Git yer knuckles on
I first learned the words "conscientious objector" in high school. The ever present bogeyman of a looming draft was so near you could smell the ketones on his breath. I was raised on episodes of M*A*S*H and issues of Mother Earth News. There had been a very strong anti-gun sentiment in my home, so when war came near to calling up a draft, I knew that I didn't want to be too near. Obviously, I was never drafted, but it was notable that my time came to consider my personal military adventure, my social support system contrived my avoidance.

Nevertheless, I have engaged in a long-standing practice of studying war games. Chess and Risk and D&D in high school; Avalon Hill and historical war gaming in college; more recently, Civilization, Lords of the Realm and Rome: Total War. Many game theory and war strategy books have been read, with always a couple more "in-queue". War games are fascinating -- bloodless, repeatable, and (usually) non-destructive. The idea of war is intoxicating: war games allow for a scientific approach to tactics and create an entirely new comprehension of strategy, without the moral quandaries of actual death and deprivation.

This has lead to a my study of military force and activity as a component to my general historical research. In consequence, I have a lot more respect for some great generals of the past, and a lot less respect for others. In an odd way, my experiences with war games have allowed me to quickly absorb information about historical military encounters, and visualize how the various movements impacted one another. After a couple of rounds of Rome, I found interest in a tome on ancient warfare, and began to meditate upon the military spear.

The origins of warfare are, naturally, lost in the mists of prehistory. If we can draw some conclusions based on what we do know, it would be a fair assessment to say that warfare began as shouting matches that occasionally led to simple fisticuffs. Successive encounters built from there along a series of incremental advancements to the military we have today. First, each side tries to get more people involved in wrestling for their side, or incorporates rocks or sticks to add weight or leverage to their pummeling action. It's not long before folks are lining up together with spears and shields to face one another. 

It is remarkable that the primary development of warfare for thousands of years was based around the stick and not the rock.  In simple fighting, a rock is probably better than a stick for actually inflicting wounds. A swung stick might cause bruising, but its best purpose was to enforce distance between combatants, even to push them back. A 6m spear with sharp bronze or iron tip is a highly evolved stick. Most spearmen would hold the spear by the base 2 meters, leaving 4 meters of pokey stick jutting out. When several spearmen stood together in a line, they created an ominous line of force that could easily press back an unarmed mob. Development of spear strategies largely consisted of packing more spearmen closer together, such as the phalanx, where rows of spears, ten wide and ten deep, would be presented into a prickly hedge that could even force back cavalry.

The other thing you could do with a stick is throw it. The biggest problem is that your opponent is liable to throw it back at you. The Romans developed a heavy throwing spear called a pilum that consisted of a heavy iron tip fastened to a long shaft by a relatively fragile metal bar. When the hastati threw their pilum toward the enemy, any that weren't embedded directly into the enemy would have had their tips bent, making them unsuitable to be thrown back. The other answer to this problem was the development of the bow and arrow. Use of the special technology (the bow) to deliver these sticks (arrows) meant that it was unlikely that someone could retrieve an arrow on the battlefield and throw it to any effect.

The likelihood of return may be one reason most people didn't favor throwing rocks for combat. Rocks were better in the hand for close combat, and were only thrown by those with superior numbers. No doubt some early warriors shaped rocks into crude knives, and these shapes were gradually replaced and refined with bronze, then iron, knives and swords. Obviously speartips and arrowheads were developed from rocks, as well, but the additional leverage provided by sticks made these entirely different weapons. Once the rock took the place of the spear as a distance weapon, the stick lost most of its effectiveness on the battlefield.

Gunpowder allowed the rock, both large and small, to be used as a non-returnable offensive weapon. The advent of the flintlock and the cannon blustered in the face of thousands of years of strategy, decimating tight formations of spearmen, frightening cavalry units, and crumbling stone defenses like talc. Not since WWI has a horse or a sword found a successful place on the battlefield. Arrows and lances are absent, and with rare exception, few combatants today get close enough to their opponents as to even see them. The nature of modern warfare makes the heart yearn for the almost romantic challenge of hand-to-hand combat.

Whatever it is we think of war, the nature of war has changed so dramatically, so tremendously over the last century, that I tend to think that we still have not really adapted to the changes, culturally. We live in a time when robots are regularly dispatched to attack people as a matter of course. It's really hard to keep out of my head how close we are on an arc leading directly to a dystopia similar to those presented by the Terminator or Matrix franchises.