From 1983 to 2023

Change and Continuity

In the first feature article to appear on his new blog, Millennial Woes compared life in the year in which he was born (1983) with life in the year so recently begun (2023). As I read the essay while playing hooky from my study of the Falklands War of 1982, I soon found myself thinking about the changes that had taken place in the realm of land warfare in during the same period of time, as well as the many things that have stayed the same.

Relatively few changes have taken place in the realm of infantry weapons. The rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and mortars of 2023 are essentially those of 1983. (Some, like the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, which entered production in 1933, are much older.) The few alterations that have been made to these weapons, moreover, tend to fall into the category of “add-ons, accessories, and special munitions.” The same is true for tanks. The makers of armor plate have yet to improve upon the Chobham armor that made Challenger and Abrams tanks, both of which are still in front-line service, so impressive to soldiers of the last decade of the Cold War.

The 105mm gun-howitzer introduced a few years before the aforementioned main battle tanks earned well-deserved kudos during the land battles of the Falklands War. More than forty years later, both American (“light howitzer”) and British (“light gun”) versions of workhorse continue to send shells down range. (Moreover, while the fuzes fitted to these projectiles are of more recent vintage, the shells themselves could have been built in the 1890s.)

The M777 155mm gun-howitzer is much lighter than earlier artillery pieces of the same caliber and class. The provision of this undoubted advantage, however, was less the result of absolute technological progress than of the making of trade offs that had been available for decades. Thus, while easier to move than its predecessors, the M777 achieved that advantage at the cost of such things as barrel life, survivability, and the ability to use propellant charges of larger sorts. In other words, rather than being, like the 75mm field gun of 1897, a truly revolutionary weapon, the “M Triple Seven” might be more accurately described as the twenty-first century analogue of President Bonaparte’s 12-pounder gun-howitzer.

M777 howitzers await the planes that will take them to Ukraine (Credit: DVIDS)

The absence of great change in the aforementioned weapons may have resulted from the passing of the era in which they were imagined, designed, and, in many cases, built. All of them, from rifles and machine guns to mortars, gun-howitzers, and tanks, were artifacts of the Machine Age. Thus, as blast furnaces grew cold, and fewer gears were cut, the minds that might have improved them turned to different work.

A similar phenomenon is at work with anti-tank guided missiles. In the half century that followed the 1943 debut of the ship-killing ancestor of such weapons, these creatures of the Space Age evolved rapidly. In the three decades, however, development has slowed to a crawl. Indeed, some of the most useful weapons of this class differ little from the Milan missiles used in the Falklands War or the prototypes of the fiber-optic guided missile tested in the early 1980s.¹

The great exception to this general rule of a paucity of progress in the realm of land warfare weapons is, of course, the drone. Thanks to the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing war in Ukraine, few doubt the revolutionary effect of the many types of remotely piloted aircraft now available to forces fighting on land. In particular, drones have made open ground far less hospitable to large collections of armored vehicles than it used to be, thereby increasing the importance of forces that thrive in cities and forests. Thus, the newest of devices in the arsenal of present-day armies is breathing new life into weapons that emerged from drawing boards a very long time ago.

1. For the sad tale of the failure of the US Army to embrace this remarkable weapon, see William G. Rosenau, Selling Innovation: FOG-M, William McCorkle, and the US Army (Cambridge: Kennedy School of Government Case Program: 1988.) (This retrospective case study and its epilogue can be downloaded free of charge. In order to do this, however, one must open an account.