions of real or imagined enemies among their
own
citizens, often through policies of deliberate starvation. Chairman Mao was fond of observing that the quality of a revolutionary could be measured by the number of people he had killed.
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The sheer scale of the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian governments' atrocities against their own citizens may have been unprecedented, but many other regimes have made up in simple ferocity what they lacked in reach and ambition.

Throughout early modern Europe, for example, some of those who broke the law or otherwise incurred the wrath of the authorities were commonly subjected to whipping, branding, amputation of hands and ears, and blinding. Other offenders were subjected to ever more hideous tortures, drawn and quartered, burned alive, and, of course, hanged at the whim of one or another sadistic ruler.
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Every modern-day government is certainly capable of mistreating its citizens. Most Western regimes, however, and many others as well, tend to abjure outright brutality in favor of what at least purports to be more humane systems of governance. Ironically, one of the reasons for this shift is centuries of warfare. In order to maximize the power they can exert abroad, governments have been compelled to restrict its use at home.

It is, of course, commonly believed that in times of war, rulers are inclined to govern even more harshly than in peacetime, perhaps justifying
mistreatment of their subjects by the demands of national security. This idea is captured by the Roman proverb,
inter arma silent leges
: In time of war the laws are silent. It is certainly true that even liberal regimes are capable of restricting civil rights and violating civil liberties during wartime. The United States government, for example, restricted the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War, placed limitations on free speech during the First World War, interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and currently curtails various civil liberties as it prosecutes the “war on terror.”

But, despite such examples, over time war actually has been associated with a gradual lessening rather than an increase in the most overt forms of governmental brutishness. Particularly during the past quarter millennium, military necessity has frequently impelled rulers to turn to their subjects for support. Millions of ordinary individuals have been expected to serve in their nations' armed forces, to work long hours in defense plants, to pay burdensome taxes, and to volunteer for a variety of home-front activities. While a regime might seek to compel its subjects to undertake such activities, coercion alone is usually not very productive.

Take the example of military conscription. An effective system of conscription requires a fairly substantial level of popular support for the regime that is ordering its citizens to serve. Efforts to conscript members of an unwilling or hostile populace are frequently met with evasion, resistance, and violence.
³
A well-known example is that of early nineteenth-century Egypt, where Mehmet Ali attempted to conscript peasants into his new national army without first inculcating in them any sense of national loyalty or obligation. The result was a high level of popular resistance. To escape conscription, families abandoned their homes and villages while entire regions rebelled against the government. Some prospective conscripts resorted to such tactics as gouging out their own eyes or amputating fingers so as to be unfit for military service.
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During the unpopular Vietnam war, few Americans of draft age resorted to such extreme tactics, but tens of thousands avoided service by using the courts to fight induction, decamping
for Canada, or seeking to document medical disabilities that did not require actual self-mutilation.

In order to build popular support against foreign foes, regimes at war often find it necessary to rely more on persuasion and less on brute force in dealing with their own subjects. Indeed, such regimes frequently offer their people concessions and incentives, sometimes including both material benefits and political rights, to induce them to work, sacrifice, and fight. Even despotic rulers like Stalin, when embattled, have made an effort to convince their truculent subjects that they are, in fact,
citizens
with a stake in the regime's survival. To put it another way, in order to facilitate their use of hard power abroad, governments will often turn to soft—or at least
softer
—power at home.

Of course, concessions granted during wartime might be retracted when the danger passes. Governments, however, often find it difficult to rescind benefits once they are granted. Take, for example, the case of women's suffrage in England. During the First World War, women (initially only those with relatives in the armed services) were given the right to vote for the duration of the war. By the time the war ended, though, the idea of revoking women's voting rights was hardly discussed.
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What begins as a temporary wartime concession can quickly become a permanent entitlement, vigorously defended by its recipients and by the state institutions established to organize and distribute the regime's largesse. Revocation of wartime benefits, moreover, is not without some risk. How many citizens will be willing to sacrifice for the next war if they are cheated of the rewards promised for the last one?

WAR MAKES CITIZENS

During the medieval and early modern eras, wars were fought by small feudal levies and professional or mercenary armies, and the funds to pay for military conflicts usually were borrowed from local or international financiers. Military logistics consisted mainly of looting and scavenging as the army made its way through the countryside.
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During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, especially in Europe, changes in the character of military force and international conflict substantially increased the costs and difficulties associated with the maintenance of national power, independence, and territorial integrity and gave rulers a strong incentive to attempt to enlist their subjects' active cooperation in the defense of the state.

To begin with, war and preparation for war became constant rather than intermittent facts of life during this century. Every European state found it necessary to construct a large standing army, which it maintained in a constant state of readiness to answer threats from other powers. In addition, every state began the creation of a reserve force that could be mobilized in time of crisis to augment its regular forces. Normally, all adult males were required to perform regular military service followed by service in the reserves, which typically included a period of military training each year. War and preparation for war had been intermittent—albeit frequent—features of European political life. Now preparation for conflict had become a permanent and full-time aspect of every state's existence.
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Citizen Soldiers

Second, the size of military forces increased dramatically at this time. In the mid-seventeenth century, the forces that could be mustered by, say, Prussia hardly numbered more than 40,000 men. Even at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1712, the size of the British army barely reached 75,000 men. Only France, the wealthiest and most populous state in Europe, could field more than 100,000 soldiers before the eighteenth century. Beginning with the French revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, though, the size of national military forces began to increase substantially. The Jacobin
levee en masse
of 1793 produced 300,000 volunteers and conscripts for the republic's armies. By 1813, Napoleon was able to draft some 1.3 million of his countrymen. He drafted another one million for the campaigns of 1813 and 1814. Napoleon's
Grande Armee
assembled for the Russian campaign
numbered 700,000 men. By the end of the nineteenth century, even these numbers were dwarfed by the standing armies of the major European powers. In 1874, the French standing army numbered some 1.75 million soldiers; the German army had approximately 3.5 million. By 1897, French forces including reserves numbered 3.5 million, and Germany fielded 3.4 million men. In World War I, the French were able to place more than three million soldiers in the trenches of the western front.

These huge forces, moreover, were mainly national armies. Prior to the eighteenth century, armies were composed of mercenary or forcibly impressed troops whose nationality was of little or no consequence. Armies were multilingual or multinational, held together by iron discipline and material incentives. But as the need to maintain permanent reserve forces impelled rulers to rely more heavily upon their own subjects to fill the military ranks, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the earlier multinational armies began to give way to more or less exclusively national forces. The construction of national armies, of course, was associated with the development of the idea that military service was a duty and an obligation of all male citizens.

Of course, even while most of Europe still relied on mercenaries and professional soldiers, the British colonies in North America were already fielding armies of ordinary citizens. England had urgent missions for its own professional troops elsewhere and consistently urged its North American colonies to provide for their own defense against the French in Canada, the Native Americans on the frontier, and the Spanish in the South and West. Later, colonial militiamen made up the bulk of Washington's army. Their short tours of duty reduced their military effectiveness, but the militia's enthusiasm for the cause sometimes made up for what it lacked in training and discipline. The colonies' part-time soldiers had other virtues as well. When they returned home they performed the vital service of holding their communities to the patriot cause, often by intimidation or violence, so that the Continental Army had continuing access to its recruitment base and to most of the food produced in the colonies.
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By the twentieth century, the major European powers as well as the United States were able to field enormous armies composed of a mix of conscripts and volunteers. America's army in World War I, for example, consisted of three million draftees and 700,000 volunteers. During the Second World War, ten million conscripts were inducted into the armed services along with five million volunteers. Another five million Americans were given deferments for work in war industries. Similarly, the British government introduced universal service in 1939, quickly conscripting 1.5 million men. In 1942, Britain began conscripting women, who were assigned to nonmilitary duties. Eventually, 3.2 million men were conscripted and another 1.4 million volunteered. The Soviet Union conscripted roughly thirty million men for military service in the Second World War and assigned millions of women to serve in defense plants.

Money

The expense of conflict increased substantially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Obviously, the permanence and increased size of military forces meant increased expense. The permanent maintenance of enormous standing armies and reserve forces required vast expenditures even during peacetime for food, pay, supplies, transport, and weapons. At the same time, technological advances in military tactics and weaponry, including artillery, communications, transport, and munitions, increased the cost of equipping an effective fighting force. Moreover, the industrial revolution made it possible for each nation—and thus necessary for all nations—to produce vast quantities of rifles, machine guns, field guns, and munitions. Early-modern states had relied upon a patchwork of taxes and borrowing, but these were wholly inadequate to finance the accelerating costs of war and preparation for war.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, European governments had little choice but to broaden their revenue base to the public at large. In addition to imposing income and poll taxes, states began to sell securities
in denominations small enough that ordinary citizens, not just bankers and financiers, might purchase them. These new mechanisms produced a steady and substantial flow of revenue. But in broadening the base for revenue collection, the state also enlarged the population whose loyalty and support it had to cultivate. With expanded taxation came demands for expanded representation and citizen participation, as well as increased stature for representative institutions.

These developments were similarly important in the United States. The United States began life as a nation with the sort of broadly based revenue system that European states reached only after centuries of trial and error. Local and state governments relied heavily upon ordinary citizens for their financial needs from the earliest days of the republic, making use of property taxes, poll taxes, and widely distributed certificates of indebtedness that circulated as currency in $1 or $2 notes. Reliance upon such certificates of indebtedness was one of the factors that forced colonial governments to pay attention to the views of ordinary citizens. If a government lost public confidence, its notes would no longer be accepted, and its ability to meet its obligations would be threatened.