Do (incremental) advances in military technology actually change the number of people who die in wars? They might change which people die, or how rapidly, but it seems to me that groups of people who are determined to fight each other are going to do it regardless of what the “best” weapons currently available happen to be. The Mongols wreaked havoc on a scale surpassing World War I with only 13th century technology, and the Rwandan genocide was mostly carried out with machetes. World War I brought about a horror of poison gas, but bullets and explosions don’t make people any less dead than poison gas does.
(Although the World War 1 era gases did have one thing that set them apart from other weapons: nonlethal levels of exposure often left survivors with permanent debilitating injuries. Dead is dead, but different types of weapons can be more or less cruel to those who survive the fighting.)
That is very much the right question to ask. How can we best find the answer?
Perhaps a timeline of major wars, together with the casualty figures (both as raw numbers, and as a percentage of estimated combatants) would provide that answer.
Hmmm… of the top ten wars by death toll, according to a Wikipedia list self-described as incomplete, the range of deaths-per-war ranged from 8-12 million (no. 10) to 60-78 million (no. 1, WWII). This is about an eightfold difference. The second war on the list is the 13th-century Mongols, and the earliest on the list is the Warring States Era, in China, in around 400 B.C. (10 million, estimated, 9th on the list).
Glancing over the data, I notice that most of the wars in that list are either world-spanning, or took place in China. This, I imagine, is most likely because China has a large population; thus, there are more people to get involved in, and killed in, a war. A list rearranged by percentage of involved soldiers killed might show a different trend.
I also notice that there is a very wide range of dates; but the century with the most entries in that top-ten list is the twentieth century. That may be influenced by the fact that there were more people around in the 20th century, and also by the scale of some of the conflicts (WWI and WWII, for example).
I’m not sure whether the data supports the hypothesis or not, though. Given the wide range of dates, I’m inclined to think that you may be right; that advances in war change the manner of death more than the number of deaths.
No, even a brief examination of history makes it clear that the lethality of warfare is almost completely determined by the culture and ideology of the people involved. In some wars the victors try to avoid civilian casualties, while in others they kill all the adult males or even wipe out entire populations. Those fatalities dwarf anything produced in the actual fighting, and they can and have been inflicted with bronze age technology. So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology.
As for the casualty rate of soldiers, that tends to jump up whenever a new type of weapon is introduced and then fall again as tactics change to deal with it. In the long run the dominant factor is again a matter of ideology—an army that tries to minimize casualties can generally do so, while one that sees soldiers as expendable will get them killed in huge numbers regardless of technology.
(BTW, WWI gases are nothing unusual in the crippling injury department—cannons, guns, explosives and edged weapons all have a tendency to litter the battlefield with crippled victims as well. What changed in the 20th century was that better medical meant a larger fraction of crippled soldiers to survive their injuries to return to civilian life.)
“So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology.”
This is actually one of the major purposes that Christians have had in doing missionary work—to spread tolerance and reduce violence. I assume it’s happened in other religions too. For example, the rules of chivalry in the middle ages were an attempt to moderate the violence and abuses of the warriors.
(Although the World War 1 era gases did have one thing that set them apart from other weapons: nonlethal levels of exposure often left survivors with permanent debilitating injuries. Dead is dead, but different types of weapons can be more or less cruel to those who survive the fighting.)
Some actual or hypothetical advances in military technology allow very widespread, imprecise destruction. Such destruction could kill big segments of the enemy state’s civilian population, or of a population in which a guerrila army is embedded, as a side effect of killing soldiers.
For instance sufficiently powerful or numerous bombs can destroy large cities. Pathogens can kill or sicken an entire population (with the attacker distributing a vaccine or cure among their own population only). Damage to infrastructure can kill those who depend on it.
On the other hand, a century or two previously little infrastructure existed outside cities. Railways, electricity lines and power plants, car-quality roads, oil and gas pipelines, even most roads or trans-city water and sewage systems are modern inventions.
My armchair impression is that advances in military technology can lead to higher casualty rates when tactics haven’t caught up, but that once they do the death toll regresses to the mean pretty quick. Two examples: Minié balls greatly increased the accuracy and effective range of quick-loading small arms (rifling had been around for a while, but earlier muzzle-loading rifles took much longer to load), essentially rendering Napoleonic line tactics obsolete, but it took decades and two major wars (the Crimean and the American Civil War) before the lesson fully sank in. A century later, large-scale strategic bombing of civilian targets contributed to much of WWII’s death toll, without bringing about the rapid capitulations it had been intended to produce.
Well, one could argue that the biggest advance in military technology (nuclear weapons) vastly decreased the number of deaths in wars were it was involved. That is, far fewer people died from the Cold War then from World War II. So to that extent, the military technology actually changed the number of deaths down.
The most notable advances that I can think of off hand are machine guns, nuclear weapons, and the whole mass mechanized, aerial, and heavy weapons thing.
Do (incremental) advances in military technology actually change the number of people who die in wars? They might change which people die, or how rapidly, but it seems to me that groups of people who are determined to fight each other are going to do it regardless of what the “best” weapons currently available happen to be. The Mongols wreaked havoc on a scale surpassing World War I with only 13th century technology, and the Rwandan genocide was mostly carried out with machetes. World War I brought about a horror of poison gas, but bullets and explosions don’t make people any less dead than poison gas does.
(Although the World War 1 era gases did have one thing that set them apart from other weapons: nonlethal levels of exposure often left survivors with permanent debilitating injuries. Dead is dead, but different types of weapons can be more or less cruel to those who survive the fighting.)
That is very much the right question to ask. How can we best find the answer?
Perhaps a timeline of major wars, together with the casualty figures (both as raw numbers, and as a percentage of estimated combatants) would provide that answer.
Hmmm… of the top ten wars by death toll, according to a Wikipedia list self-described as incomplete, the range of deaths-per-war ranged from 8-12 million (no. 10) to 60-78 million (no. 1, WWII). This is about an eightfold difference. The second war on the list is the 13th-century Mongols, and the earliest on the list is the Warring States Era, in China, in around 400 B.C. (10 million, estimated, 9th on the list).
Glancing over the data, I notice that most of the wars in that list are either world-spanning, or took place in China. This, I imagine, is most likely because China has a large population; thus, there are more people to get involved in, and killed in, a war. A list rearranged by percentage of involved soldiers killed might show a different trend.
I also notice that there is a very wide range of dates; but the century with the most entries in that top-ten list is the twentieth century. That may be influenced by the fact that there were more people around in the 20th century, and also by the scale of some of the conflicts (WWI and WWII, for example).
I’m not sure whether the data supports the hypothesis or not, though. Given the wide range of dates, I’m inclined to think that you may be right; that advances in war change the manner of death more than the number of deaths.
Good insight.
No, even a brief examination of history makes it clear that the lethality of warfare is almost completely determined by the culture and ideology of the people involved. In some wars the victors try to avoid civilian casualties, while in others they kill all the adult males or even wipe out entire populations. Those fatalities dwarf anything produced in the actual fighting, and they can and have been inflicted with bronze age technology. So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology.
As for the casualty rate of soldiers, that tends to jump up whenever a new type of weapon is introduced and then fall again as tactics change to deal with it. In the long run the dominant factor is again a matter of ideology—an army that tries to minimize casualties can generally do so, while one that sees soldiers as expendable will get them killed in huge numbers regardless of technology.
(BTW, WWI gases are nothing unusual in the crippling injury department—cannons, guns, explosives and edged weapons all have a tendency to litter the battlefield with crippled victims as well. What changed in the 20th century was that better medical meant a larger fraction of crippled soldiers to survive their injuries to return to civilian life.)
“So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies rather than worrying about weapon technology.”
This is actually one of the major purposes that Christians have had in doing missionary work—to spread tolerance and reduce violence. I assume it’s happened in other religions too. For example, the rules of chivalry in the middle ages were an attempt to moderate the violence and abuses of the warriors.
Bullets and explosions don’t necesarily kill.
Some actual or hypothetical advances in military technology allow very widespread, imprecise destruction. Such destruction could kill big segments of the enemy state’s civilian population, or of a population in which a guerrila army is embedded, as a side effect of killing soldiers.
For instance sufficiently powerful or numerous bombs can destroy large cities. Pathogens can kill or sicken an entire population (with the attacker distributing a vaccine or cure among their own population only). Damage to infrastructure can kill those who depend on it.
Notably, the two World Wars introduced the mass use of mechanized units and heavy weapons leading to a huge amount of infrastructure damage.
On the other hand, a century or two previously little infrastructure existed outside cities. Railways, electricity lines and power plants, car-quality roads, oil and gas pipelines, even most roads or trans-city water and sewage systems are modern inventions.
My armchair impression is that advances in military technology can lead to higher casualty rates when tactics haven’t caught up, but that once they do the death toll regresses to the mean pretty quick. Two examples: Minié balls greatly increased the accuracy and effective range of quick-loading small arms (rifling had been around for a while, but earlier muzzle-loading rifles took much longer to load), essentially rendering Napoleonic line tactics obsolete, but it took decades and two major wars (the Crimean and the American Civil War) before the lesson fully sank in. A century later, large-scale strategic bombing of civilian targets contributed to much of WWII’s death toll, without bringing about the rapid capitulations it had been intended to produce.
Perhaps higher casualty rates lead to wars ending sooner? After all, wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted.
Well, one could argue that the biggest advance in military technology (nuclear weapons) vastly decreased the number of deaths in wars were it was involved. That is, far fewer people died from the Cold War then from World War II. So to that extent, the military technology actually changed the number of deaths down.
The most notable advances that I can think of off hand are machine guns, nuclear weapons, and the whole mass mechanized, aerial, and heavy weapons thing.