Technology for nonviolent struggle

This is undoubtedly the greatest influence, covering as it does influences from a host of other factors from basic needs such as food and housing to commerce and culture (including art). Civilian interest groups, including corporations, governments and consumers, usually want technologies to serve their immediate purposes. In capitalist societies, cost in the market is a key consideration. This explains, for example, why most industries are not designed to withstand a military attack. (Only in a few countries, such as Iraq, Sweden and Switzerland, are some factories built underground or otherwise designed with military threats in mind.) In most countries, there are few stockpiles of food, goods or strategic minerals beyond what is dictated by the search for profits. Most road and rail systems are designed primarily for civilian purposes.

Military influences do have some influences on all these areas, but civilian influences are usually much greater. Military influence on technology is greatest in areas where there is little civilian interest, such as missiles.

Bureaucratic interests

Within the military and within military industries, officers, soldiers, managers and workers have jobs, status, authority, routines, standard ways of thinking, and emotional commitments. In other words, the current way of doing things is a way of life. Changes in technology also introduce the prospect of social changes. These social changes are likely to be welcomed by some and opposed by others, in ways that don’t necessarily correlate with military efficiency. In other words, vested interests within various bureaucracies constitute one influence on technological development.

Sometimes the main vested interest can be called conservatism, since it manifests itself as resistance to new technologies. For example, around 1900, when the new method of continuous-aim firing from ships was proposed, bureaucrats within the US Navy at first ignored and then did everything possible to discredit the method and delay its introduction, in spite of the fact that it was vastly superior to the existing method. The reason for the resistance was that the new method entailed changes in the organisation of tasks on board: it changed the arrangements in naval society.[31]

The introduction of the machine gun provides another example of military conservatism. It was vastly more effective than rifles and, because of this, threatened to make obsolete the traditional training and tactics based on beliefs in the importance of courage and quality of troops. Plentiful evidence was available of the superiority of the machine gun in various colonial wars, but these victories were attributed to white superiority over native peoples rather than to technological superiority. As a result, the implications of the machine gun for warfare were not grasped and integrated into military organisations and planning until well into World War I, when the suicidal implications of infantry attacks on positions defended by machine guns eventually became clear. Even in this situation, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed before commanders were willing to recognise the failure of standard methods.[32]

Another example is the US-produced M-16 rifle, which was the result of prolonged bureaucratic manipulation. Another rifle had been developed, the AR-15, which attained a high reputation among soldiers. However, Eugene Stoner, the designer of the AR-15, worked outside the Army’s arsenal system, and thus this rifle was a threat to the bureaucratic status quo. The AR-15 was subject to numerous design changes imposed by rigid specifications, many of which were irrelevant to practical conditions, such as performing in freezing temperatures. The design changes led to the M-16, which was much heavier, inconvenient and failure-prone, and led to more deaths in action. Soldiers who were aware of the problems with the M-16 wrote to their parents who in turn put pressure on Congress. As a result, the sabotage of the AR-15 was exposed in hearings of Congress.[33]

These examples are distinctive because strong bureaucratic interests favoured a clearly inferior technology for the purposes of warfare. However, bureaucratic interests are present at all times, and on many occasions they favour superior technology. This means that the adoption of a technology, whether technically superior or inferior, may have occurred in part because of bureaucratic considerations.

More generally, it is a reasonable assumption that military leaders will not voluntarily adopt any technology that undermines the need or rationale for their existence. As will be discussed later, even when nonviolent methods of struggle are superior in terms of reducing the threat from an enemy, militaries favour military methods. Military strength creates its own necessity, by posing a threat to other societies and stimulating military races.