The Physics of War: From Arrows to Atoms

  • Barry Parker
Prometheus Books: 2014. 9781616148034 | ISBN: 978-1-6161-4803-4

Head Strong: Psychology and Military Dominance in the 21st Century

  • Michael D. Matthews
Oxford University Press: 2013. 9780199916177 | ISBN: 978-0-1999-1617-7

Barry Parker's chronicle of the interplay between the military and science, The Physics of War, is largely a record of people developing more effective ways to kill each other. So it is poignant that Parker, a physicist, begins the book with a passage on a battle that took place more than 3,000 years ago in what is now Syria, a country in the middle of a bloody civil war threatening to draw in world powers. It seems that fundamentals of warfare have not changed, but with the advent of science and the creation of more-powerful weapons, the stakes are now higher.

Remote control of drones is one of the many contributions science and technology have made to war. Credit: MICHAELA REHLE/REUTERS/CORBIS

Physics, Parker argues, has enabled much of the killing. For thousands of years people have used its principles to build increasingly powerful weapons, even before they understood what made the devices work. Weapon by weapon, and in excruciating detail, Parker shows how a mix of tinkering, basic maths and physics — including, much later, nuclear physics — enabled the development of weapons of war, from the chariots of ancient Syria to modern thermonuclear weapons.

That is a lot of ground to cover, and Parker's book is best read as a primer for those interested in the science of weapons and their contributions to various battles. It is on less solid ground in helping us to understand when military leaders realized that advancing science as a discipline could aid warfare. At one point, for example, Parker writes that “Napoleon studied physics along with mathematics and astronomy in military school, and knew the importance of science to war”. In the same paragraph, however, he states that there is “no indication” that Napoleon “took a lot of interest in physics, or science, in general”.

By contrast, Michael Matthews' lively and engaging Head Strong makes the weighty argument that psychology is emerging as the science that will make the difference in twenty-first-century warfare. War is not just about killing, he argues; it is about understanding the enemy, and ourselves. Matthews, a military psychologist, makes a valiant case, noting how psychology has contributed to everything from selecting leaders to helping soldiers navigate foreign cultures. He predicts that it will one day help to produce drugs “capable of regulating the brain's response to combat stress”, perhaps eliminating post-traumatic stress disorder.

When Matthews writes about his own research on the psychology of soldier performance and leadership, or his experience as a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York, the book springs to life. He shows how psychological methods have challenged some of the military leadership's entrenched beliefs about gender, citing a study he was involved in that surveyed Air Force base commanders' attitudes about women. Almost every commander told a story of how the pilot of a crashed, burning aeroplane died because a female firefighter was not strong enough to carry him out. The story, Matthews later found, was apocryphal.

His larger point is how science, particularly psychology, can inform decisions about integration. In another example, he notes that West Point, which trains officers, targets women's enrolment at about 15% to reflect the ratio of women in the military. That sounds noble; but he notes that West Point tries (and has so far failed) to recruit African Americans at a rate reflecting their representation in the recruiting-age population. Were the same rule applied to women, he writes, they should make up half the class. West Point spokesman Francis DeMaro declined to comment on goals linked to gender or ethnicity, instead providing numbers on the most recent entering class (16% women, 10% African Americans) that seem to bolster Matthews's argument. “We strive to ensure our cadet population is representative of the soldiers they will lead,” says DeMaro.

Matthews stumbles a bit when talking about the importance of psychology in understanding foreign cultures. He praises the Human Terrain System, the well-intentioned but troubled US programme that embeds social scientists into teams that deploy with the military (see Nature http://doi.org/bxmgsw; 2011). Matthews engages in the same kind of oversimplification of cultural knowledge that underlies the problems facing these teams. He recalls how a US military commander in Iraq learned that arriving heavily armed at meetings with community leaders was a “major social blunder” (as it might be, of course, in most cultures).

By focusing on the progression of weapons, Parker misses the point at which physics was overtaken by other fields, including psychology, as disciplines crucial to warfare. But Matthews, in focusing so closely on current and future applications of psychology, omits mention of one of most important military psychologists.

In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency hired psychologist J. C. R. Licklider to create a behavioural sciences office. It was his unique insights into how man would interact with machine in the future that laid the foundation for ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Today, networked computers are as key to military command and control as they are to modern society. It could be argued that, thanks to Licklider, military psychology has already revolutionized war. Whether it will help the United States to win future wars is another matter.