Sir John Keegan’s modest, mighty book contains five chapters, each describing a separate age of human warfare. The first is a primitive state where monkeys who threw their shite at one another have descended and stood straight(er) to hurl spears and stones. This has its roots in predation and animalistic defense of territory. The Age of Stone begins when a few of these hominids, sick of being attacked or doing the attacking, begin to lay one stone on another and another and another and another proto-man comes and another and also lay stones until there is a wall. Fortification was the great weapon in the Age of Stone. This continued until the Age of Flesh; that would mean horseflesh mostly but also the Age of Flesh involves the invention of something you could call an army. Warriors at the command of a chief would include far more than his cousins. With hordes of this size and mobility the siege became possible, starving out the fortress masters or breaching their walls in massed attacks. Fourthly comes the Age of Iron, not meaning iron weapons although the era is about right. Rather this is the coming of iron discipline; think Greece, the Macedonians and Rome. The modernization of fighting comes naturally with the modernization of life. The art of fortification is mated to iron-willed and stone-hearted defense, counter-attack and long-ranging strategic forces executing sophisticated political solutions to domestic problems, often involving wealth and power being in the wrong hands. The Fifth Age, the one we inhabit now, is the closest they come to being well yclept. The Fifth Age is The Age of Fire.

You notice a good bit of overlap, there. Yes, very early man had fire and many a burning log was swung at many a head over the eons. Natural flammables like naphtha and pitch were used in war as soon as they were discovered, no doubt. But it wasn’t until the power of fire was concentrated down into a form where it could be stored, transported and then suddenly released in a targeted burst that fire took its place at the head and heart of warfare. That was gunpowder. First it was used to demolish forts, gear and men. Grenade charges were thrown at and tucked under the enemy. Then came the gun. The huge brass bombard cast by Mehmet to take down the walls of Constantinople announced the coronation. The gun has been the king of warfare ever since. That twenty-seven foot long cannon was scaled down and down until it could be put on a ship. Then it was trimmed until it could fit on a carriage. Then on a pole. Then it was shrunk until it could be held in two hands; then one hand. It became more reliable in wet conditions. It became more accurate and then able to fire quickly. Only now has the full maturity of Fire-based warfare really arrived in the appearance of the XM 25. That X will drop off once this thing goes into general use.

Read it and weep with gratitude that this dog is on our side! It is a grenade rifle shooting high-tech rounds that detonate from advanced miniaturized fuzes. The idea is that a wall will not be protection from fire because this will shoot over your little fort and pop above your head. That is a big, big leap and according to Michael Yon, Austin Bay and other writers with muddy boots, the boys who shoot and get shot at for a living think it is the cat’s meow. It fires a variety of ammo that let it do duty as a rifle, shotgun and riot weapon as well earning its name of The Punisher. Of course it uses an advanced computerized sighting system and puts practical fire power equal to a mortar squad into the hands of a single man. And with one variety of ordinance we step a toe over a line that we have been skirting for a long time. Also available for the XM 25 are thermobaric rounds.

Thermobarics. It is a term the spell checker does not recognize and almost certainly neither do you. There was a nasty thermobaric terrorist attack waged on America, did you know that? Probably not. This was the Time Square Bomber whose attempt turned out to be mistaken for a poorly attended home fireworks display. If you didn’t know that jihadis were doing field experiments with next generation munitions you may read about it here. The Daisy Cutter was the most notorious thermobaric weapon in the US arsenal until now. The Massive Ordinance Air Burst bomb got its nickname from the pattern of crushed flora left by its bite. The flattening effect could turn thick jungle into a dewy meadow if you didn’t look too hard. Now this nasty interaction of blast force mechanics and the air you might want to breath or just lounge in is part of everyday military armaments.

It is hard to conceive that the Age of Fire, that is the age of chemical explosives, could deliver any major innovations after this. What will happen is that this particular gadget, now costing many thousands of dollars to put into the field, will become cheaper with mass production and redesign of the ammo. The gun, after all, is a simple thing; little but a tube blocked at one end. A 25mm bore is something like a 10 gauge shotgun. Couldn’t ingenuity get the diameter down a bit? If so then every 12 gauge shotgun on the planet, and that is a lot, could be a dispenser of mayhem like the advanced experimental weapon, if a bit less accurate. But it all amounts to a refinement of the same old thing; fire as a weapon. Whether you are using it to hurl lead or torch a thatched roof the process is about the same, it’s all just oxidation of one speed or another. The thermobaric works as follows:

First there is a small charge that turns a liquid, gelatin or dust into a cloud. The cloud is then detonated. Instead of a single point source for the blast you get the shape of the cloud explosively expanded. With small payloads like these grenades carry you are probably looking at a diameter of 6 or 10 feet. If you are inside it you will be crushed and burned for good measure. If you are outside it there are some truly horrible effects as well. First off the burning will have consumed all the oxygen around. If you’re outside that will rush back in pretty quickly but that’s not so good either. You see when the thermobaric cloud explodes and expands it only does so for an instant. What is left is a near vacuum so you can enjoy the effects of explosive decompression in the safety and convenience of earth’s atmosphere, which then comes rushing in. That rebounding effect can pull your lungs right through your throat, burst your eyes if you are not close enough for that and burst your ears if you are further still. The reasons these weapons, invented in the Viet Nam era, have hardly been fielded are obvious. These things could leave a wake of hideously disfigured walking wounded that would make the marches of blinded doughboys look like a conga line. And it is indiscriminate to say the least. A competently aimed bullet can take down the Bad Guy and leave his good wife to do the cleaning up. Not so here unless she is out back. The effect on structures is awesome as well. Firing a thermo round into a house of stud wall construction would collapse it in on itself as if it were crushed under a twister. This family of weapons has been considered just too powerful for war! Well, up until lately.

Fire has finally come of age which means its age is rapidly coming to an end. That doesn’t mean guns are out. There is still going to be a great struggle between the dumb gun, epitomized by the AK family, and the smart gun. The modern site you see on every rifle in Iraq or Afghanistan represents a hybrid of high tech and medium tech. With night vision and other targeting equipment, our boys are toting not-too-dumb guns. The XM25 is the pretty smart gun and with its integrated computerized fire control it gives us a hint as to what might replace the greying Age of Fire.

Terminator and Matrix fans won’t be too surprised if the replacement is something like The Age of Thought, where orders are given to machines, or things we couldn’t imagine that will act like machines. Or perhaps The Age of the Atom, such a slow starter, actually will rise to its movie-based reputation. Let us hope not. Genetics also offers a route to a new conception of warfare that we could hardly recognize as such. The Age of Viruses could come to full might without anyone knowing about it. An Age of Energy might bring us lasers with a range only limited by the earth’s curvature. Or perhaps we are already in the new age, in our dimly lit and poorly recorded struggle with jihad, and all warfare exists within a permanent Age of the Spirit. It could be that the fundamental process of war is only now re-asserting itself. Could all man’s struggles really go BACK to the ancient, unmediable issues of whose god sits in the sky? It seems this is so no matter what sort of implement or technique of murdering one’s opponents might be employed. If this is, as Bush was wont to say, a decades long struggle, we might be nearly at the middle or we might be barely at the beginning. With thermobarics it seems certain that we are at the limits to what Fire can do. When it is the common weapon of war we will again see wars true, forgotten face which is exploded, still and burnt.

 

 

 

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