The new warfare and old truths: How our technologies are still our allies

Abstract

In the early 1880s, a Maine-born inventor named Hiram Maxim, who had tried and failed to become a leading figure in the young electrical industry, met a fellow American in Vienna who told him, "Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility." Maxim took the man's advice. He invented the first truly automatic machine gun. By the turn of the century, it had killed thousands of colonial rebels in Africa, India, and Egypt, and it accounted for more than half of the Japanese casualties in the Russo-Japanese War. By the end of World War I, the Germans had 100,000 machine guns. Death was now mass-produced. Maxim's gun was one of an endless succession of breakthroughs in warfare that have gone on for millennia, escalating destruction by leaps. Some of those breakthroughs, the Maxim gun among them, have seemed to change the very nature of warfare. Earlier in the nineteenth century had come the development of the rifle and the birth of the ironclad, remaking war both on land and sea. Later came the military airplane and the aircraft carrier and, most epochally, the atom bomb. On September 11, 2001, the technology of war took a leap in a wholly new direction. Now it was not a matter of bigger, more advanced machinery, of an increase in destructive capability. It was chillingly the opposite. The biggest, most advanced weapon used on September 11 may have been a box cutter. This was a breakthrough into war fought not with weapons at all but with the peaceful technology of modern life. Swords were put aside, and our plowshares were turned against us. It was done with fearful sophistication. Whoever dreamed up the conspiracy had been thinking exactly the way the man who advised Hiram Maxim thought: