A hundred years later the Chinese were using gunpowder to propel spears and various materials from a tube. A gun perhaps. By the 14th century, the Chinese were making so-called hand cannons, and the secrets had followed the silk road to Europe. The Ottomans were providing their infantry with crude, single-shot muzzle loaded guns by the year 1500. Guns were heavy in those days, but ships were less concerned with weight, so cannons had taken their place in naval warfare. And of course, since then guns have continued to decrease in weight and increase in power and speed of firing, until now we have operational multi - barrel machine guns capable of 6,000 to 10,000 rounds per minute.
And chemical power in other forms has led to such things as increasingly powerful explosives, supersonic aircraft, and indirectly, intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear “warheads”. (I put the word in quotes, because there is a strong school of thought that such things should actually be called nuclear bargaining chips, since if anyone uses them, they will be permanently ostracized).
Over time, advances in technology have made weapons both increasingly powerful and more rapidly and easily deliverable, and at the same time militaries have grown greatly. At the height of Napolean’s Grande Armie (the first great “citizen’s army”) in 1812, it contained some 600,000 soldiers. In the U.S. Civil war, over two million people served in the Union army alone. And both sides were plentifully equipped with cannons, rifles, and side arms. The result, as you nay know, was 620,000 deaths which represents the highest death toll of U.S. citizens of any wars in which the U.S. has been involved to date.
And the nature of battle has changed. War has gone from the close combat necessary when weapons were limited in range by people and animal power, to massed firepower of muskets and volley fire, to the stable slaughter of World War I trenches and machine guns, to the wider open tank and airplane battle in Europe in World War II, to the present “irregular” wars going on in the world right now. These wars, strangely enough, have certain resemblances to the U.S. Revolutionary War, except that in that war the U.S. were the irregulars, and the British the regulars.
World War II, sometimes thought to be an extension of World War I, very much raised the bar in what is now called collateral damage, and in the importance of industrial production. Wikipedia states estimates of civilians killed ranging from 38 to 55 million, and military dead from 22 to 25 million, and it is generally agreed that the allied win was based heavily on the ability to produce the weapons and other material necessary to conduct the war. An interesting book is Eagles of Mitsubishi: The Story of the Zero Fighter, by Jiro Horikoshi, the chief designer of the aircraft (University of Washington Press, I think now out of print, but available on the used book market.) It tells the tale of the Zero, originally undoubtedly the outstanding fighter in the world, but eventually doomed because of the production of large numbers of increasingly high-performing fighters by the U.S., while Japan was limited in industrial capability to compete (The U.S. produced 300,000 airplanes during the four years of World War II).
But since World War II, wars have been more limited and localized, and the winner (if any) more difficult to determine. It could be that our technology has advanced to the point where total war, at least as defined by Clauswitz doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps through historically heavily supporting the development of technology, the military has helped unlimited make war too potentially costly and all-encompassing to be used to solve international (or any other) disputes. More about this next post and then we will leave the subject of war.
As to whether weapons and other materials of war are good products or bad products, it obviously depends on whether the judgement is to be made by the deer or the hunter; the military sniper or the civilian pacifist; the Lockheed program manager or the Buddhist Priest; The question of the quality of a particular assault rifle is necessarily impacted by whether the person answering the question is strongly for or against the right of civilians to own them.
But since we in the U.S. are spending such an incredible amount of time and money on weapons and wars, we should at least be thinking more about what quality means when applied to products of industry used by the military—and what their availability to civilians and other countries should be. We are, after all, the world's leading exporter of arms.
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