A Humanistic Look at Weapons

You could mail me or go to my home page, or my main strategy page. Last modified 1999 May 12

Let me tell you a little story about me at the Minnesota State Fair.

The Minnesota National Guard had an exhibit there, and they included an Abrams tank that was used in the Gulf War. (You know the sort - fast, invulnerable, invincible.) I walked up to it. I tapped it on the armor (didn't think I'd hurt anything). I found it to be completely harmless. It didn't do anything, no matter what I did to it. My conclusion is that tanks aren't dangerous.

Now, I understand that some Iraqis might disagree with my conclusion that US M1 tanks are innocuous. The difference is that those Iraqis encountered the tanks with tank crews inside them. Now, tank crews are more dangerous than tanks, but they're still just four guys, and four guys by themselves don't have much of an impact on the battlefield. The really neat thing comes when these four guys get into this multiton hunk of steel, ceramics, and more exotic things, and suddenly we have a tank with a crew in it. They therefore became mighty implements of war, capable of fighting effectively in any lighting conditions, killing tanks through sand dunes, and that sort of thing.

Leonhard, in one of his books, pointed out that the normal state of a military unit is "vulnerable". Most military units spend only a small amount of time with the vehicles and weapons manned, alert and ready to fire. You can attack one of these units when it is vulnerable in an analog of attacking it where it is vulnerable, sort of an outflanking in space-time rather than in space only.

Science fiction fans may recognize the influence of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. There is a scene when the drill sergeant tells the trainees that there is no such thing as a dangerous weapon, just dangerous men, and that he wants his trainees to be dangerous no matter what they're armed with. (Like all of the interesting and thoughtful stuff in the book, this never made it to the movie.)

This was more or less recognized in the old days, before weapons had parts that moved by themselves. As weapons got more complicated, people started to speculate on which weapon was better (which is OK), and to neglect human considerations (which is not). I'm going to show why some early WWII tanks were less effective than they might have been, and why the early German tanks were so successful.

Consider the French S.35. Fast, well-armored, and with a powerful gun for its time (a high-velocity 47mm certainly beat anything the Germans had mounted on a tank). The great failing of the tank was its one-man turret. In all the French tanks, there was a guy who was supposed to load the main gun, fire the main gun, and command the tank. Further, the tank did not have a radio, meaning that he had to be alert to visual signals from his commander's tank.

In other words, one guy has to keep his head out to see the signals, keep his head out to try to spot the enemy, keep his head in to load the gun, and keep his head at the gunsight to aim and fire the gun. By my count, this is four functions involving a head, located in two different places. By another count, tank commanders have one head each (I've never seen an exception). This meant that French tank formations were very clumsy even under the best of circumstances and under the best commanders.

Another example, not so flagrant, is the Soviet T-34. Fast, heavily armored, and with a gun far superior to anything the Germans fielded until sometime in 1942, it had a two-man turret. The commander didn't have to load the gun, but he did aim and fire it. In the earlier models, he didn't have a radio (it took the Soviets a long time to get radios into all of their tanks, even with US help), and he couldn't see well to the front because of the way his hatch opened.

In contrast, the German tanks of the time, despite being lightly armed, had a commander with a radio who was responsible for commanding the tank. He didn't have to load the gun; that was the loader's responsibility. He didn't have to aim and fire the gun; that was the gunner's responsibility. He didn't have to keep an eye out for signal flags, since the tactical orders would generally come over the radio. "All" he had to do was to keep his eyes open, listen to the radio, and command his men appropriately. This is a sizeable task.

Another example comes from Korea. In the battles against the Soviet- designed fighters, our fighters were usually at a disadvantage in all categories of performance. The MiGs had better guns, could fly faster, climb and dive better, and would win a turning fight. There had to be some reason why our pilots were downing MiGs at almost ridiculous kill ratios. To the credit of the Air Force, they did not simply attribute it to pilot superiority, but started the investigations that led to the Boyd cycle.

Boyd discovered that you can model combat as a feedback loop. The warrior sees what is going on, arrives at some sort of understanding, makes a decision, and implements it. What makes this a feedback loop is that the warrior's actions affect the external world, and hence the warrior's actions affect what he sees is going on. This became the basis for training American combat pilots, who got lots of practice in seeing and reacting to situations, in an effort to "get inside" the enemy's Boyd cycle. (The lessons learned were sidetracked from aircraft design for some time, as the Air Force and Navy wrongly decided that the future fighter was going to be nothing more than a missile platform, but they reemerged with the F-14/15/16/18 generation.)

The exact things that Boyd found were different were that the American aircraft had canopies with better visibility, and that the American aircraft had some sort of power assist on the control surfaces. (For a long time in aviation history, muscle power was sufficient to wrestle the control surfaces around as violently as the aircraft could stand. With the higher speeds of the new jets, this was no longer the case.) The American pilots saw the situation faster, since they could see more at any one time. They appreciated what they saw fast, being well-trained fighter pilots. When they decided what to do, they used the controls and got faster response from the control surfaces. The net result was that the MiG pilots could not keep up with the American actions, and were increasingly reacting to events that no longer mattered.

From my point of view, this is a clear example of a weapon that is superior simply because it is easier to use.