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.35
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.36 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.37
CASUALTIES AND LETHALITY
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.38 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.39 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
Source: T. N. Dupuy, Evolution of Weapons and Warfare, 314.
Some specific historical examples help clarify this point. Until the Napoleonic Wars, the proportion of casualties (killed and wounded) to total effective forces using the system of linear tactics had steadily declined from 19 percent for the victors to 28 percent for the losers in battles during the Thirty Years’ War to about 9 and 16 percent, respectively, during the wars of the French Revolution.40 Napoleon’s use of column tactics forced him to reduce the dispersion of his forces when faced with the increased killing power of musketry and artillery,41 and his casualty rates rose to 20 percent. By 1848, however, dispersion had begun once again to surge and continued with each war over the next hundred years. The result was a decline in the number of soldiers killed per thousand per year. In the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces lost 9.9 soldiers per thousand per annum. For the Spanish-American War (1898), the corresponding figure was 1.9; for the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1902), 2.2; for World War I (1914–1918), 12.0; and for World War II (1939–1945), 9.0. Only during the Civil War, which saw many batt
les with massed formations thrown against strong defensive positions (a violation of dispersion), did the rates for the North (21.3) and the South (23.0 estimated) again begin to approach those of the Napoleonic period.42 The data show that barring incredible tactical stupidity, as lethal as modern weaponry had become and as intense as modern conventional wars can be, they generally produce fewer casualties per day of exposure than did the weapons and wars of the past.43
Table 1. Historical Army Dispersion Patterns for Units of 100,000 Troops
Studies of casualty rates from antiquity to the Korean War (1950–1953) reached the same conclusion regarding mortality rates.44 Given that weapons and tactics changed little from the times of antiquity through the Middle Ages, the data provided for the Greek and Roman periods are assumed to be roughly similar to that for later periods of antiquity prior to the advent of gunpowder weapons. Table 2 presents mortality data for various wars at different periods in history. For the armies of antiquity, long-range weapons included slings, arrows, and the thrown spear, while in the modern period they were limited to rifles. Clearly for armies of antiquity, close-range weapons were the most lethal. Factoring in the weapons’ lethality along the time dimension, the data demonstrate that although weapons became deadlier with each war, the mortality rates for each war tend to decline, with the highest found during wars of antiquity and the lowest rates in modern wars. Once again adjustments in tactics, mobility, and dispersion by and large offset the increased killing power of weaponry as far as their ability to generate casualties is concerned.
Table 2. Battle Mortality from Antiquity to the Korean War
In Virgil’s Aeneid (29 BCE–19 BCE), 96 percent of the wounds inflicted at short range by swords and spears were fatal. In Homer’s Iliad (about 750 BCE), the corresponding number was 93.5 percent. In modern wars, however, the effectiveness of short-range weapons—bayonet, rifle butt, knife—lost much of their potential for lethality precisely because the rifle’s range makes using these weapons with any frequency almost impossible. In World War II, for example, only 2.3 percent of the British Army’s casualties came from close-range weapons.45
What is intriguing from the perspective of the military surgeon who must treat the wounded is the change in the types of wounds that modern weapons have caused. Table 3 presents data from the Crimean War to the Vietnam War (1959–1975) on the distribution of wounds that long-range infantry weapons inflicted on various areas of the body. The data demonstrate that most of the combat wounds inflicted by rifle fire are to the upper and lower limbs.
One reason for this outcome is simply that as J. D. Hardy and E. F. Dubois have calculated, the upper limbs comprise 19 percent of total body area and the lower limbs 39 percent, or a combined 58 percent of the body’s area exposed to weapons’ fire.46 That these areas suffer the most wounds is hardly surprising; however, these rifle wounds are usually not fatal. In his study of combat casualties in the Crimean War, George H. B. MacLeod (1828–1892) shows that wounds to the upper limbs had a mortality rate of only 3.25 percent while wounds to the lower limbs produce an 8.05 percent mortality rate.47 From the 1960s until 1998 in Northern Ireland, British forces incurred only 0.26 percent fatalities from wounds to the limbs.48 Since Korea, body armor has become standard military equipment and has increased the rate of wounds to the unprotected limbs by reducing overall wounds to the trunk. Battle jackets reduce the rate of overall wounds by an estimated 30 percent.49 This figure may be too high. In the Israeli–Palestine Liberation Organization war of 1983, a war that saw many close order battles, Israeli military doctors believed that the overall casualty rate would have been 28 percent higher had Israel Defense Force troops not been equipped with battle jackets.50
In analyzing weapons’ lethality, clearly medical treatment makes a significant difference in lethality rates. Of course, a number of factors influence these rates, not the least of which is a modern army’s ability to deliver high-quality medical care and rapidly to the soldier within the battle area. Moreover, these conditions have largely been extant for less than a hundred years. Tables 4 and 5 present data drawn from the mortality rates of those wounded in a number of wars who received treatment in military hospitals for their injuries. Table 4, which covers the Crimean War until the Northern Ireland Troubles, includes the mortality rates of patients with gunshot or high-explosive fragment wounds to the head. Table 5 shows data for patients from various conflicts who suffered skull-penetrating injuries from the same projectiles. Despite the usual seriousness of these types of wounds, especially the latter, the data clearly demonstrate that the military medical services’ ability to deal with these injuries has drastically reduced their associated mortality rate over the years, offering unequivocal proof of the value of prompt and adequate medical care on the battlefield. The data in table 6, which shows the lethality rates for Americans wounded in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) to the wars in Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan (from 2001 and ongoing, as of this writing), support the same conclusion.51
Table 3. Anatomical Distribution of Injuries from High-Explosive (HE) Fragments and Gunshot Wounds (GSW)
Table 4. Mortality from Head Injuries from GSW and HE Fragments
In the 350 years since the early prototypes of the gunpowder armies first emerged on the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War, the destructive power of weapons and the organizational sophistication of armies have proceeded at a developmental pace without historical precedent. These elements are the products of larger social and technological forces that have revolutionized the manner in which humans live their lives. For more than 5,500 years of human existence in organized societies, or since ancient Sumer, the means and methods by which humans destroyed each other in war had changed little. But in the last 350 years they have changed so drastically that they would be literally beyond the imaginations of the soldiers and commanders who have gone before us. The advent of modern weapons can only be seen as among humanity’s most ingenious creations.
Table 5. Mortality from Penetrating Injuries of the Skull
Table 6. Lethality of War Wounds among U.S. Soldiers from the Revolution to the Afghan War
What has not changed are the death and pain that war has always inflicted upon its participants. The wounded soldier still bleeds, suffers, and worries that he or she will not survive his or her wounds. The psyche at the core of soldier’s humanity must yet endure terrorizing fear. The same anxiety that drove the ancient soldier to psychiatric collapse afflicts the modern soldier to an equal degree once shot and shell begin to fly.52 For most soldiers in combat, the risk of being driven mad by that fear remains the same as it was for those who stood at Marathon in 490 BCE. Humans remain as fragile as ever. Nowhere is this frailty more evident than in the hospital and surgical wards where, since earliest times, military surgeons have attempted to stem the tide of death and pain that has always accompanied war.
NOTES
1. See Robert Laffont, The Ancient Art of Warfare (London: Crescent Press, 1966), vol. 1, chapter 13, for an analysis of feudal armies as they related to the changing sociopolitical order.
2. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 168.
3. Richard A. Gabriel, Philip II of Macedonia: Greater than Alexander (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010), 62–69, for an analysis of the Macedonian phalanx; and C. W. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), chapter 5, for an examination of the Swiss infantry’s innovations to defeat cavalry.
4. See Richard A. Gabriel, Empires at War: A Chronological Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 3:957–63, for a detailed account of the Battle of Crécy.
5. T. N. Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 101.
6. Seigneur de Tavannes, writing in the sixteenth century, noted the impact of the pistol on cavalry when he wrote, “A cavalry battle which, in the past, would have lasted three or four hours and no
t killed ten men out of five hundred, has now become a murderous affair and the outcome of the battle is now decided in less than an hour.” Quoted in Laffont, The Ancient Art of Warfare, 443.
7. The innovation of horse artillery as opposed to horse-drawn artillery is generally credited to the Prussian king Frederick the Great.
8. Dupuy and Dupuy, Encyclopedia of Military History, 295.
9. Richard A. Gabriel, “The History of Armaments,” Italian Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Rome: Marchesi Grafiche Editoriali, 1990), 352. This work traces the development of military technology from Rome to the modern era.
10. Ibid.
11. Dupuy, Evolution of Weapons and Warfare, 131.
12. The fluted bayonet had a channel depression running down the side called the “gutrunner” that made the bayonet easier to extract from the victim’s body. The English seem to have been the first army to use this device in the battle at Culloden Moor, but the innovation’s origins are obscure.
13. Although the standard iron ramrod could pack the powder down with fewer strokes without breaking, as often happened with the wooden version, much of the increased rate of fire that resulted from the Prussian troops who first used this device was probably owed to their excellent discipline and training.
Between Flesh and Steel Page 5
