What Wins Wictory When Waging Wars

This is a takeoff of the general hostility to Wesley Clark’s position http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=685739&page=2

Specifically, the comment: “No, nations win because of how technologically advanced they are.” WC later went back and sort-of backed away from that position without backing away from it by listing numerous exceptions… which comprise a significant portion of all wars ever waged, so I’m not sure it’s a good argument. Because there was a certain challenge issued, I decided to take up that gauntlet and hurl it right back.

First, while technology is important, it not always or even usually the deciding factor in determining the outcome of wars. It is only one among many, and I will roll down and list the major elements as I can thing of. Some of these may seem familiar if you’ve read Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, though condensed here. You will note that technology isn’t even one of them, although it is an element of several.

The reason is that life isn’t like a video game. There are no “Tech Levels” and there is no “upgrading units” when you research Advanced Firearms VI (…mostly). Technology is a human solution to a social or physical problem which uses available materials, facilities, and knowledge. Technology cannot ever be more or less “advanced” - only more complicated or more practical. Advancement and progress are always human opinions and judgments about the state of things - never an intrinsic aspect of those things.

If I may be permitted to swear (once!) in GD, this is what I call “Fucking Star Trek Science,” because of all the times that Star Trek fell into the bad habit of instant-fix solutions which completely resolve a problem so that it need never be discussed again. Enemy has you hammered on the ropes? No problem! Just develop some counter-measure and his weapons are instantly useless! What, contradicting established canon and doing what’s explicitly impossible? Haha, that’s easy! Just use the tech to tech the tech while teching the other tech top the tech power - that solves everything!

Anyway, distraction halted, we can whine about bad television representations of science in CS, onto the meat.

(1) Geography. The physical organization of the landscape - and the understanding of how to exploit it, has and remains a massive factor in warfare. Even today, this is arguably THE key consideration in war and sets every conflict apart. Naval access, rivers, terrain, climate - these define how war is conducted in every nation on earth.

Note that geography in and of itself does nothing (unless you pull an Alexander and wipe half your army marching through a desert). Using it is the issue: technology can assist but technology is only a means, not the end, and can’t decide the war on its own. Later on in that thread Wesley Clark noted that European nations dominated many indigenous groups around Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The key factor in doing was one specific form of technology: naval development. The creation of reasonably fast, strong warships allowed Europeans to first get toeholds, then control whole coastlines, and then transport troops to get at the inland. But technology didn’t create the will or organization to create the ships or organize the expeditions: Rome, China, and several other nations did much the same with much more limited capabilities.
(2) Politics.

“War is the continuation of Politik by other means” - von Clausewitz

This is so widely recognized as to be trite, but it should be said anyway. War always has a political (or policy) purpose, even in small-scale tribes; it wouldn’t exist outside that purpose. The need for Kings to demonstrate power, the need for warlords to acquire land, the need for democracies to ensure a stabile trading network, even the need for idealists to remake the world - all cause wars and continue to do so. Likewise, war is frequently the result of a cruel prisoners’ dilemma where often the least bad outcome for at least one side to use physical violence.

This need not be rational to a viewer outside the group in question, because as they say, politics is all local. To the ruler or powerful politician, external war may be necessary to placate internal challenge or to stave off unrest. But because it requires significant internal support, war is rarely the expression on only the ruler’s whim.

Leaving that aside, political factors heavily affect the progress of a war. The nature of political systems on each side change how war is waged, how it can be ended, and who has to make the key decisions along the way.

(3) Military Organization. Not surprisingly, the nature of military organization affects the number and quality of troops, how they are armed, and how they fight. This issue is so large there’s no way I can adequately explain it all. Instead, let me give just a few examples of how American military organization affects how we fight.

*American troops tend to have high esprit de corps due to being volunteers, but won’t necessarily obey really stupid orders, or what seem that way to them. This won’t inherently mean disobedience - just very careful “interpretation”.
*American soldiers carry a lot of firepower at the lowest levels, and even very low-ranking soldiers can call in surprising levels of fire support.
*Decisions are pushed down, not up, the chain of command, and officers who don’t respect their NCO’s will learn the painful, hard way.
*Extreme physical and mental fortitude isn’t greatly valued; the concept of “fair play” just doesn’t make much sense. American soldiers would prefer to stand off and blow the holy hell out of an enemy without ever risking life or limb.

These traits are hardly universal, but they matter. These aren’t the result of technological advancement, but they impact it greatly. Then selection of what weapons we use and how we use them, from automatic rifles to nuclear missiles, reflects the character of military organization and the culture incubated there.

(4) Social Organization.

Not surprisingly, social attitudes and culture affect war, both in terms of the above

(5) Hardware and Production.

(6) Will.

Dang. I’ll try to finish tomorrow.

Your link doesn’t work, you wascally wabbit.

What winds?

The will to win combined with sufficient resources to win.

In WW2, Japan and Germany had the first but not the second.

Ever since Viet Nam, the USA has had the second, but not the first.

Have to politely disagree. Sometimes, tech does make quantum leaps. The tank, the airplane, radar, etc. “Advanced” and “more practical” can be the same thing. If my battleships have radar and yours don’t…and all other things are roughly equal…I’m probably gonna win.

The Alliance kicked Iraqi butt, in very large part because of technological advantages. (Also a huge training advantage…)

Training, technology, supply, are all force multipliers. They make a little army able to beat a bigger one. They’re damn fine investments!

Respectfully, you’re assuming what you set out to prove. This is what I would have gotten to under the Hardware section

A piece of technology is just a bit of metal or plastic. What makes it a worthwhile military tool involves the following:

(1) Is it rugged enough for battlefield use under plausible conditions? The German in WW2 had what were in many respects incredibly advanced engines - but they weren’t practical for any purpose.

(2) Can you actually produce (or purchase) enough of the item to make a significant difference? Many foolish people still dismiss U.S. tanks in World War 2 when comparing against German designs… forgetting that ten tanks you have now are infinitely better than one tank you’ll never see. This isn’t to say a relatively uncommon tool isn’t worthwhile; just that you can’t judge it by being extremely functional if nobody can ever use one.

(3) Can you fit a specific tool into your military doctrine? 17th-century Great Britain had constant need for ships. Austria did not, and they could have developed the most splendiferously awesome ships and it’d still be useless. On a simpler note, the U.S. military made a mistake with its rollout of the M-16 before it was ready to fully support the firearm, failed to train soldiers in the case of a less rugged (but still worthwhile) design, and didn’t teach the men how to use them in conjunction with other tools. The soldiers themselves ended up doing and demanding the above.

(4) After all is said an done, is it worth doing at all? There’ve been endless numbers of military tools which were incredibly neat and very effective, but which simply required more resources than were practical. The investment could go elsewhere more productively.

I did not, and would never, say that the development of technology is useless or not worthwhile. But we must distinguish between multiple steps and stages. Technology is a word which could refer to any of them, and there’s an ongoing filtering effect between them.

(A) Basic scientific knowledge. You don’t actually need this, but for some bleeding-edge designs, scientific knowhow may be required. At the very least, somebody out there has to do some basic research or note an odd but useful fact to design anything.
(B) Technical development. Just because theoretically there’s no basic scientific problem with doing something, you don’t auto-magically have a working prototype. We’ve been after fusion power for quite some time now and have made fairly minimal progress due to a lot of complex and unforeseen engineering challenges.
(C) Adaptation. You can make a basic design, but then have to refine and perfect it for the purposes at hand. Military gear often needs to be ruggedized, changed to meet needs that designers in a workshop didn’t even conceive of, and pass numerous inspections and dubious officers and politicians.
(D) PR. Fantastic - now you’ve got something a soldier might use. Now you’ve got to convince them to do so. more than one military tool, foundered on the fact that nobody could or would use it as intended.

I thought it just came down to not dying for your country, but making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Well, I was hoping that I was pointing to history as providing a lot of examples, of which I did mention a few as a kind of short cut.

I would consider all of these to be part of the word “advanced.” And, sure, there is a slight element of circularity here – just as in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” when survival is, by and large, what defines fittest. But, let’s face it, if I invent the best infantry rifle ever seen – and it weighs eighty-four pounds, I have not invented the best infantry rifle ever seen. The word “best,” like the word “advanced,” is negated if the particular features don’t actually fit.

Totally agreed. It’s all very evolutionary. The technology advances by small steps, and sometimes makes hideous blunders. These usually get discarded damn fast!

Way back in the 1970’s, I flirted with the “lots of simple, stupid, easy-to-make” weapons philosophy. The AK-47 is, perhaps, one of the best examples of this. I made the blunder of thinking it could be extended to tanks and aircraft. Big dorky oops on my part. Tanks and aircraft, with laser-guided weaponry, various degrees of automatic piloting, etc. etc. – bells and whistles – did turn out to be able to beat the living snot out of many times their number of simple, stupid, cheap-to-produce hardware.

Perhaps I am overcompensating in the other direction a little… Individuals, like militaries, tend to over-correct a little when they learn they were wrong…

What wins wars is either completely destroying the other side or getting it to accept that it’s lost. If it’s still fighting, you haven’t won even if there’s no other way for the other side to.

As for the technology stuff, I admit I have no idea.

What Wins Wictory When Waging Wars

God, Guns and Guts. :slight_smile:

I’m still struggling with this concept that there is no such thing as advanced technology. Are night vision goggles not advanced technology over the Mk 1 eyeball? Is Interceptor body armor not advanced, especially compared to an M1591 flak jacket?

There’s of course many reasons why winners win wars: resources, training, equipment (including technology), logistics, intelligence, battlespace, etc. I’m just puzzled by this hate for advanced weapons. It positively sounds like the pre-WWI notion that sufficient elan would overcome that bulky contraption known as the machine-gun.

Advancement implies that we have straight-line comparison, and that a given tool is “better” than another; that such improvement can be measured objectively. This is not the case, and never has been. Human technology is multifaceted. We often have numerous ways to accomplish a certain task. Quite frequently, technological competition is won not by which is more “advanced”, but by which is more convenient, which came first, or which has the best marketing budget. Or sometimes just changing preferences or slight variances in situations.

As an unimportant example: consider all the ways we can light up a computer screen: LED, LCD, Plasma, and that’s leaving aside sub-options such as AMOLED or IPS. There isn’t a way to directly compare them; you can’t point at one and say, this is “more advanced”.

No. Not even remotely. Night Vision goggles are a specialty assist which is useful in some conditions. It is most definitely not an advance over the human eye, as it’s completely nonfunctional without it. That’s like saying the sword edge is more advanced than the blade.

Not really. It’s more complicated and offers more protection. But depending on your combat doctrine, resources, and soldier preferences it may or may not be a good tool. Let me give an extreme example which may explain this. Armor drains a soldier. It makes you slower, bulkier, and exhausts you quicker. In some situations, it is an active hindrance. We might be able to build a mini-tank suit which was virtually invulnerable to anything short of an armor-peircing rocket, but you couldn’t move. Yet it might involve all kinds of “advanced” design. It would be a complete dead-end as a technology, though.

Don’t mischaracterize me, and do not read such nonsense into my post.

What offends me is the blind misunderstanding of technology. It is neutral; technology does not advance or pgress - we open up more options though improved development, and some of these will naturally be more useful, and some less so. Quite frequently an extremely simple, old-fashioned solution is the best way to go. But technology is only one aspect, and not the largest aspect, of how and why anyone wins a war. In a more general sense, the blind worship of technology in the abstract is something of a modern curse, always assuming that we will naturally “advance” and solve our problems.

John Wayne and/or Chuck Norris win wars

Nonsense. Improvements in technology by definition lead to quantitative, measurable results. The improved technology in the M4 can be measured over a musket in weight, range, accuracy, speed of fire, reliability, etc. It’s also advanced at a more… philosophical level, because we know that the M4 never could have been manufactured earlier in history.

Asking whether LED or LCD is better for a particular room is not a question of whether one technology is more advanced. Both technologies are obviously more advanced than cathode ray tubes, and measurement can prove that. Some technologies are better suited for different applications, of course. But you can’t say that LCD technology has not advanced because it doesn’t function well underwater, in a volcano, and may be slightly sub-optimal in certain lighting conditions.

How night vision goggles don’t count as advanced technology because they need eyeballs to work pretty means there’s no such thing as technology, period. Archimedes water screw? Not technology, because a human still has a build it.

Who gave you the idea that advanced technology is perfect in all regards? Nobody is arguing that. An F-22 is more advanced than a P-51, but costs way more. So what. That doesn’t mean an F-22 isn’t “advanced technology.”

I think your position is bordering on nonsensical, because you seem to take a mild annoyance (technology as being a deus ex machina in Sci-Fi TV shows) and turn it into a philosophical point that there’s no such thing as advanced technology. It’s the opposite of a reductio ad absurdum – you’re not reducing an argument to the absurd, you’re expanding it to the absurd.

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

A solid and reliable logistics supply chain is critical. The lack of it pretty well killed Russia in Afghanistan, and the US is not doing a lot better. German troops could have made it through several Russian winters given enough fuel, blankets, warm clothes and hot food. The US inability to stop traffic on the Ho-chi-min trail is a big part of the lack of success in Viet Nam.

It is why code breaking is such an important part of the Allied victory in WW-II. It was the key to moving material across the Atlantic. Once we were reading the Wolf Packs’ mail, their success rate dropped and so their support among the German command.

As Japan expanded across the Pacific, it became increasingly harder to supply and support it’s far flung troops. Not any easier for the US, but we had vastly more resources to pour into the effort. Well before the end of the war Japan was being limited by labor, fuel, and raw materials.

Note that logistics support is far easier for the home team. Material only needs to be moved short distances, and much of the infrastructure is already in place…like housing for example. Any invading force has to overcome this huge advantage. It is what makes fighting an insurgency such a bitch. The only way to interrupt the enemy’s supply line is by destroying infrastructure and making sure all the locals hate you enough to join the insurgents.

I think it depends on what, where, and for what cause.

Technology can be a huge factor, but there have been occasions when it’s not been sufficient. Communications and logistics, possibly, would be a subset (or at least a partially subsumed category) of technology.

Consider the first Afghan War fought by the British in the early Nineteenth Century; technologically superior British, with plenty of wealth, confident and well-trained soldiers, but attacked a ragtag country of very proud martial tribes with a knowledge of the land. The British were cut off and pursued back to India until only one man escaped.

Technology does not advance. It expands.

Science advances. There is a hypothetical state of understanding how everything in the universe works and can work. There is an implicit end goal for science: the understanding of all physical, chemical, atomic, subatomic, gravitic, etc forces and how they affect or alter the environment.

Technology does not do so. It is a pragmatic and temporary solution created to meet specific needs localized in time and space, within an available resource solution set. There is no goal in technology; any concept of advancement is solely a human judgement.

This is my point: by choosing your measurement scale, you create whichever outcome you want. What, specifically, about Cathode Ray Tubes makes them “less advanced” than LED’s? Because, frankly, I’m not hearing actual arguments. It’s emotion so ground into the fiber of how you look at the world that it substitutes for fact.
back to the overall thrust fo the post, I’ll get to the subject of Will later today.

You’re not going to win this one.

CRTs take more power. They take up more space. They’re heavier. The display of different screen resolutions is more difficult with CRTs. CRTs are more expensive to produce for the same screen real estate than LEDs.

There are perhaps only a few metrics for which CRTs might possibly be preferable.

One way CRTs might be preferable is that the technology is somewhat simpler to implement from scratch than LEDs. Of course, a rock from the ground is a much simpler weapons technology than a sword, so that may not be saying much.

“Choosing” measurement scales is pointless. You have to go out of your way to find one for which CRTs are superior.

At any rate, I came out hugely AGAINST the concept of “will” as decisive factors in winning wars. While the side with vastly superior technology may lose their “will” and stop fighting a war, they will rarely outright lose one militarily, even if it loses politically or logistically.

I think that often, the latest gee-whiz technology is either insufficient or not the most important factor.

For instance, I would argue that all the cumulative technologies involving food, taken together, is hugely important factor in the effectiveness of armies. Most importantly because we can feed enough people to be in an army rather than spending all their time growing food. Even without any arms or armor from the Renaissance forward, any major power in World War II would still beat any medieval European army, mostly on army size alone (combined with better indoctrination and training which would enable them to fight on even when sustaining a Tiger-versus-Sherman like casualty rate from the battle hardened hand to hand fighters.)

And of course speaking of training, you have to be trained on how to use the high tech equipment to begin with. America has a head start in this, both in World War 2 when we had a lot of experienced mechanics and car drivers to pull from, and now when we incorporate video-game like controls into our war fighting machines.

But given equal access to infrastructure and training, having a better technology will quite often make a difference between a winner and a loser in war, as the copious examples in the thread show. I’ll add the nuclear bomb and Japan. Once we “unlocked” the nuclear bomb tech (requires “bomber” or “missiles”) it was all over.