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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: technology

The Culture of Military Innovation

04 Sat Feb 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Culture of Military Innovation

Tags

firepower, Inventing Accuracy, lethality, marksmanship, Matthew Ford, NATO, rifle, technology, The Machine at Work, Weapon of Choice

weapon-of-choiceFord, Matthew. Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and The Culture of Military Innovation. London: C Hurst & Co Publishers, 2017. 256 pp.

The sheer complexity of modern military equipment has made it very difficult for the average person to understand the nuances of its design. This has inevitably, invited a sense of technological determinism in most public conversations about military procurement, again, making the headlines only when expensive, high-end, and alluring weapons such as fighter jets are involved. In this climate, Matthew Ford’s Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation is a welcome and much-needed reminder of how much social conditions influence technological choices. Focussing on the evolution of the rifle in Western, primarily the British and American militaries, from 1900 to the present day, Ford uncovers a fascinating tapestry of weapons development involving soldiers, bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and politics.

Weapon of Choice takes after the seminal work of Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar, The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization, which challenges the notion that some inherent design property within a machine dictates the capacity of the technology and gives the device its eventual value. Instead, the desirability of certain design properties is shaped by the interaction of several variables most of which are not technical. Grint and Woolgar themselves continue the path-breaking work of Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, which argues for accuracy as a social process that can even be uninvented. Not only does such iconoclastic scholarship dispel the myth of technological momentum, it also opens the possibility of feedback from lower down the technical hierarchy – in other words, bottom-up history.

Ford organises his chapters by the different groups that have shaped the evolution of small arms. He starts with hat-tip to epistemology and discusses the academic literature on the social shaping of technology. Various theoretical frameworks are analysed as the author moulds his own and prepares the reader to understand the social contours of military innovation as these theories keep reappearing in later chapters. Readers will appreciate that the professional jargon has been kept to a minimum and the argument flows smoothely. Ford begins the actual discussion on military innovation with the infantry. The design of a gun, we are informed, has always been a delicate balance between marksmanship, firepower, willpower, and stopping power. These choices reflect upon the the weight and cost of the rifle and the tactics of individual soldiers and units. As the various battlefields of the British empire yielded varied experiences, soldiers had different expectations from their weapons; standardisation across the army would not be easy.

While engineers struggled to accommodate the contradictory views of soldiers and the fixed, if old-fashioned, views of senior officers in defining the range of technical possibilities that would address the problems of the battlefield, scientists were locked in a debate about lethality. To the layman, this might seem simple: enough wounding capacity such that the fallen enemy would not stand up again. However, it was too easy to design weapons for overkill. The objective of the scientist was to design ammunition that had just enough power to kill, thereby making the most efficient use of national resources. It is not difficult to imagine the differences of opinion between countries here: those dependent on imported war material, such as Britain, designed frugally, while countries like the United States that were not restrained by such constraints were less bothered with the new science. This is not to say that US planners did not understand the benefits of such considerations but merely that they did not necessarily feel compelled to adopt its principles. Although a rule of thumb had been accepted since the 1880s that the muzzle energy of a bullet should be 58 ftlb or higher to cause death, there were long debates on the merits of kinetics versus calibre. Yet given the different levels of vulnerability of various body parts and splintering of shells, killing remained at best a probabilistic calculation than an absolute one. Ford’s skillful narration of the conundrums faced by the technicians passes their sense of frustration to the reader.

There have been entrenched bureaucracies in the war industry long before Dwight Eisenhower warned of the rise of a military-industrial complex. These exerted influence over their national governments to advance their military designs over those of foreign states and bureaucracies. Of course, such considerations were not merely about profits but also reflected their thinking on the philosophy of arms and ammunition. Weapon of Choice dwells on the tussle in NATO between the British EM-2, the American T65, and the Belgian FAL rifles in the early 1950s to show how far removed some of these debates could get from purely technical considerations. An important development at this juncture in history is the entry of scientists into policy-making as weapons were becoming too complicated for policy makers to understand. Yet treaty obligations, economics, and other factors curtailed the power of the technical class to leave their imprint upon military procurement.

Ford makes a compelling argument that military innovation is not all about technology but also about cultural values. He shows that scientists cannot answer socio-technical questions reliably on their own, implying that decisions about technology are actually framed by cultural values. One particular strength of Weapon of Choice is that it looks at the entire spectrum along which choices can be made: from the politicians and bureaucracy at the top to the soldiers at the bottom, as well as scientists, engineers, and senior officers from the middle out. This last group is Ford’s unique and valuable contribution to the growing field of social history of technology. The conclusions, however, should leave the reader more worried about the veracity of technical claims and effectiveness of more expensive weapons systems being inducted into the military.

However, one wonders if too much is not being made of the social dimensions of technical choices. Any engineer should be able to understand that an optimal design may not necessarily be suitable given resource constraints, and keeping those in mind, the best sub-optimal weapons design can hardly be considered a sleight of hand in the technological narrative. The military is a social organism as is the political apparatus; decisions made therein are bound to reflect social norms and cultural values. Do these necessarily shape technical choices made in the midst of design? Probably not. Ford is absolutely correct that socio-cultural conditions and values affect our decisions about technologies adopted. Yet there remains a realm of the purely technical that, too, functions within the socio-cultural ultimately but retains its purity of purpose. For Ford, that does not matter for it carries no social consequence.

One cannot help but wonder what would a similar work on the military-political complex of non-Western state look like? Would it have its own socio-cultural quirks? Or would the adoption oaf Western ideas of efficiency, time, and space – modernity – be reflected? It is a pity that most such states do not afford the level of access Ford has enjoyed in researching his project.

Weapon of Choice is a refreshing look at how weapons are designed and inducted that is well-written with something for everybody – to the interested layman, Ford offers a new way of understanding military procurement; to the historian, Weapon of Choice adds the important middle to the top-down/bottom-up debate; and to the military man, there is much food for thought. There is no aspect of our activities that is not touched by our values; to essentialise certain strains may answer questions in a limited context but would ultimately paint an incomplete picture. Ford’s Weapon of Choice is a thought-provoking and eminently readable book that should not be missed.

 

Disclaimer: The reviewer and the author of this book were fellows at West Point together.

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The Greatest Empire of Them All

19 Tue May 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ Comments Off on The Greatest Empire of Them All

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Abbasid, Achaemenid, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Chalukya, Chola, culture, economy, empire, Gupta, Khmer, Kush, literature, Maurya, military, philosophy, Rome, Satavahana, science, Sumeria, technology, territory, Venice

Who was the greatest empire of them all? Ask a dozen people that question and you will get a baker’s dozen answers! Of course, everyone has their favourites and it is hard to accept that there were any shortcomings in our precious darlings but how does one go about bringing even a semblance of objectivity to the discussion? What are the criteria by which one might evaluate empires?

Almost every discussion on this topic starts with a comparison of military might. “Rome dominated the world,” someone would say. “Surely, the irresistible onslaught of the Mongol horde is something to be feared,” someone else would counter. “Agincourt!” blurts out the incorrigible Anglophile. “Waterloo,” they grin further as the Italo-Gallics imperceptibly roll their eyes at those “northerners” who did not even learn to take a bath daily until well into the 19th century. “But what about Alexander the Great?” squeaks the lonely classicist.

Two things immediately stand out in this conversation: first, this is still a largely Western conversation without any serious inclusions of Eastern empires. One wonders if the Mongols would have made the list had they not invaded Poland and threatened Central Europe. Second, what exactly is an empire? Is it defined merely by size or does it consider the nature of the political, social, and economic relationship between the conquerors and the conquered? Before I kill all the fun in this exercise, I will just state that the way the ancients understood empire was through political fealty and allegiance: weaker kings and chiefs would swear oaths of loyalty to an emperor and send annual tributes in exchange for their continued local rule. This worked well for the emperor too in an era where difficulty in communications and travel meant that authority and distance from the imperial capital were inversely related.

Does the size of an empire contribute to its greatness? If so, the British were the greatest empire ever. This same yardstick would also knock Rome out of the Top 25 and cede greater importance to Brazil than to the Achaemenid, Mauryan, or Mughal empires. Clearly, territory is important but not all-important; after all, one hardly refers to Israel as an empire for its dominion over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By the same token, population, economic wealth, and raw military power are complicated indicators because later empires will always have an advantage with regard to these features. Even comparing contemporarily, there was hardly any technological difference between the Romans and the Greeks at Asculum or between the French and the Austrians at Austerlitz. While these indicators do matter in a broad sense, they are of little use when differentiating among an already elite group of empires.

Related to size is duration. How great is an empire, really, if it collapses even before the ashes of its creator have cooled? Alexander the Great comes to mind here, for he shaped an empire in 13 years that did not last as many months after he was gone. However, in that short yet intense period, Alexander did as much to spread Greek influence around the known world as the many great kings and philosophers before him. How can an empire leave its mark on history if it lasts but for a fleeting moment? If duration is the primary criterion, Rome would undoubtedly reign as the primus inter pares of empires – even though considered an empire only after the fall of the republic in 27 BCE, Rome was among the mightiest powers around the Mediterranean since the 3rd century BCE. From this early date, it lived on in some form or another, until the collapse of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 – almost 1,700 years. Yet survivability is also an imperfect measure – who remembers the Kush in eastern Africa that lasted for nearly 1,400 years? Or how seriously are the Venetian and Holy Roman Empires taken, both of which lasted about a thousand years?

Surely culture must have a role to play in how empires are remembered and evaluated? After conceding the approximate criteria of size and duration, does culture offer a better yardstick by which to measure empires? This is a complicated question, for it immediately raises the question of who does the remembering. There is no doubt that the more popular Romans and Abbasids built great empires but in what cultural way do the Cholas or the Guptas fail to measure up to them? Memory depends on where one stands; for Europe, Greece was the cradle of civilisation but to people further east in Sumeria, Iran, and India, Homer and Aristotle were relatively late to the game. Should we judge an empire by how much cultural influence it wielded in its own time or should the measure be how much of it trickled down to the present? Do Rome and Greece not have an unfair advantage in that their influence was carried forth since the 1500s by the bayonets of those who wished to claim their lineage than by the merits of their own empires? In other words, had India colonised Europe in the 1500s, would the referent empires not have been the Harappans, Guptas, and Cholas? How much sense does it make to tear these cultures out of their historical context and evaluate them clinically for their contributions to humanity?

There is also the problem of making sense of the contributions each civilisation made to human knowledge. If utility is considered, we run into problems with Indian science which offered remarkable explanations of the natural world but did not always translate into technology. The same could be said of the metaphysics of Aristotle by a modern atheist. Another consideration, veracity, is of little help either. Modern states and empires will always have an advantage over older ones because the nature of discovery and invention is such that it builds on earlier work. A millennium down the road, our descendants might consider our lifetimes a total waste because so many of our theories might have been disproved by then. Influence is perhaps a better measurement, however imprecise: Parmenides and Aristotle laid down the framework in the West of how science and philosophy ought to be done. Many of their theories were not challenged until the 1500s, some even as late as the 1800s. The Greek plays are still used as metaphor to capture complex human emotions and characteristics in an easily understandable way. Similarly, the power of Sanskrit and its literature over Indian writing was enormous until the Raj systematically dismantled native systems in favour of creating brown Englishmen.

Given a threshold military capability and size, an empire, then, is made great by its science, philosophy, and culture. Monuments are usually good indications of an empire’s achievements for they at once represent wealth, administrative acumen, and technical and aesthetic brilliance. Neither Abu Simbel nor Ellora nor Angkor Wat could have been built by, to use a modern term, failed states. This also supports the idea that as a thinking species, humans find greater value in the higher pursuits than in crude physical strength. The greatest empire, then, is one that is closest to – forgive the borrowing of the atrocious phrase – “having it all.” With these criteria, who do you think is the greatest empire of them all?


This post first appeared on Swarajya on May 28, 2015.

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The Stuff of Empires

08 Tue May 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Europe, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

capitalism, China, Christianity, empire, Europe, ghost acreage, globalisation, history, ideology, imperialism, India, technology, Third World

For most of recorded history, the glorious empires and fantastic kingdoms existed outside of Europe. China, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, and Persia, cradles of civilization as it were, dominated the known world. The myths and legends of their riches and produce inspired many Europeans, from Alexander the Great and Marco Polo to the 21st century tourist, to visit these lands. However, most of these once splendid lands are today the bulk of the Third World. Why? What propelled Europe to the forefront and caused these former powers to recede? This is not a new question – it has troubled historians for a long time. Even during the height of imperialism, especially during the height of imperialism, much was written about what made Europe supreme. While this is too vast a topic to engage in with any detail on a blog, it would nonetheless be a fruitful venture to look at some recent scholarship on the topic and discuss some of the theories.

Daniel Headrick, author of The Tools of Empire, asserts what may probably be the most visible reason for Europe’s rise to power. He argues that empire required not just motives, but also the means to do so. Earlier, European conquests of non-Europe were at best temporary and haphazard. Local rulers soon displaced their European masters (e.g. Alexander) and Europe’s hegemonic grip was lost. Later, by the nineteenth century, European superiority in technologies of war gave European armies a decisive advantage over their local counterparts, usually at great cost to native armies in terms of lives. An example the author gives is of how English armies at the end of the eighteenth century, during the Mysore Wars with Tipu Sultan, could easily face armies six to seven times their size. By the time of the Maratha wars, however, that had reduced to twice their size, and by the Sikh wars in the middle of the nineteenth century, the armies were more or less equal. Indigenous people had absorbed European organizational skills and technology, and were rapidly catching up with European armies. At this point, however, Europe gained a decisive advantage not to be lost again, with the advent of picric acid, machine guns, and dumdum bullets. Headrick’s argument is that technology allowed non-Europeans to achieve parity with Europeans for a short time before they fell behind again. This should clearly demonstrate the role of technology over anything else. Ideology (e.g. Christianity), as in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and to a certain extent, the seventeenth centuries, were unable to achieve the same spectacular success of later years.

Headrick divides the “tools of empire” into three categories: the first is the steamship, which allowed the Europeans to explore greater parts of the globe and penetrate the coasts of Asia, Africa, and South America beyond the scant few miles they had been able to do so for a long time on foot. The second category is that of military technology: better guns, explosives, and organizational/topographical skills allowed Europeans to muster firepower where and when they wanted it in concentrated bursts to produce decisive victories. Europeans knew not only how to make faster loading rifles, machine guns, and stronger steel, but also understood the applications of cartography to war-making. The third category Headrick discusses is communications. As communications improved, with the laying of underwater cables, railways, and steamships, news traveled faster around the world, and with their advanced transportation, gave the British the ability to respond in weeks when it would have taken years. However, Headrick does not take into account entirely that all that he has mentioned falls into one larger category, namely, tools of conquest. Empire was far greater an exercise than the defeat of a few native armies. The ability to hold territory without constant use of force was also required. When even a relatively small mutiny (as in the case of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857) occurred, it broke the British East India Company and the Crown had to step in. Thus, knowledge, if not ideology, served a critical role to keep locals under control. Admittedly, the author admits that as means were made available, motives changed. However, perhaps the converse can also be argued – as motives changed, there was a greater impetus to make means available.

In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas furthers this idea that technology had a larger role to play in imperialism than it is usually given credit for. Unlike Headrick, Adas accepts that ideology may have been a motive for early European expeditions, to bring the “lost peoples of the world” into the fold of Christianity. However, this changes with time, and European discourse about themselves and their relation to the conquered peoples begins to focus on technology rather than ideology. Countering the argument by some scholars that race was also a crucial element in imperialist ideology, Adas explains that racism was not a factor in imperialism, but may have grown out of technological dominance. Adas cites thinkers like J.S. Mill and F.W. Farrar who argued that technological marvels were proof of British superiority and extrapolates from this that non-European inferiority was not necessarily seen as inherent. Here, Adas makes a masterful distinction between science and technology – Europeans could not explain the evidence for high science in ancient India, nor could they account for maritime charts the Indians and Chinese possessed that were initially superior to European charts. Thus, Europeans argued that rather than science, its useful application to serve human needs is evidence of superiority, for knowledge can be gained by patient observation but not everyone possessed the creative spark to harness that knowledge into something useful for humankind. In the application of knowledge, non-Europeans were obviously lacking. Furthermore, the acceptance by local elites that there was a need for their culture to “modernise” would seem to vindicate European views. Unfortunately, Adas does not take into account the new trends in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century that brought race into vogue. With Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Europe became more and more fascinated with race and purity. It is unlikely that this did not bleed into their thoughts on imperial thinking. Indeed, as other scholars have shown, most notably Thomas Trautmann in Aryans and British India, Europeans wove intricate myths of race that dominated their thinking. The best known example is the Aryan Invasion Theory, that of a master, Aryan race that was prevalent in India (and hence the sophistication on ancient Indian civilisation), whose purity was destroyed by mixing with the local Dravidians (and hence the decline). As Ann Stoler has convincingly argued in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, race became the yardstick by which imperial booty was distributed – as more and more natives learned European tongues, mastered Western technology, and converted to Christianity, it became harder for Europeans to justify their rule over their conquered subjects. Race proved to be the ultimate divider between East and West.

Another school of thought has looked at the implications of science and technology in other fields, primarily economics. It has been argued that European monetary systems and free trade were the motors of European domination. Simply put, Europe became richer, and hence could afford greater armies and spend more on research. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, discusses the impact of capitalism on imperialism. First of all, he makes a much-needed distinction between a capitalist world market and a capitalist mode of production – a capitalist world market, if taken to mean commodity exchange, could have been said to exist from the times of cavemen perhaps. The capitalist mode of production, however, was the essence of capitalism as we know it. Surplus extraction and homogenised and quantified labour (labour as commodity) were uniquely European, he argues, which propelled Europe to the forefront. This should not, the author makes clear, ignore the many non-European actors in the world market. Workers from all parts of the globe – forced labourers, independent merchants, entrepreneurs, mercenaries – all participated in world economy. The mercantile activity that was forced upon various regions expanded the scale of markets in size, consumption, productivity, and profit, but this disrupted traditional social relations in many parts of the world and brought together disparate social groups into the capitalist trade network. What is not focussed on entirely is how unequal relations between European traders and their local counterparts impacted imperialism – did this cause resistance, or were the locals co-opted into imperial discourse? In a way, the author argues that imperialism is therefore inherent in capitalism not a final stage of it as was argued by Lenin.

Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, a remarkable success even in the non-academic community, puts forward another argument about the economic underpinning of Great Power status. He attempts to show a distinct link between economics and strategy, and in the process, his argument begins to look like a mixture of modernisation theory and economic determinism. His main point, however, is that it is relative power that matters, not absolute. This would then open the door for an argument that the East did not necessarily decline, but the West rose faster than the empires of Asia and Africa. Furthermore, Kennedy argues that a fine balance is required in expending resources on economic development and building up a military. The West was better at achieving this than India or China, and hence, although vast riches were found in India, the Indian princely states were relatively easy to coax out of their wealth. The weight of the argument here for Europe’s rise is obviously carried by a realist, economic-military materialism that does not take into account the tremendous impact of the organisational abilities of the nation-state or the seduction of ideology.

In perhaps the latest trend in the historiography of the question of Europe’s rise, Kenneth Pomerantz’s The Great Divergence offers a radically different view from the above authors. With more information on the East, particularly China, Pomerantz attacks the notion that the East, by the 16th century, had stagnated economically or socially. Pomerantz strongly asserts that in fact, in many areas, Asia was ahead of Europe. China for example, produced more iron that England did at the height of the industrial revolution. In many other criteria for “advanced” civilisation such as birth-rates, infant mortality, variety of goods in the market, and calorie intake, Pomerantz demonstrates that Asia was equal to if not ahead of Europe. In perhaps the greatest divergence from historiography, Pomerantz plays down the role of coal in Europe’s rise to hegemony. The traditional argument has been that land was scarce in England, and trade and colonies in the New World, ghost acreage, alleviated some of the pressures on land use. Pomerantz counters this, by arguing that land was not at all scarce in China, and therefore, China had access to resources without the need for colonies.

Pomerantz’s greatest failure is that in his obsession to show economic parity, he has ignored political and social institutions such as the nation-state, universities, and multi-national money-lending institutions. He is content to argue that it was serendipity that Europe discovered the New World and the resources acquired from there propelled Europe ahead of Asia. Due to China’s sudden decision to use silver as currency instead of paper, large sums of money were wasted in monetisation of the Chinese market when they could have been used on other value-added commodities. Unfortunately, Pomerantz ignores the multiplying effects of these events, and in turn, his argument is unaware of the slow progress of European technology until the 1800s when Europe suddenly seems to spurt ahead.

The question of Europe’s rise to world domination is truly complicated, and it is unfair to be overly harsh on any of the above excellent authors. Imperialism in itself is a difficult concept to precisely define, let alone the relative rise and fall of imperialism in different parts of the globe. Additionally, it is silly to try and explain an event as complicated as Europe’s rise, an event that has taken place over centuries, monocausally. Thus, all these authors have their place in historiography. However, it seems that although technology played a large part in creating empire (it is difficult to separate Europe’s rise and imperialism given the numerous and strong connections between them), it had less to do with retaining it. Ideology has much to do with imperial control, ambitions, and demise, as nationalism has proven over the last century. The impact of using technology as an ideology (the discourse of technology rather than actual technology) has perhaps had a greater effect on natives than the threat of bigger guns. Discourses of lack, decay, and failure continue to have effect long after the scars of the millions of deaths due to famine, epidemics, and bloodshed caused by imperialism have healed.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty states in Provincializing Europe, it is exceedingly difficult to talk outside of a European framework in studying non-European history. Europe is a hyperreal entity that dominates our discussions, and it is hard to not fall into the trap of thinking, “first in Europe, then elsewhere.” This is the lasting legacy of Europe’s rise – its ability to dominate discourse long after its military power has waned. Europe’s rise owes much, to be Gramscian, to its ability to control the site around which conflict rages, thereby giving it hegemony. This is the reason ideology seems to be the cement that holds technology and economics together.

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