Today’s Eyrie post has gone live: “Tech marches ever on,” a discussion of the way advances in technology and the basic concepts of how war is properly and successfully waged are and have always tended to radically shift the ground under the very feet of those charged with actually fighting said war. Excerpt:
Repeating carbine rifles; pistols; wireless radio communications; tanks; submarines; radar; sonar; piston-engine airplanes; the Norden bombsight; jets—all scoffed at as either extravagantly costly toys or unworkable, pie-in-the-sky daydreams by an ossified officer class who would soon find themselves shocked—SHOCKED!—at armies under their command having their asses kicked all to Hell and gone by them, often wielded by OpFor numbers greatly, even lopsidedly, inferior to their own. It’s the oldest story in the long annals of human warfare, going all the way back to mighty, invincible Goliath laughing at David and his puny slingshot, if not longer. The really baffling part of it is how very few professional officers in the higher ranks seem capable of learning the lesson history keeps trying, again and again and again, to teach them.
It has long been said that you can’t kill an idea. Left unspoken is the correlating truism: ideas can for sure kill you. For the infantryman, they will, and have.
Go ye and read of it, for It. Is. Good.
“The really baffling part of it is how very few professional officers seem capable of learning the lesson history keeps trying, again and again and again, to teach them.”
My entire reading life which is >65 years I have been trying to understand the reluctance of intelligent and trained men in adapting to the new technology.
I’ve yet to come to any conclusion.