The Seven Weapons That Changed The World

Artist's rendering of a Hoplite Phalanx

A Roman Ballista

An English Longbow.

A Union Spencer Carbine

A WWI Gas Attack

An American B-29, the heaviest bomber of WWII

An IED Explosion, Iraq.

The blood-spattered spectacle of 300 has done more than any film since Gladiator to rekindle American interest in Ancient warfare. The cartoonish depiction of the Spartan military alongside the incalculable vastness of Xerxes' army evokes martial thematics that stretch through film, literature, music, and culture to the earliest echoes of Western Civilization. In that sense, 300 is, in and of itself, a fascinating mirror through which to view our own military history. The images of war depicted in Miller's comic book and its film adaptation differ substantially from Hoplitic combat as it likely occurred during the fifth century BC; and through those differences the formative moments in the Western Military Tradition are laid bare.

The SciFi Channel published a blog entry recently which focused on the "Top 7 Weapons that Changed Warfare" but confined its analysis to the weapons of the middle ages for reasons neither altogether clear nor meaningful. Even so, military history is as much defined by technology and tactics; perhaps slightly more-so, as tactics themselves are dictated somewhat by the technological realities of the eras they confront.

To that end a more historically inclusive answer to SciFi's discussion is in order. Rather than focus upon a single moment or era in history, a more complete catalog might trace the entire Western military tradition from its earliest days in pre-Trojan Greece to the modern day.

1 - The Hoplite Spear

Hoplites and their spears effectively brought about an end to the despotic rule of Ancient Greece and created the modern infantry regiment as we think of it today. Almost every tradition of Western Warfare, from phrases like "standing shoulder to shoulder" to "brothers in arms" can be traced, in one sense or another, to the first time a band of peasants grew weary of rich men on horseback burning down their hovels and arrived at "pointed sticks" as an adequate solution to the problem. Massed formations with spears quickly evolved into the phalanx, the quintessential Greek infantry unit. Drawing its strength, at least in part, from numbers, the phalanx brought about some limited social change as well and encouraged denser urban populations to support larger infantry formations.

Calvary was generally loathe to approach a phalanx as the massed spears almost uniformly butchered all but the most heavily armored of mounts. Indeed the hoplite phalanx so successfully destroyed cavalry power in the region that hoplite combat itself developed into a system specifically attuned, not to combat with a mounted opponent, but another infantry force. As the Hoplite Spear lengthened to better confront other similarly armed foes, the importance of cavalry returned, though typically as an auxiliary to infantry combat. Indeed the hoplite spear would relegate cavalry to an supporting role for centuries to come with heavy cavalry reemerging as a principal fighting unit only in the late Roman Empire.

Honorable Mention: The Gladius

The Roman Gladius would ultimately conquer the known world several centuries after the rise of the Hoplite Spear. Even so, the legion never abandoned the tried and true techniques of phalanx combat. The most senior and experienced of Roman warriors made up the Triarii , a unit of the legion armed with shields, spears, and armor reminiscent of techniques and tactics of centuries before. Rome's legions faced the shield rows and bristling spears of Carthaginian hoplites in the Punic Wars; and while the Carthaginians would eventually fall before the legion, the weapons and tactics first perfected in Greece served well against the Romans on all but the most uneven of terrain.

2 - The Ballista

Though Rome put armies to the sword, it conquered cities with its engineering prowess. In the hands of the omni-competent Augustine legion, the ballista provided Rome the means to topple cities, crush fortifications, and besiege whole nations. The versatile weapon proved the backbone of the Roman siege engine and toppled even mighty Jerusalem in its heyday. The Roman Ballista was highly accurate, portable, and could be constructed rapidly and on the site of a siege. The result was an inexpensive weapon equally suited to siege support and battlefield deployment.

Ballistas changed the way nations did battle and brought siege into the forefront of western war. While Rome's engineering might came hundreds of years after the siege of Troy, her armies proved themselves more than capable against fortifications and walls many times stronger and better defended than those of Troy.

Honorable Mention: The Trojan Horse

Though exaggerated and distorted through centuries of storytelling, the Trojan Horse nonetheless represented a major leap in military tactics and strategy in its time. The famous wooden steed was very likely not a weapon of stealth and cunning at all, but an early siege tower. The walls of Troy, though vaunted in the Homeric Epic, appear somewhat less impressive in the archaeological record. Troy's fortifications, modest though they were, proved able enough against the Greek armies which were neither well equipped or tactically prepared for siege warfare as the Romans would later think of it. A primitive siege tower as the Trojan Horse very likely was, served to turn the tide in the battle. The rest is, as they say, history.

3 - The Longbow

Bringing ranged combat to the common man, the longbow did for the middle ages what the Phalanx did for ancient times. Once again the heavy armor and expensive weapons of the military elite were humbled before the awesome power of motivated soldiers with simple weapons. In the centuries following the fall of Rome the arts of metallurgy and the sophisticated infantry weapons that made Rome mighty were lost throughout Europe. Military power once again concentrated in the hands of those wealthy enough to afford the heavy weapons, mounts, and attendants necessary to engage in heavy cavalry combat. The Longbow reversed this trend, and in capable hands this inexpensive piece of yew could fell even the most heavily armored of knights.

The longbow is still used by modern hobbyists, though the military-grade pull of the English Longbows used at Againcourt by the armies of Henry IV is much reduced in most modern reproductions. Though the longbow would eventually be replaced in the militaries of Europe by firearms, the two existed side by side for some time. The longbow, most famously used in the Hundred Years War (14^th and 15^th Centuries) was preferred in terms of cost, accuracy, and volume of fire to contemporary matchlock firearms.

Honorable Mention: The Caravel

The longbow was also a contemporary of the beginnings of the European Colonial Surge. A short 80 years after the battle of Againcourt, Christopher Columbus would make landfall in the New World. Improvements in European naval technologies made his journey and those of his contemporaries possible - allowing for greater range, better navigation, and superior survivability at sea. Though the Caravel and the naval technologies that accompanied it to the four corners of the earth certainly changed the world - naval combat itself changed little with the expansion of European naval power.

4 - The Spencer Carbine

First developed during the civil war, the Spencer Carbine changed the way firearms were used in combat and evoked the mobile and highly agile military we consider typical of infantry forces today. Spencer Carbines allowed for a much larger volume of fire, introducing the importance of covering fire and multiplying the importance of a small unit. Moreover, the weapons obviated the need for the massed firing formations common in firearms based conflicts previous to their introduction. First introduced during the American Civil War, these carbines saw limited deployment, though they stood witness to a change in tactics and strategy long since overdue in Western War. By the end of the war, the Confederate Army, once trained to fight in the straight lines and frontal assaults expected of a Western power, had turned to entrenchment, fortification, and bombardment to hold off the superior arms and equipment of the Union Army.

Like the weapons before it, the repeating rifle's significance stems from the changes in doctrine and tactics that followed its development. With a single solider now capable of delivering a more rounds down range and able to spend a smaller percentage of his time loading his firearm, a unit equipped with Spencer Carbines no longer needed to fire en mass to sustain a reasonable volume of fire. Moreover, the ceaseless hail of bullets from a small group of soldiers could effectively force opponents to cover, bringing an end to the 19^th Century tactics that were in use throughout most of the Civil War. Lee's soldiers began their fight as their European forefathers did and ended it as their grandchildren would, 60 years later, in the trenches of France.

Honorable Mention: The Mine Ball

Though the Confederate Army feared "the Union rifle you [could] load on Sunday and shoot all week," the vicious brutality of the Civil War came, not from sophisticated Northern rifle actions, but from the simple invention of a French Army Captain. The Minié ball (or minie ball) is a muzzle-loading rifle bullet with a cavity towards the rear of the projectile. As hot gas from the exploding black powder fills the cavity, the soft lead of the bullet expands and engages the grooves of the rifled barrel. The result is a bullet with the accuracy of a rifled round but with the loading advantages of a smooth-bore projectile. Minie balls extended the range of both Union and Confederate firearms by as much as three times, forcing considerable revisions in infantry tactics over the following 50 years.

5 - Gas

Lee's army was forced into trenches by the repeaters of the north and the trench tactic would persist throughout the next 50 years until its confrontation with the dawn of industrial war. WWI saw the first use of gas weapons in large scale infantry combat. The result was a complete inversion of the defensive tactics favored by military thinkers for the previous half century. Gas weapons destroyed the tactical advantage of the defender and would eventually force infantry combat out of the claustrophobic trenches made necessary by the high rate of fire brought about by the repeating rifle.

Military thinkers entered the First World War with the assumption that the weapons and tactics of the era favored the attacker. Machine guns, heavy artillery, and the breach loading rifle would all bring about a fast moving war in which the first blow was decisive. The tactics pioneered by Lee, however, would prove the equal of the Maxim Gun, and the war in Europe rapidly degenerated into a hellish nightmare of blood, mud, fire, and death. With miles of trenches supplied by supporting trenches and auxiliary trenches, machine guns and artillery proved most effective at cutting down futile offensives and shattering the minds of a generation of young men.

Poison gas proved an effective and brutal weapon in the stalemate with results so devastating that it remains a banned weapon to this day. First used by the German Army at the battle of Second Ypres, gas brought unconventional weapons to the tactical engagement and tipped the strategic balance away from the defender if only slightly. Gas again forced a change in tactics, requiring infantry to once again embrace mobility or face the choking fumes of a gas attack.

Honorable Mention - The Machine Gun

The Maxim gun was to the repeating rifle what the Spencer Carbine was to the flint and cap-locks it replaced. The Maxim, or Machine Gun, fired a ceaseless stream of bullets, enabling a single solider to rake large formations of the enemy and hold a position against a numerically superior foe. In the trenches of the first world war, the Machine Gun demonstrated its defensive prowess. Though responsible for much of the carnage and horror that was World War One, the machine gun represented a substantial technological leap rather than a military one. Tactically speaking, Maxim's gun did what the repeating rifle and the Gatling Gun did - only better. It was a difference that cost untold thousands of lives in the trenches of France, but one that did not elicit a massive change in tactical and strategic though so much as encourage what was already underway since the 1860s.

6 - Airpower

Though tanks would eventually compliment the mobile post World War One infantry it was air power that defined World War Two as the first completely mechanized war. At sea and over Europe, aircraft expanded the battlefield both into the sky and well beyond the front lines. War came out of the night, without remorse or the warning of an approaching army. Airpower made total war possible on the mechanized scale and allowed the dawning of the Atomic Age itself - bringing about the notion of strategic warfare and the possibility of annihilation.

Most iconically during World War II, the bombers of the Luftwaffe and the Allies brought the war to the home-front. Strategic bombing made war a national hardship and spread the threat of violent death away from the front lines and into the most remote reaches of the embattled nations. Simultaneously, air power reshaped the tactical environment as well. Radio communications enabled the beginnings of combined arms doctrine as soldiers were able to radio for limited air support. Air superiority became a major tactical advantage for the first time in combat and the results paved the way for the informational wars of the 20^th century.

In the Pacific, aircraft redefined the nature of naval combat. Carriers became the flagships of a new naval doctrine - projecting power on the wings of light bombers and attack craft, the carrier effectively ended the era of the battleship, while bringing the threat of naval power to inland cities and other landlocked targets.

Honorable Mention: The Enigma Machine and the U-Boat

Carriers were not the only revolution in 20^th century naval combat. The submarine, first developed in the 19^th century, saw use in both world wars. Submarines brought stealth and a hunter's ethos to the world of naval warfare and their ability to control territory through threat rather than presence altered the dynamics of resupply and transport in time of war.

World War II saw far more effective use of submarine warfare, particularly in the Kriegsmarine, and effective coordination of submarine forces using encryption technologies best embodied in the famous Enigma Machine. The first modern application of informational warfare, the Enigma and its allied counterparts defined the beginnings of modern signals intelligence. Enigma made secure communication with U-boats (almost) possible and allowed the Nazi government to leverage the effectiveness of distant assets rapidly and secretly based upon new information and intelligence.

7 - The IED

Cliche? Perhaps. But the IED represents a formative reaction to the overwhelming dominance of American air power. Though explosive booby-traps were used to great effect in the Vietnam war,IEDs are a generation beyond their crude 1960s predecessors. Brought about through advances in compact radio communication and tactical necessity, the IED allows precision bombing on an insurgent budget. As may IEDs are triggered remotely by an observer, the bombs may be placed in crowded areas and detonated only when the desired target is within range. Moreover, the IED's flexibility in the tactical environment allows it to effectively engage targets from heavy armor to foot patrols while allowing the user the advantages of stealth and anonymity.

These factors have resulted in a major change in the tactical environment, making the IED an ideal weapon for resisting an occupation. IEDs force an occupying military into a constantly defensive and besieged posture, reversing the traditional roles in an occupation. Moreover, IEDs undermine an occupiers efforts, both socially and militarily, by actively attacking the presumption of power and dominance held by an occupying force. In that sense, the IED is as much as psychological as physical weapon, directly undermining the overall strategic goals of an occupying army.

Honorable Mention: The Cruise Missile

If the IED is the poor man's precision guided munition, the Cruise Missile is the rich man's suicide bomber. Cruise Missiles are a weapon whose day is yet to come, but which hold promise as a revolutionary force both in land and sea battles. Recent Russian innovations in ballistic missiles have incorporated a cruise stage into the delivery system, effectively invalidating advances in Anti-Ballistic Missile technology. Simultaneously, Cruise Missiles played an important part in the Falkland's War, and are likely to have increased significance in future naval combat as an anti-carrier weapon. Depending upon the outcome of the growing tensions with Iran, Cruise Missiles may one day be viewed as the revolutionary military technology of the 21^st century - or perhaps that distinction will fall to another, as yet unknown, innovation.

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