War has changed.
On the military level in Western Civilization in the twentieth
century the chief development has been a steady increase in the
complexity and the cost of weapons.
When weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost
anyone can use them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up
of large masses of amateur soldiers.
Such weapons we call "amateur weapons," and such armies we might
call "mass armies
of citizen-soldiers."
The Age of Pericles in Classical Greece and the nineteenth
century in Western Civilization were periods of amateur weapons and
citizen-soldiers.
But the nineteenth century was preceded (as was the Age of
Pericles also) by
a period in which weapons were expensive and required long training
in their use.
Such weapons we call "specialist" weapons. Periods of specialist
weapons are generally periods of small armies of
professional soldiers (usually mercenaries).
In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such
weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey;
thus a period of
specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule
and authoritarian government.
But a period of amateur weapons is a period in which all men are roughly
equal in military power, a majority can compel a
minority to yield, and majority rule or even
democratic government tends to rise.
The medieval period in which the best weapon was usually a
mounted knight on horseback (clearly a specialist weapon) was a
period of minority rule and authoritarian government.
Even when the medieval knight was made obsolete (along with his
stone castle) by the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of
firearms, these new weapons were so expensive and so difficult to
use (until 1800) that minority rule and authoritarian government
continued even though that government sought to enforce its rule by
shifting from mounted knights to professional pike-men and
musketeers.
But after 1800, guns became cheaper to obtain and easier to use.
By 1840 a Colt
revolver sold for $27 and a Springfield musket for not much more,
and these were about as good weapons as anyone could get at that
time.
Thus, mass armies of citizens, equipped with these cheap and
easily used weapons, began to replace armies of professional
soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe and even earlier in
America.
At the same time, democratic government began to replace
authoritarian governments (but chiefly in those areas where the
cheap new weapons were available and local standards of living were
high enough to allow people to obtain them).
The arrival of the mass army of citizen-soldiers in the
nineteenth century created a difficult problem of control, because
techniques of transportation and of communications had not reached
a high-enough level to allow any flexibility of control in a mass
army...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/02.html#4
The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth
century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation,
for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature,
organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the
numerous factors that determine what happens in political life.
Surely weapons
will continue to be expensive and complex.
This means that they will increasingly be the
tools of professionalized, if not mercenary,
forces.
All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of
citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads,
in the long run, to a decline of democracy.
When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost any
man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society,
such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary,
industrious, private citizen.
This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is
now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state
today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence
of the ordinary citizen.
When weapons are of the "amateur" type of 1880, as they were in
Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed hy
citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel
the majority to yield to its will.
With such an
"amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are not totally
unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively
democratic political system.
But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex
and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess
or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who
control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who
lack them.
In such a
society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that
reflects the inequality in control of weapons will he
established.
At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt
that the specialist weapons of today will continue to dominate the
military picture into the foreseeable future.
If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather
than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the
same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors
may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many
areas, such as the United States or England.
To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may
seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in
this situation may well be considered...
...There is still another element in this complex picture. This
is also related to weapons.
The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that
the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has
been because of the increased power of the offensive in the
dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive
weapons became dominant have been those in which political units
remained small in area or even became smaller.
The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or
about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power
units so small that all power became private power, and the state
disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose
the so-called "Dark Ages" about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#74
...Also related to the problem of internalised controls is the
shift of weapons in our society. This is a profound problem. I have
spent ten years working on it throughout all of history, and I hope
eventually to produce a book if I can find a publisher. There will
be endless analyses of Chinese history, Byzantine history and
Russian history and everything else, and the book is about
nine-tenths written.
I'd say in the last ten years the shift of weapons in any
civilization and, above all, in our civilization, from shock
weapons to missile weapons has a dominant influence on the ability
to control individuals: individuals cannot be controlled by missile
weapons.
Notice that if
you go back several hundred years to the Middle Ages, all weapons
were shock, that is, you came at the enemy with a spear or a
sword.
Even as late as 1916, in the First World War, you came at the
Germans with bayonets after a preliminary barrage with artillery.
But we have now shifted almost completely to missile weapons.
Missile weapons are weapons that you hurl. You may shoot, you may
have bombs dropped from an airplane, you may throw a hand grenade:
these are missile weapons.
The essential difference between a shock weapon and a missile
weapon is this: a missile weapon is either fired or it isn't fired.
It cannot be half-fired. Once you let it go, it's out of your
control. It is a killing weapon.
But a shock weapon--a billy club or a bayonet-- can be used to
any degree you wish. If you say to someone, "Get up and get out of
my room," and you pull out a machines gun, or you call in a B-52
bomber, or you pull the pin in a hand grenade....But with a bayonet
you can persuade him.
In our society, individual behaviour can no longer be controlled
by any system of weaponry we have. In fact, we do not have enough
people, even if we equip them with shock weapons, to control the
behaviour of that part of the population which does not have
internalised controls.
One reason for that, of course, is that the twenty percent who
do have internalised controls are concentrated in certain areas. I
won't go into the subject of controls. It opens up the whole field
of guerrilla resistance, terrorism, and everything else; these
cannot be controlled by any system or organized structure or force
that exists, at least on the basis of missile weaponry.
And, as I said, it would take too many people on the basis of
shock weaponry.
We have now
done what the Romans did when they started to commit
suicide: we have shifted from an army of
citizens to an army of mercenaries, those
mercenaries are being recruited in our society, as they were in
Roman society, from the twenty percent of the population which does
not have the internalised controls of the
civilization and...
http://www.wealthbuilder.ie/essay15.htm