September18, 2012:
Over a decade of war has brought forth hordes of journalists looking
for stories about what new technological wonders will see combat for the first
time and how the new gadgets performed. Part of this is driven by the
politicians, generals, and manufacturers getting behind some new weapon system
to insure its survival via successful combat use. There are always some new
items that have gotten a lot of publicity recently. But new military technology
usually faces hostile scrutiny from the media, which knows that the new stuff
always has flaws and bad news attracts more eyeballs and advertising dollars
than good news. Whenever a war comes along, there's always some new technology
waiting for its first combat test. And that is considered a potentially big
story, even if the new gear works.
But
there is very little really new military technology out there. What there is can
more accurately be called "perfected technology." By this is meant
gadgets that have been around for a long time, have been useful, and kept
getting better. Eventually, these ancient wonder weapons get really, really
good. They are perfected. But most people forget that they have been around in
more primitive versions for decades.
There are many examples of perfected technology, one of the more prominent examples being
the smart (or "guided") bomb. These first appeared 68 years ago,
during World War II. These first smart (radio controlled) bombs made a
spectacular debut, sinking many ships (even a battleship) and taking down bridges
with stunning (for the time) accuracy. A quarter century later, lasers were
used to guide the smart bombs and that was heralded as a new weapon. It
wasn't. Lasers had been developed in the late 1950s and that was a new
technology. Using lasers to make smart bombs more accurate was an improvement,
not a new weapon. By the 1980s, there were better night vision devices, which
also improved smart bomb effectiveness. But these were not new weapons.
However, they were pitched as new "weapons systems" in order to
justify the high cost of the night vision gear and all the new electronics
needed to make possible night operations by bombers dropping smart bombs. At
this point there were several ways to guide smart bombs. In addition to the
laser approach you could also choose a guidance system that had a TV camera in
the nose of the bomb, allowing the "weapons officer" on the bomber to
literally fly the bomb to very precise targets (even through a window).
In
the 1990s, more new technology, especially the Global Positioning System (GPS),
arrived and smart bombs became smarter still. Now all you had to do was insert
the GPS location in the smart bombs memory and the bombs GPS receiver would
provide the directions (of where the bomb was relative to the target) that
would guide the bomb to the target. At this point the smart bomb, benefiting
from five decades of improvements, became cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and remarkably effective. This was not new technology, it was perfected
technology. The same thing has happened to your TV set. The one you could buy,
when they first came out in the 1940s, was a lot more expensive, complex, and
unreliable than the one you can get today. The current TVs are "perfected
technology," not new technology, this despite the fact that today's TVs
contain several technologies that didn't even exist in the 1940s, like flat
screens and transistors.
Some
perfected technologies are seen more as tactics or procedures than gadgets.
Take the use of radio by ground troops to call in bombers or fire from distant
artillery units. Radios got small and reliable enough for aircraft use during
World War II. At that point the U.S. Army took the lead in developing
techniques for fighter bombers to work closely with ground units to find and
destroy enemy targets. At the time the air force belonged to the army, but
when the air force became a separate service right after World War II, the
degree of cooperation between warplanes and combat troops declined. The basic
problem was that the air force didn't want to just be a bomb delivery service
for the ground troops. This, however, didn't prevent U.S. Army Special Forces,
during the 1960s, from doing the same thing in Vietnam (going deep into enemy
territory and calling in air strikes on unsuspecting enemy troops) that they
did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and lots of other places. As radio equipment got
cheaper and more capable towards the end of the 20th century, it became
practical to equip more ground troops with radios that could communicate with
friendly aircraft overhead. The air force still insisted on all this
communications going through its own people on the ground with the army
troops. But it now became more practical for the army to make a strong case for
training some of its troops to handle this chore, as was the case during World
War II. What is making the army case more compelling is the increasing use of
smart bombs and the fact that a guy on the ground is still better at spotting
targets than someone six kilometers (four miles) above. This was convincingly
demonstrated in Afghanistan, where most of the bombs dropped were smart bombs. The
campaign in Iraq would see some 90 percent of the stuff dropped being smart
bombs. These are ten times more expensive than dumb (unguided) bombs, but if
you have a real target identified, the smart bomb is more than twenty times as
accurate as the dumb bombs. Plus you don't have to keep your bombers in the air
as long when delivering the smaller quantity of smart bombs. The air force
likes that, as their expensive aircraft last longer because of less wear and
tear.
The
air force has never been able to improve their target spotting (from the air)
as quickly as they have boosted the accuracy of their bombs. Actually, the U.S.
Air Force admits this and sees future warfare featuring tighter coordination between
fast moving, well trained (for spotting juicy targets) ground troops and smart
bomb carrying bombers above. Afghanistan proved that this approach could work,
even if it meant seeing the air force operating (in air force eyes) as a
subservient bomb delivery service for the guys on the ground. No matter, air
force and navy aviation publicists made sure everyone knew where the bombs were
coming from.
There
has been a lot of new technology in the last half century. Lasers have been
seening military use since the 1960s, and are still being perfected. Same with
night vision gear and microcomputers, which have been in military gear for over
twenty years and are spreading rapidly in military weapons and equipment. One
thing all this electronic gear is waiting for are "perfected batteries"
that are light and long lasting enough to power the equipment of individual
soldiers. So while smart bombs get perfected, other new weapons are developed
and start on the long road to perfection.