Is Military Technology Deterministic?

Vulcan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Alex Roland

In their papers prepared for this volume, Kelly DeVries and David Zimmerman explore the differing viewpoints on technological determinism that military historians bring to bear on premodern and modern warfare. This paper analyzes their respective arguments, including DeVries’s introduction of the concepts of effectiveness, invincibility, and decisiveness; it focuses primarily on technological determinism. It explores some concepts of historical causation and concludes that nothing in human behavior is deterministic. It recommends language that can help historians avoid this rhetorical battleground and speak more clearly and judiciously about the factors that shape warfare and affect its outcome.

Vulcan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Kelly DeVries

In 1997 War and History published my article, “Catapults Are Not Atomic Bombs: Towards a Redefinition of ‘Effectiveness’ in Premodern Military Technology.” The title was hyperbolic as the article discussed neither catapults nor atomic bombs, but that hyperbole was to serve a purpose: to have military historians, primarily historians of military technology rethink their notions of military technological determinism, especially in interpreting premodern military history. In that article I used three examples: the chariot, the longbow, and gunpowder weaponry, suggesting that the use of these technologies by modern historians as determining catastrophe, invincibility, and revolution, respectively, was overstating their effects on history. After 22 years I was asked to revisit my original thoughts and here use the various chroniclers’ descriptions at the battle of Crécy (1346) and the function of the English longbows (and longbowmen) to explore how the premodern world thought about technology in war. Ultimately, I reaffirm the importance of humans over technology in any military situation, even if the technologies are either characteristic or central to any particular engagement.


Vulcan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
David Zimmerman

Kelly Devries in “Catapults are not atomic bombs”—and in fact, of almost all of those who have joined the fray to, once and for all, kill off simplistic technological determinism—may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. One aspect linking most of these anti-determinists is their temporal focus which is almost exclusively on pre-industrial revolutions in military technology. Furthermore, their views of the importance (or more accurately, the lack thereof) of technology in war is one that has ceased to apply to the world since the mid-nineteenth century. Technological determinism is not a disease of bad historical writing, but something that must be carefully applied in studying the technological systems of armed forces, regardless of time periods or geographic locations. We need to apply a definition of determinacy related to the systems theory that French writer Jacques Ellul proposed in The Technological Society. Here examples of military systems since the Industrial Revolution are covered and then this systems approach is applied to the pre-modern period. The approach moves us away from the radical assumptions of earlier determinists to show that technology is determinant, but only one of the many determinant factors that influence battles, campaigns, and wars. The study of military technology is central to any study of war, and we must not be afraid to move beyond a merely descriptive approach that appears to be promoted by the anti-determinists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Löschnigg

This essay analyses how since the early twentieth century war novels and memoirs have reflected the challenges which modern warfare poses to narrative. Mechanized warfare, I argue, resists the narrative encoding of experience, creating a crisis of narrative that is frequently made explicit in the assertion, on the part of novelists and memoirists, that the actual experience of combat cannot be narrated. Thus, for instance, the nature of warfare on the Western Front 1914–1918, characterized by the fragmentation of vision in the trenches and the exposure of soldiers to a continuous sequence of acoustic shocks, had a disruptive effect on perceptions of time and space, and consequently on the rendering of the chronotope in narrative accounts of the fighting. Since then, modern military technology has increasingly generated a sense that wars have acquired a dynamic of their own. The “cinematic” nature of technological warfare and the resulting loss of individual agency have suspended the order-creating and meaning-creating function of narrative, leading, in extremis, to the representational impasse emphasized by trauma theory. In my discussion of selected war writings, I shall show how the “cognitive narratology” of modern warfare can be applied to the analysis of aesthetic manifestations in war literature and the “crisis of language” underlying (literary) modernity and postmodernity.


JOURNAL ASRO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (01) ◽  
pp. 166
Author(s):  
Muksin Muksin ◽  
Udisubakti Ciptomulyono ◽  
Sutrisno Sutrisno ◽  
Sunarta Sunarta

Some of the Indonesian naval effort to see and protect the Indonesian territory is by using Helicopter sea patrol. In the other side, submarines are the most strategic weapons in the world that can provide a deterrence effect which has a very significant impact on the maritime powers of the countries operating them in the era of generation 4.0 war. Operational readiness is very important, there are readiness in building operational readiness for naval defense through budget fulfillment, utilization of existing resources, procurement and naval modernization by paying attention to Life Cycle Cost, and interoperability while still paying attention to paradigm shifts in naval capability. So, the combat readiness is the condition of the Indonesian Navy's defense equipment and its constituent units, resources and personnel, weapon systems and other military technology equipment in a condition that is ready to carry out military operations in an unspecified time, or function consistent with the purpose for which the defense equipment is organized or designed, the management of resources and training personnel in preparation for combat in the face of the threat of modern warfare in a state of constant combat readiness. At this time, training in Anti-Submarine Warfare conducted by Indonesian Navy’s Helicopter is still limited to carrying out flight procedures, communication procedures with the KRI and the command line, because Helicopters have sensors, weapons and command that need to be upgraded and The personnel also have underwater warfare capabilities that need to be upgraded, so there needs to be an increase in the capability of the helicopter and human resources. Technometry will be used to calculate the Heli's current readiness level. Keywords: Submarine, Anti Submarine Helicopter and operational readiness


1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-75
Author(s):  
RALPH H. TURNER
Keyword(s):  

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-171
Author(s):  
SONIA F. OSLER
Keyword(s):  

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 432-432
Author(s):  
RICHARD F. THOMPSON
Keyword(s):  

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRENDAN MAHER
Keyword(s):  

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Glenn
Keyword(s):  

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