Air University Review, January-February 1967

National Power and Firepower

Anthony Harrigan

In 1913 the maps of the world showed Europe as occupying the central position on the globe. As the earth is a sphere, there is no centrality of position in geographical terms. But in terms of the power realities of the age, it was only logical that maps show the central area of the globe located on the European continent. Europe was the center of the world, not only in European eyes but in the eyes of Asians, Africans, and Americans.

In a very real sense, Europe discovered the world without ever having been discovered itself. The Chinese had an opportunity in the voyages of Cheng Ho to sweep around Africa and reach the northern hemisphere, but they muffed their chance. They lacked the world vision of the Europeans at the end of the medieval period. As a French writer said in 1816, “This narrow peninsula, which appears on the globe as a mere appendix of Asia, has become the metropolis of the human species.” Europe, in 1913, was at the peak of its power. The states of Europe had divided the entire African continent, with the exception of Ethiopia. The subcontinent of India was the crown jewel in the British Empire. China was subdued and impotent. What Europe did not control outright, or manage by way of military protectorates, it manipulated through a variety of financial and other pressures.

The heart of the European world consisted of the major powers—France, the new German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Imperial Russia. Italy, while not a first-rank power, had considerable possessions in Africa. Little Belgium commanded the Congo, the heart of Central Africa. The Dutch controlled the rich East Indies. Only Spain and Portugal had regressed, though Portugal still held immense territories beyond the seas. Spain had suffered many misfortunes, the most recent having been the bad luck to tangle with the rising power of the United States of America.

Britain’s power still seemed to be in the ascendancy, the British having won a protracted war with the Boers and strengthened their hold over the Cape Town to Cairo route. Throughout the nineteenth century the Russians expanded their empire in Asia by the absorption of Chinese territories. Russia, however, made one critical mistake and suffered one significant setback. The mistake was the decision to sell the vast Alaska territory to the United States. Alaska represented a beachhead in the New World, but the Russian government lacked leadership with an understanding of the potential of Alaska in strategic terms. The setback was defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905.

Germany’s power was increasing rapidly. She held large and valuable territories in East Africa and South-West Africa, the latter being the world’s principal source of diamonds. Germany also maintained a foothold in China on the Shantung Peninsula. Had war not broken out in 1914, Germany might have arrived at an understanding with Britain regarding a division of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique in Africa.

The United States, while not subordinate to European power, was linked to Europe. Its people were overwhelmingly European in origin. American culture, commerce, and finance were joined in various ways to the nations of Europe. America in 1913 was a complement to European power, not in any sense a threat. The United States had a role to play in shaping the history of the western hemisphere. It was on its way to establishing protectorates over Haiti and Santo Domingo while guiding the new nation of Cuba in a protective relationship.

In 1913 it seemed that the Pax Europa would endure for a long time, perhaps as long as the Roman Empire had endured. Westernization of isolated pockets on the globe seemed a certainty. Within 50 years, however, or the life span of many men educated before World War I, the power structure of the world had completely changed. For a time, in the late 1940’s, the very survival of the European nations was in question. Indeed much of central and all of eastern Europe had fallen under control of the Soviet Union, which had largely rejected Russia’s European past. Germany in 1945 was in ruins, as was Italy. France was a moral wreck, bitter and divided. Britain, having “won” a world war, was exhausted and ruined by a second colossal conflict within a quarter century. Only the power of the United States enabled the European nations to make an economic recovery. American military power had to stand guard from Norway to Greece to protect prostrate Europe. Psychologically, Europe found itself unable to retain its overseas territories or even to remember its civilizing mission. Where there was not outright collapse in Europe, there was a contraction of goals and a loss of faith in the ability to develop and use power. The United States, while protecting western Europe against economic ruin and Soviet military conquest, showed no understanding of Europe’s need for power bases elsewhere in the world. American administrations applied pressure to help oust the Dutch from Java and Sumatra, the French from Algeria, the Belgians from the Congo, and the British from many parts of their former empire. Only Portugal, the weakest of the European countries, had the stamina to stand firm against terrible pressure. As Elie Deloches wrote in Le Charivari, “Portugal in a pillory, the only one of the older nations of Europe to grace the storm, is like the symbol of the West, which does not want to die.”

That Europe could fall to such a humiliating condition in so short a time, after being at a peak in 1913, has sent a shock through the minds of thoughtful Westerners. What happened? Why? Is the process of deterioration inevitable? Such questions confront the West, especially America, which today stands as strong as the European states in 1913. An examination of the metamorphosis of power is essential if we in the West are to be masters of our fate, not victims of new historical tides.

To begin with, the inner structure of Europe did not change as the major European nations developed overseas empires and protectorates. The crowned heads of Europe knew each other, and many were related by blood. But their countries had scant appreciation of the changed relationships in the world—relationships which require a considerable measure of collaboration among the advanced states. Europe had the interests of a single house, but European diplomats did not see this. They could have pondered the Japanese naval victory over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, but they did not do so; or at least they did not reach the right conclusions. Apparently it never occurred to the masters of European chancelleries that, in Franklin’s words, they had to hang together or assuredly they would all hang separately. They did not grasp the fact that European technology was spreading and that new power centers—competitive centers—would emerge as threats to Western nations. Being rooted in the conflicts and enmities of previous centuries, they could not take stock of the new challenges just over the horizon. Indeed history was repeating itself in a sense, for it had proved very difficult in earlier times for the nations of Christendom to see beyond their disputes and deal effectively with the power of Islam. Because they lacked vision, the great nations of Europe turned to civil war, not once but twice in the twentieth century. The two European civil wars—known as World Wars I and II—gutted Europe’s power. The millions killed at Verdun, Stalingrad, and scores of other battles took away the edge that the advanced nations of Europe had over the backward lands of this planet. The vast outpouring of blood and treasure, in what amounted to domestic struggles, represented a near-fatal bleeding of a civilization.

What strange and terrible ironies one finds in this period of European madness! For example, after the awful struggles between Frenchmen and Germans, the French Foreign Legion, fighting in Indochina to save an important piece of the French Empire, had its ranks filled with former soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. The British Commonwealth, created as a link between English-speaking nations with a shared constitutional heritage, in the 1950’s and 1960’s became an assembly in which backward and turbulent states had the dominant voice.

These two civil wars of the Western world represent a kind of massive failure of control, a breakdown through irritability. True, the components of Europe in 1913 were often contradictory. Styles of national life were different, as in England and Germany. Nevertheless, there were lessons of history that the wise men of early twentieth century Europe should have been able to read. Through the Dark Ages and the Crusades, in the period of the advance of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan, in the era when Spain was flattened and France half overrun, Europe had been the underdog and the loser because of a lack of unity—a failure to direct conflict feelings against the external enemy. Then, with the coming of the Renaissance, Europe turned outward toward the new worlds being discovered. The forces set in motion by discovery, in terms of space and ideas, galvanized the Continent. As Denis de Rougemont has said, “Their [the Europeans’] fusion produced energy so great that it had to spread to the entire planet. First, it was a conquering energy, belligerent and business-minded out of necessity, spiritual by vocation and then unifying. Europe did not merely discover the world; it practically made the world.”

Europe’s lapse in 1913, its plunge into suicidal strife, was the strangest crisis of our civilization. The retreats and nihilism that have followed are the products of that breakdown.

The result, after 50 years, has been a transformation of power in the world. Today, power centers exist in lands that seemed hopelessly backward in 1913. After 500 years of slumber, China is reasserting power as in earlier dynastic periods. The Soviet Union, consisting of an Asian as well as a European component, is the second largest power center in the world. The Indian Union, despite its internal problems and stresses, looms large in global politics. Unstable, proletarian states such as Cuba and the United Arab Republic seem capable of far more decisive action than many of the old, stable states of Europe, economically recovered from World War II. Belgium in 1960 cast loose the vast empire of the Congo, under pressure from the United States. Meanwhile Cuba, which the United States seems impotent to handle, works hard to build a Communist political empire in South and Central America. France fought a war to retain Algeria and faced terrible opposition within and without. The United Arab Republic wages war in Yemen and receives massive financial aid for its economy from the United States while the Soviets supply weapons. The situation is such that the West is not only witnessing the establishment and strengthening of power centers that threaten its existence but is actively helping such centers augment their power. For the West, however, this is not just part of a bad dream; it is a reality. The West on many occasions seems determined to accomplish for itself a final ruin that the two wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 could not achieve. If there is not positively hurtful action, there is dangerous inaction. Thus the West fails to take pre-emptive actions against Communist China’s increasing nuclear arsenal, even though it now realizes that preemptive action against Imperial Japan would have been wise in the 1930’s.

In ignoring the power realities in this manner, the West—and this includes the United States—acts as though human nature had been repealed. It acts as though—indeed it openly professes that the good will of masses of people is more important than a solid advantage in terms of power. Thus we have the slogan that we must “win the minds” of the people. But the impossibility of doing this, in a period when nations practice thought control through news media, public education, and other instruments of policy, is ignored. The people who are developing new power centers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are not answerable to their peoples. The good will of the Russians toward individual Americans, for instance, has no bearing on the policies of the Soviet state. Writing in the Columbia University Forum, David Cort has pointed out, though many Westerners refuse to believe it, that “while there may be different kinds of power, power has always been and will probably always be a decisive element in human affairs.” Arnold Toynbee touched on this reality in another way: “Self-assertion is of the essence of life. This self-assertion is perpetually being challenged, because there are more self-assertive creatures than one.”

This is the real world of self-assertive creature against self-assertive creature; power center against power center. In this age-old struggle for power, the role of firepower has been and is crucial. Europe’s decline from the power it held in 1913 involved not only a kind of inner crackup but a loss of firepower, or failure to control the spread of weapons once exclusively in Western hands. The decline is involved also with the failure of the European powers to look ahead and master new forms of command and control in remote regions, to develop a combination of military and political warfare as scientific as the doctrines taught by enemies of the West in the Lenin institutes.

Historically, the evolution of the West has been deeply involved with the evolution of arms and military command systems. Professor Eddy Bauer, a Swiss military historian, has described the intimate relationship of the Roman legion to the overall Roman order:

Going no further back in history than the start of the Christian era, one finds that the Roman army held sway, guaranteeing order, security and peace throughout the entire Mediterranean world. The highly organized legions which, in the days of Augustus, numbered 30 major units all with interchangeable weapons, maintained the upper hand over such varied adversaries as Hannibal’s mercenaries, the Macedonian phalanx inherited from Alexander and the mass rising of Vercingetorix.

When the legions were reduced to half their former strength, and when barbarian contingents filled the ranks, Rome’s decline set in.  Thus Rome’s political crisis was essentially a military crisis.  Oddly, it was  not Rome’s military adversaries were so formidable in number and equipment.  The aggressors against Rome were generally few in number, but the defenders were even fewer.  Moreover, the Roman military machine was in disrepair many ways.  Once the barbarians broke through the empire’s outer defenses, they found little to impede them in the interior zones.  This contains a warning for Westerners who in recent decades have seen the “countryside” of the world conquered by Communist revolutionary forces as they prepare to ring the inner citadels of the West.

The influence of the weapons and military formations upon history has been enormous.  Hellenism spread over the ancient world because of the phalanx.  Military changes have brought about new social systems.  Consider the establishment of heavy cavalry units after Charlemagne’s time.  to ensure the availability of these shock troops, the calvarymen were granted the land which they held on the promise to render service to their lord.  It was therefore a military need that laid the foundation of the feudal system and new social relationships.  The employment of new weapons also has had the most striking effects on the lives of nations.  An example of this was the decision of Edward I to equip his infantry with a longbow capable of rapid fire.  This military instrument enabled the English to inflict terrible defeats on the French at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.  The ultimate in history-making through weaponry was the exploding of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The great expansion of the West form the sixteen through the nineteenth centuries can be attributed in large part to  the monopoly that the Western nations had on firepower.  They achieved a technological breakthrough on arms that allowed Europeans to penetrate and hold vast areas of the world.  But before the nineteenth century came to an end, there were signs that the non-Western world intended to obtain the West’s tools of power.  Gunrunners found markets from the Western territories of the United States to the grasslands of south-central Africa. Custer’s death at the Little Big Horn was symbolic of what would happen when backward peoples obtained modern weapons. In southern Africa, warlike Zulu obtained firearms and wiped out a British force at Isandilwana. Fanatic Moslems murdered Gordon at Khartoum in 1883. But European nations were strangely complacent about the non-Western world’s interest in modern arms. They were almost exclusively concerned with the threat they posed to one another.

The Japanese were the first of the non-Western people to realize that modernization meant the acquisition of contemporary weapon systems of great destructiveness. By acquiring a modern fleet and learning how to handle it expertly, the Japanese were able to virtually destroy Russian seapower in the Pacific at the Battle of Tsushima Strait. The Japanese learned their lesson well. From that time on, they knew that a greater empire could be built on greater firepower. Imperial Russia learned nothing, however. It failed to modernize its armed forces, with disastrous—indeed fatal—results for the Romanoff dynasty in World War I. Had the czars developed a modern military machine, it is questionable whether the Russian Revolution would have taken place or, if it had, whether it would have succeeded. It was the shock of defeat at the hands of the Japanese that did much to undermine the confidence of the Russian people in the imperial government.

The vital role of firepower in shaping history is still not recognized in many quarters. Critics of the American role in the Vietnam war repeatedly have come forward with the argument that you cannot bomb an idea out of existence. They have said that bullets will not stop revolutionary advances. In this connection, it is well to bear in mind the words of Professor Stefan Possony of Stanford University, that the Communist “use of violence must be preceded, accompanied, and followed by techniques aimed at demoralization and at preventing the enemy from using violence.” Thus while Communism is an armed doctrine and while Communist use of violence has given it all its victories, the Communists use their political “transmission belts” to convince Westerners that counter-force is futile. Nowhere in history, however, is there any substantiation for the belief that it is futile to try to stop force with force. Indeed it is the organization of violence in military systems that always has been basic in effecting change in the world. Pre-World War II China was under the influence of an idea—the idea of democratic development; but this did not prevent Japan from conquering large parts of China and, in World War II, coming close to ultimate victory. It was only the existence of superior American firepower—from the South Pacific to Hiroshima—that blunted the Japanese drive. And at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the United States unquestionably was able to bomb out of existence the Japanese idea of conquest of Asia and the Pacific world.

The underdeveloped revolutionary nations—Communist China is the prime example—profess to believe that firepower has only limited application. Their spokesmen have worked very hard to convince the West that this is true. Indeed China hopes that the war in Vietnam will convince Americans that their vaunted firepower is useless against a revolutionary enemy in the countryside. But the successes that the Communists enjoyed in the Vietnam war were not due to a failure of Western firepower but simply to the long delay on the part of the United States in utilizing its weapons on sufficient scale and against significant targets. It is true that there is a certain equality in warfare between the forces of advanced and underdeveloped nations when warfare is restricted to rifles, machine guns, and mortars. The absurdity of Western nations limiting themselves in this way should be obvious. It is as though Europeans had attempted to conquer Africa in the nineteenth century, using only spears instead of the repeating rifle and the Maxim gun. The real Western advantage is in area weapons, the delivery of immense firepower over large areas in which guerrillas find concealment. It is these weapons, of course, that are most bitterly campaigned against by the underdeveloped revolutionary states—understandably so as they are not prepared to counter these weapons.

But the Communist nations that are resorting to guerrilla war will have to reckon with the cybernetic revolution, that is, the control of machines by machines. The late Ralph McCabe touched on this in writing of the cybernetic revolution and backward nations:

Military applications are of critical concern now and will be more important if, as some observers predict, conflict in the world tends to increase with population. This would suggest that the variety of military applications also will increase.

Casualty-limiting applications are of first importance. In Viet Nam, the cost of locating guerrilla positions is high—in lives and time. A fleet of cybernetic automata, programmed to move out over a defined course and report on the presence of the adversary, would be more efficient than military patrol operations and less costly. Linked to artillery, this kind of cybernetic force would be a new weapons system—and a formidable deterrent.

With the development of electronic, infrared, and other sensors for detecting guerrillas, the underdeveloped revolutionary nations would lose one of their most important military advantages. Western firepower would gain in decisiveness.

What we have seen in recent decades is a narrowing of the military gap between the advanced countries and the underdeveloped revolutionary nations—partly because of the spread of automatic weapons to countries such as North Vietnam, partly because of the West’s decision to restrict use of its most powerful weapons, and partly because of the idea that firepower is not a particularly significant factor in history-making. But there is no assurance that the military situation will remain unchanged.

As mentioned earlier, the cybernetic revolution will affect military systems. The West may shed its mistaken sense of guilt over possession of area weapons. Finally, there may be a new appreciation of the role of firepower in affecting political decisions in the world. If we have eyes to see and use them, we will not be misled.

This is not to say that the clock will be turned back. It would be foolish to believe that the conditions of 1913 will be duplicated in 1973, let us say. The power centers that have grown up in Asia and Africa will continue to exist in one fashion or another. China has awakened and is unlikely to return to sleep in the foreseeable future. But the gains that the emerging nations have scored since 1945 may not be matched by further significant power gains. The West may regain much of its supremacy because of the technical revolution and because of the underdeveloped nations’ inability to pay for the latest stage of the industrial revolution.

It is clear that the United States, Canada, Australia, Western Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union will go through an immense amount of cybernetic change in the decades ahead. These countries have the economic resources to apply machines to the learning process and the storage of information, to the control of industrial processes and the management of transportation. They will be able to eliminate costly man-hours, lay aside the slide rule, subject agriculture to a precise new kind of direction, obtain optimum yields from natural resources, and install new controls over machine-tool industries such as shipbuilding. In short, the populations of the advanced countries will have a rapidly rising income and will be free for other tasks.

Countries such as China, Indonesia, India, and the parts of Africa where European leadership is absent, however, are decades behind the advanced countries in overall industrial development. Thus, after several decades, although the military gap between the advanced and preindustrial countries may have narrowed, the technological gap may well be further widened as a result of cybernetic change in the advanced countries.

The German Tribune has rightly pointed out that “a world power of today is a country that can muster the tremendous material means needed to make modern missiles and nuclear armament, air force, navy and army equipment with all basic formations, bases, ground installations, logistics systems; and, what is more, maintain them and modernize them continuously.”

The process of continual modernization will put the greatest strain on the revolutionary nations that have become power centers in recent decades. Thus, unless the advanced nations are brainwashed into believing that firepower is not decisive in history, the atlases of the 1970’s again may show the advanced states of the northern hemisphere occupying the central position.

Charleston, South Carolina

Contributor

Anthony Harrigan is Associate Editor, The News and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina, and a writer on military affairs for defense journals in the United States and abroad. As a correspondent, he has covered the war in Vietnam. He has lectured at the National War College and is a member of the Institute for Strategic Studies, London. Among his published books are Defense Against Total Attack and A Guide to the War in Viet Nam. His articles have appeared in Military Review, Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, Marine Corps Gazette, Australian Army Journal, Canadian Military Journal, Irish Defense Journal, Wehrkunde (West Germany), Révue Militaire Générale (France), Royal United Service Institution Journal, and others.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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