WARFARE GOES HIGH-TECH (4-2003)

During the early years of our nation’s history, if a man 
went to war there was a really good chance that he would 
come home dead, if he came home at all. When one went to 
battle, it was with the expectation that he probably would 
not return.

During the American Revolution, soldiers from opposite 
camps would line up in parallel rows on the battlefield, 
facing each other, while the first row of soldiers on each 
side would take turns shooting across the field at the 
enemy lines. If you were unlucky enough to be in the first 
few rows, you stood little chance of surviving.

The only thing you could take solace in was that if the 
first shot missed you, it would take your counterpart 
several seconds to reload. If you were a better shot than 
your enemy, you could use that time to gun him.

There were no aerial bombs in the American Revolution, the 
Civil War, or any war prior to the twentieth century. There 
were only bullets and canon balls. Bombs dropped from 
planes didn’t come into play until World War I.

The early bombs were far from “smart.” A typical World War 
II bomb was as dumb as a rock. All it could do was fall 
from a plane and follow the trajectory dictated to it by 
the laws of aerodynamics.

That is why we had to use a lot of them. And by a lot, I 
don’t mean hundreds, or even thousands, but hundreds of 
thousands. Hundreds of bombers would fly over enemy 
territory, dropping thousands of bombs. It was a statistics 
game: the more bombs you dropped, the more likely it would 
be that you would kill an enemy soldier or take out a piece 
of equipment. It was called carpet bombing for obvious 
reasons.

That all changed with the “smart bombs” employed during the 
first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91. The bombs used radar and 
lasers, along with their own propulsion system to seek out 
and strike a target within a few yards of bull’s eye.

But compared to the smart bombs of a decade ago, many of 
those being used in the current war with Iraq are 
absolutely intelligent. If the 1991 bombs had a high school 
diploma, today’s bombs are college graduates.

That’s because they not only employ lasers to guide them, 
some of them house their own self-contained laser guidance 
systems. And many use the latest in aiming technology, the 
GPS, or Global Positioning Satellites to guide them to 
within a few inches of their designated targets.

And it is not only the bombs that have gotten smarter. The 
entire spectrum of military equipment is now high-tech. Our 
soldiers can see as well under a dark, hazy sky at night as 
they can in broad daylight, thanks to infrared technology. 
And armored vehicles are now almost impervious to enemy 
fire, making them much better shelters than their 
predecessors.

All this high-tech warfare means that the battlefield is 
actually safer today than ever, although certainly still 
not exactly safe. After all, it’s still war.

But casualties of modern wars have certainly gone down. 
Compare the 383 battlefield deaths in the Persian Gulf War 
with the 47,000 fatalities in Vietnam, or the 295,000 
American deaths curing World War II.

But if war has gotten less dangerous for American soldiers, 
it may have gotten deadlier for our low-tech enemies. 
Compare the 100 or so battlefield deaths thus far in 
Operation Iraqi Freedom with the uncounted thousands of 
Iraqi troops that have been killed.

In fact, we typically lose almost as many soldiers to 
accidents and friendly fire as we do to the action of the 
enemy. And that may be the future direction in which smart 
weapons technology will develop.

In a future conflict we may employ devices that will be 
able to detect the signature of tiny transponders worn by 
every American GI and mounted on every piece of friendly 
equipment in the battlefield. Bombs and missiles will be 
programmed to avoid those friendly transponder signals.

On the other hand, there may one day be bombs that can zero 
in on an individual enemy, such as Saddam Hussein, even if 
we don’t know his precise location. In the future, a bomb 
may be able to remotely detect the DNA signature of any 
person we program in. Then we would just need to drop it 
somewhere in his vicinity and the bomb would seek him out 
and kill him.

We could have used such technology against Noriega in 
Panama, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and Hussein in Iraq. 

But, alas, we will have to settle for our college-educated 
bombs of today and hope that in the future, such high-tech 
search-and-destroy weaponry will make war virtually 
obsolete.