Quartz
The
human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change
that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond
recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying
attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding
human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end
of the Age of the Gun.
You
may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the
Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine
yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it),
the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse
archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the
ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse
by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two
weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.
That
day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. For
centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the
battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to
motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning
the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the
near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the
human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always,
that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.
The
advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train.
In the modern day, it’s true that bombers, tanks, and artillery can lay
waste to infantry—but those industrial tools of warfare are just so
expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter industrialized nations
from fighting protracted conflicts. Look at how much it cost the United
States to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, versus how much it
cost our opponents. The hand-held firearm reached its apotheosis with
the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon,
guerrilla armies can still defy the mightiest nations on Earth.
The
Age of the Gun is the age of People Power. The fact that guns don’t
take that long to master means that most people can learn to be decent
gunmen in their spare time. That’s probably why the gun is regarded as
the ultimate guarantor of personal liberty in America—in the event that
we need to overthrow a tyrannical government, we like to think that we
can put down our laptops, pick up our guns, and become an invincible
swarm.
Of
course, it doesn’t always work out that way. People Power has often
been used not for freedom, but to establish nightmarish tyrannies, in
the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and elsewhere. But Stalin, Mao, and their
ilk still had to win hearts and minds to hold power; in the end, when
people wised up, their nightmare regimes were reformed into something
less horrible.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment