Fun with Gatling Guns

"Thank the Lord
That we have got
The Gatling Gun
And they have not"
Old British Proverb
I daily visit Mr. Free Market's fine blog, where one can experience one of the few outposts of classic British humor in a country that is falling apart. He provided this little morsel in his post on the Battle of Ulundi, the final battle of the Anglo-Zulu war.
This entry shifted my mind from its usual morass and into reflective mode. To-day's entry is on the subject of "innovations designed to save the world, but ended up making it vastly worse."
The first one up is, obviously, the Gatling Gun and later the Machine Gun. It was thought in the overly-optimistic Victorian era that a constant stream of lead directed at enemy troops would make war impossible, as casualty rates would be so enormous that armies could not function.
As we learned in World War I, armies would continually march into machine-gun nests despite horrific casualties. By World War II, armies had figured out that marching directly into the line of fire was a bad plan, so they developed doctrines such as those of suppressive fire and fire and maneuver. These neutralised the advantages of the machine-gun and made war relatively safe. Nowadays, nearly every soldier in every modern army carries some form of automatic weapon, yet casualty rates have gone down, not up.
A couple of other innovations designed to doom warfare were the magazine-fed rifle and the airplane. Instead, they've facilitated it, and allowed sides to engage in relatively greater safety because they can minimise exposure to enemy fire.
The modern mind, in my view, is a direct yet slightly twisted descendant of the Victorian world-view, like the Goth son of a football star and prom queen. Nowadays, while we laugh at the naivete of the Victorians, we count on a few of our own innovations to protect us from open war.
These innovations are the double team of nuclear weapons (including the doctrines of MAD and the like) and transnational organisations and international trade. We think that the scale balanced on one end with the tremendous costs of nuclear conflict (the result of open war) with the benefits of international trade and the power of treaties weighing strongly in favour of peace. We assume that it will prevent full conflict between industrialised powers. What we don't realise is that it will probably make it worse.
First, even if one does accept the value of nuclear arms as deterrent and the power of treaties, I'd argue that it merely forces people to find new forms of warfare that will end up being just as destructive as open armed conflict. This doctrine was published in the monumental Unrestricted Warfare, which asks questions such as "What is war?" To most of us, war exists when two sides start inflicting physical harm on one another.
Yet there are many ways to inflict harm. There's economic warfare- a stock market crash would destroy a nation just as efficiently as bombs without the messy problem of retaliation- if a nation's market crashes, it loses its financial resources and this its ability to retaliate in kind. It either has to risk military retaliation (which it can no longer afford) or sit in its newfound morass.
There's also the trend of involving civilians in war. One excellent strategy for electronic warfare would be to hijack computer systems that control the routing for trains &c. One could actually kill members of the population and, if it is done correctly, it cannot be traced. It could be used for wide-ranging destruction, economic and otherwise. Yet it leaves one blameless in the eye of the world.
Aside from the many new forms of war opened up by this, I think that these will be co-opted into future wars. Nuclear weapons don't have to be used to level cities in dramatic fashion- EMP from an upper-atmosphere burst will shut down an entire country of a considerable size. All one needs is a single nuclear weapon to accomplish that purpose. Furthermore, because a high-altitude detonation disrupts the ionosphere that is used to reflect radio communications and because EMP also effects satellites, this singular burst would delay or even prevent retaliation. Such an attack would cripple the economy, especially one so dependent on technology as the United States'.
In a tactical sense, it would in a moment neutralise the technological advantage held by US troops. The EMP would literally fry all of the electronic equipment our military depends on for its edge. The advantage would then lie with the side who is most familiar with the terrain and best able to exploit it.
As for transnational organisations and treaties, history has shown that they tend to make wars worse. Transnational organisations are obsessed with unity. This goes back to their earliest days. It reminds me of King Charles I of Great Britain, who dreamed of yoking England, Scotland, and Ireland together into one unified and harmonious realm united in every way and incapable of experiencing war. However, this meant that everyone had to follow a centralised programme that dictated the totality of life for all people in his realms. Religion was part of that, facilitated by the authoritarian Archbishop Laud. Charles' attempt at civic religion angered the Presbyterian Scottish Kirk, and they refused to obey by signing the National Covenant against him. This began the English civil wars. By attempting to shoehorn everyone into a unified realm, Charles guaranteed war. This goes to show that the English never have much luck with any King named Charles.
The same goes for treaties. Must I remind everyone of the alliance system that expanded World War I from a conflict between Serbia and Austria into a general European war?
As we can see, man's attempts to enforce peace have failed spectacularly. This demonstrates my theory that man loves nothing better than war. Like the unfortunate dieter, he tries to find ways around the self-imposed regimen that separates him from the object of his desire that he knows is no good for his body. It's time for a realistic self-assessment on man's part. Crash dieting isn't working in this case. The best solution would be to limit war by general convention and habit- common rules agreed on by all sides that limited the scope and damage to the willful combatants.
Will this happen? No, because war breaks out over things that matters, and man always is willing to pull out all the stops to win. It'll continue to get worse, and that's how it is. It's the flaw at the heart of human existence, and it is an irreparable fault.