ad, 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 States as the only possessor of nuclear technology at the end of World War II lasted only until the USSR tested its first bomb in 1949. To cease looking for new emerging capabilities is to ignore the lessons of the past as well. The Airborne Laser (ABL)-a powerful laser mounted in a Boeing 747 airframe, capable of destroying targets like SCUD missiles from great distances-is an example of an emerging capability that represents a fundamentally new capability being brought to the battlefield. The other millennial lesson is not to make the mistake John Donne made and surmise that advanced capabilities have somehow made war less horrible because of the apparent decrease in the loss of life in combat brought about by new technologies. The gun camera footage piped into our living rooms by CNN from the latest air war over Yugoslavia demonstrates the danger. It is all too easy to become familiar with the videotaped image of a laser-guided bomb turning a black-and-white building into a puff of smoke. The action seems clean, straightforward, and since we don't actually see any people, the subconscious conclusion is that there aren't any present. We certainly are not advised that there were any people present. The danger is to see warfare as a video game and be seduced by the attractiveness of believing that you can secure foreign policy and national-security objectives with little to no cost in lives. It has become almost a big national video game. We must never forget that while it may look nearly antiseptic on TV, war (even from the air) is horrible-sometimes necessary, perhaps, but always destructive. Although we can't see the carnage though the images are flashed into our living rooms, the death and destruction are as real as can be. We should not make it seem less horrible, and we need to remember that more men, women, and children were killed in the wars of the 20th century than in any other 100 years since the Creation. We must be led by the imperative of Proverbs 20:18 as we face the new millennium and the certainty of 