t significant weapon introduced in medieval times. So deadly was the crossbow that Pope Innocent II prohibited its use; so overwhelming in its power and lethal in its application that the pope declared that the crossbow was "hateful to God and unfit for Christians." (That was, until later, when it was determined that the crossbow was just fine to use in killing Muslims.) It was with the crossbow that the French opened their attack. Regrettably for the French, their commanders weren't keeping up with the technological advances of their enemy. The English, under Edward III, had developed the longbow as a military weapon in preparation for their invasion of France. The longbow had greater range than the crossbow, so when Genoese crossbowmen let their arrows fly, they fell harmlessly short of the massed Englishmen. In response the English archers let fly a devastating volley of arrows. At a cost of 43 Englishmen and "a few dozen Welsh," the English decimated the French, killing over 11,000 of them. Throughout the millennium this story of advanced technology playing a central role in subduing the vanquished repeats itself. In the summer of 1588, the Spanish Armada with its 130 ships and over 30,000 men greatly outnumbered Queen Elizabeth's navy. With only 34 warships the English relied on technological advantages in ship design that gave them superior speed and maneuverability over the enemy. Armed with another key piece of advanced weaponry, the long-range naval cannon, the English navy could attack the Spanish decisively without having to rely on the accepted method of grappling the enemy ship alongside and boarding the enemy vessel for a final fight with naval infantry. On July 29 alone, the Spanish suffered over 8,000 casualties, their fleet all but destroyed. The British lost none of their ships and only 60 men. More destructive force, but less death?
These kinds of overwhelming results at sea, along with similar ones on land, contributed to the notion that was widely accepted well into the 1600s that gunpowder had, in fact, made war more civilized by limiting casualties. The great English poet and Anglican priest John Donne once wrote, "[T]hey have found out artillery, by which wars come to quicker ends than heretofore, and the great expense of blood is avoided; for the numbers of men slain now, since the invention of artillery, are much less than before, when the sword was the executioner." Later, the advent of the submarine, the machine gun, and the tank-each dependent on many scientific developments in metals, propulsion, and weapons-all represented technologies that, when first introduced onto the battlefield, gave an enormous advantage to the side that was able to exploit these new capabilities. Other subsystems and technologies had similar effects. The steam engine and its successor, the internal combustion engine, shaped every facet of warfare and ultimately allowed the development of the airplane. The lessons of the last thousand years stand out clearly as guideposts for the new millennium. Their policy implications are unmistakable. The central lesson is that technological advantages are never enduring. Either the enemy over time comes to possess the same technology, negating the superior position of the one combatant vis-à-vis the other, or some additional new scientific discovery negates, supplants, or otherwise overwhelms the capability of the first. Won't last forever
To assume a technological advantage will be exclusively yours in perpetuity is folly. As overpowering as the longbow was in the early part of the millennium, it has no place on the modern battlefield. Current technological advantages enjoyed by the United States must be guarded jealously, but at the same time the government and defense establishment must take the long view. America's advantage in stealth technology in the short term is, for the moment, overpowering, but we must assume that new technologies of detection will render current stealth aircraft unprotected at some future date. After all, the unassailable position of the United State