Progress?

Almost everyone is familiar with Moore's law: The number of transistors that can fit on the same size chip will double every two years. This has meant exponential growth in electronics as now we're dealing with some pretty big numbers, and doubling them creates numbers that require scientific notation because you lose your place in the zeroes following the 1.

Another application of this concept is in our ability to make war. According to P.W. Singer in his book Wired for War a Greek hoplite and 500 of his buddies could just about cover the area of a football field in antiquity. A commander could see his entire army along with the army of the enemy from a good vantage point. By the Civil War our weapons and methods had improved to the point where on twenty men could control the same area. By World War I weapon lethality was at the point that we could kill people we couldn't even see. Two soldiers with a machine gun could control the field. By World War II a single infantryman would be responsible for an area the size of five football fields. In 2008, in Iraq the territory for a single soldier was 780 football fields.

Air war has seen even greater exponential growth. In World War I, the pilots who mostly flew reconnaissance missions would occasionally drop a homemade bomb or hand grenade. On rare occasions it was effective. The entire air force never successfully neutralized a single target without infantry. By World War II we could actually take out a target with 108 planes. In 2008 Afghanistan, the average sortie of one aircraft destroys 4.07 targets. Many of those aircraft are flown by someone sitting in a single wide near Las Vegas.

There is also another sensitivity that has changed. In antiquity the bards reveled in the heroic deaths of the thousands and thousands, who at that time constituted a much larger percent of the population. Civilians were not customarily killed in battle. The losing side were just enslaved, ravished and systematically put to death or sacrificed by the victor. In the Civil War, 30,000 could die in a battle. Civilians might sit in a good spot to catch all the action. Sherman realized the only way to stop the Confederacy was to their supplies and sometimes their suppliers.  The First World War saw the death of millions and introduction of the term "collateral damage". Again in the Second World War millions died and the perpetration of civilian casualties was prosecuted by both sides as part of their overall strategy. The First Gulf War introduced a new concept: War where none of the "good guys" died in battle. Today, we go to great lengths to make sure the caskets coming home cannot be seen by camera crews. It took years for as many soldiers to perish in battle as civilians perished in the Twin Towers.

Writing this brought up a few realizations:

1. We value efficiency creating both life and death.
2. We continue to use sports in our analogies of war. Maybe this is because so many games came from training exercises for warriors and hunters. I can't think of a peaceful application of throwing a javelin. Somehow, seeing "no man's land" and "ground zero" as a football field makes it all seem less hostile.
3. There really are no "innocent" civilians any more. The Afghans supply the Taliban, our taxes and grandchildren's debt supply our military and mercenary.
4. The Predator drone seems like an effective response to the suicide bomber.
5. I had better say my prayers every night, because all it takes is a few empowered people having a bad day to create the post homo sapiens period of earth's history.