Defense Focus: Weapons evolution -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) -- In contrast to the stately, apparently leisured way long-range aircraft have evolved in their capabilities and weapons systems over the past half century, the evolution of land weapons systems appears more like life in a tropical jungle, with a bewildering number of weapons systems evolving or neutralizing each other and then being killed off in their turn, only to re-emerge in other conflicts, in a bewildering kaleidoscope of movement.

If one is looking at all kinds of war and weapons systems rather than just the pricey, high-tech ones that get all the publicity in the specialist journals, one has to conclude that in the second half of the 20th century the most effective killing weapons became less advanced by the year. It was like a mad gallop back to the Stone Age.

World War II was ended by fleets of state-of-the-art American submarines starving the home islands of Japan while unprecedented, pressurized long-range, high-speed Boeing B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers burned Japan's cities to cinders. The war was ended by the strategic impact of the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet in 1994 at least as many people were killed in Rwanda by being hacked to death with machetes as were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Other Third World genocides of the 20th century such as the Killing Fields of Cambodia in the late 1970s or the slaughter of around half a million to a million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1966 were also carried out with nothing more than knives.

Even when it came to modern weapons systems, without a doubt the most lethal weapon created by an industrialized society in the past 60 years in terms of the number of people killed has been the Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle.

The AK-47 is an ideal example of the kind of design and performance characteristics that mark the most successful examples of weapons evolution. It was developed or "evolved" by design from many previous, also excellent automatic weapons like the World War II German Schmeisser machine-pistol; it is simple in design, simple to maintain and look after and so simple to operate that untrained teenagers or illiterates can use it -- which explains why it has racked up such a huge death toll of victims in tribal conflicts around the world.

Even in terms of more conventional, large-scale guerrilla, or insurgency, wars, the "star" weapon of the early 21st century has not been any of the bewildering number of Future Combat System or other super high-tech ISR, C3 or UAV drones developed by U.S. defense contractors, but the simple improvised explosive device. That has proven a weapon with a strategic impact on shaping the nature of the war in Iraq. When caught in unfavorable circumstances, even state-of-the-art Abrams M1A2 Main Battle Tanks have sometimes been knocked out by them.

Like the AK-47, the IED is relatively low tech and does not require any operationally sensitive or unreliable electronics. It too is simple to manufacture and operate, and it too is the evolutionary offshoot of a long line of previous, also successful weapons. In weapons design and evolution, as in the breeding of dogs and race horses, bloodlines count.

That is not to say there is no place for advanced weapons systems in wars. As we have documented in many previous columns, nations without arsenals of combat aircraft, artillery and Main Battle Tanks remain sitting ducks waiting to be knocked over by other nations armed to the teeth with such systems.

But it does mean that the evolution of weapons systems in wars involves weapons for every different kind of war -- and that weapons systems and combat tactics essential for some forms of conflict may prove to be completely irrelevant for others.

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Next: Giantism as a dead end in weapons evolution