Back to the Future? Parallels Between Modern Military Automation and the Stirrup
Today, we appear to be witnessing a seismic shift in the technologies of warfare, one on a level not seen in centuries. The integration of automated systems and AI into combat platforms is, at the very least, as consequential as the advent of aerial warfare. However, there is a strong argument to be made that it is already proving as consequential as the advent of gun powder and the stirrup.
In those prior two cases, changes in military technology radically altered society and the rights and roles of the citizenry for centuries.
With the stirrup, it became possible for small, elite cadres of professional soldiers to master much larger mass mobilized armies. The age of heavy infantry and the citizen soldier came to a close, and the (incredibly expensive, and trained from birth) mounted knight reigned over the battlefield for a millennium. This was a key factor in the shift towards feudalism and the rule of a (then hereditary) military elite. It wasnât the only factor, but it is perhaps the defining one. The capabilities and needs of the heavily armored, professional knight shaped society for centuries.
Political Consequences: Rights Grow from the Barrel of a Gun?
With the advent of gun powder and small arms, mass mobilization was once again on the table. To win wars required mobilizing a large portion of the citizenry. This incentivized larger, centralized states. As military technology advanced, this also meant that economic development mobilization became crucial to winning wars. It was this sort of incentive that was the primary driving factor behind the expansion of universal compulsory education in the West (i.e., to form good conscripts and factory hands) for instance.
In this new environment, many historians argue that the citizens were able to win increased rights because they now held leverage over the survival of the political and economic elite. So too, economic liberalization (a path to economic growth) became a means of building military power. Indeed, in some cases, most notably China, liberalization was pursued explicitly in service to these sorts of ends.
However, what weâre seeing in todayâs wars is more akin to the shifts the stirrup brought. Mass mobilization, the mass production of relatively simple tanks, bombers, etc., is no longer the rule of the day. Specialists are required to produce todayâs technologies. New technologies also allow much smaller, expensively equipped professionals to dominate the battlefield. This tendency seems likely to increase dramatically as AI target recognition continues to get better for spotter drones, and automated artillery systems become the norm, allowing for extremely accurate and rapid fire missions. Artillery has long been the number one killer on the battlefield, and it is a sea change to be able to launch tiny spotters that let you place smart munitions directly onto even moving targets at a rapid pace.
In the battlefield environment that these technologies will create in the relatively near future, the style of war fighting that dominated from the Second World War through the Cold War will become as suicidal as line infantry assaults after the advent of the machine gun. If you donât have a layered interception umbrella, ground forces are going to be picked apart. But this also means that wars will now center around extremely sophisticated, high tech equipment that is best operated by increasingly smaller cadres of career professionals.
What does this mean for the citizenry? Well, if the thesis that citizens tended to win rights by being essential for national and elite survival are correct, then perhaps nothing good. What happens when the average citizen is irrelevant to a nationsâ military success, or when their economic output is increasingly irrelevant as well?
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander remarks that the problem for African Americans is no longer that the leadership class wants to exploit their labor, but that their labor has become increasingly irrelevant, so that, as a class, they become seen more as a problem to contain than as a constituency whose support needs to be fostered. That sort of relation could be more the âcanary in the coal mineâ for the age of automation.
As Gibbon remarked, the professionalization of Romeâs legions near the death of the Republic: âelevated war into an art, and degraded it into a trade.â Across all liberal democracies we have seen this same shift from citizen soldiers to professional warriors, and technology will only exacerbate this trend.
Internal Security: The Panopticon
Finally, one might turn to internal security. Here too, technology is changing things. New technologies of surveillance, best exemplified in Chinaâs various minority repression campaignsâwhich now involve genotyping, facial recognition, near universal camera coverage in urban areas (true of the West as well), and the ability to comb through all this video and other signals intelligence with AIâall would seem to make organizing effective internal resistance increasingly difficult. That is, the same sort of relationship appears. A small, elite, technologically enabled force is able to effectively dominate internal security spaces as well.
There are, of course, potential upsides to this. Wars may kill far fewer people. Collateral damage can be reduced more effectively. Internal security technologies, and the ability to identify suspects, has many positive uses (just think of all the cold cases solved with DNA technology or ubiquitous camera coverage). Itâs just that, given the current economic and political situation, itâs hard for me to envision these shifts largely resulting in positive outcomes.
Economic Similarities to the Middle Ages
Here, another similarity to feudalism emerges. In an automation economy, the primary source of income isnât labor, but the ownership of capital. This tended to be true in the Middle Ages as well. There was a surplus of labor. Power flowed from the ownership of capital, and military power was downstream of this. Further, the heavy focus on natural monopolies in todayâs markets means that deriving rents tends to define elite income more than production (e.g., Amazon is a great example).
Across the worldâs liberal democracies, the labor share of income (the total amount attributable to working, versus income of capital investment) has been declining for over half a century straight. But automation will surely accelerate this, and so we may soon live in a world where most income comes from capital, not labor. In the US, it has plunged to about 50/50, which explains why the top 10% wealthiest households account for half of all consumer spending (and indeed, the top 10% also own 90% of equities).
Itâs questionable then, how liberal values, already unmoored from their metaphysical and religious roots, survive in an economic and military (and so geo-political) environment that seems hostile to them.
Maybe another data point for Alasdair MacIntyreâs call for a new Saint Benedict, or something like Asimovâs Foundation.