Toward universal laws of technology evolution: modeling multi-century advances in mobile direct-fire systems

This paper explores the question of whether a single regularity of technological growth might apply to a broad range of technologies, over a period of multiple centuries. To this end, the paper investigates a collection of diverse weapon systems called here the mobile direct-fire systems. These include widely different families of technologies that span the period of 1300–2015 CE: foot soldiers armed with weapons from bows to assault rifles; horse-mounted soldiers with a variety of weapons; foot artillery and horse artillery; towed antitank guns; self-propelled antitank and assault guns; and tanks. The main contribution of this paper is that, indeed, a single, parsimonious regularity describes the historical growth of this extremely broad collection of systems. Multiple, widely different families of weapon systems—from a bowman to a tank—fall closely on the same curve, a simple function of time. This suggests a general model that unites allometric relations (such as Kleiber’s Law) and exponential growth relations (such as Moore’s Law). To this author’s knowledge, no prior research describes a regularity in the temporal growth of technology that covers such widely different technologies and over such a long period of history. This regularity is suitable for technology forecasting, as this paper illustrates with explorations of two systems that might appear 30 years in the future from this writing: a heavy infantryman and a tank. In both cases, the regularity helped lead to nonobvious conclusions, particularly regarding the power of the weapons of such future systems. Furthermore, this result suggests a possibility—and related research questions—that even broader collections of technology families might evolve historically in accordance with what might be called universal laws of technological evolution.