Chapter 5 Research Series: The Dinosaur Juice Killing Spree

5.1 Energy and The Periodisation Problem

This lecture will introduce an alternate form of historical periodisation, drawn from the history of energy production and use, and changing prime movers - the humans, animals, and technologies doing the majority of the work over time. The lecture will recap Vaclav Smil’s work on the topic, but the emphasis will be on identifying congruence and incongruence with periodisations of military history. If energy and productive work is so central to everything humans do, how come warfare doesn’t necessarily change in step? In particular, we will be discussing the role of categorising warfare in the mid-late 19th and early 20th century, and the emergence of “total war” between nation states. We will compare the use of cut-off dates and the onset of wars and peace with the changing patterns of use of fossil fuels identified by Smil.

• Discussion Question:
  • What concept/proces best describes transitions between patterns of warfare?
• Reading:
  • Smil, Vaclav. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, (2017). Chapters 4 & 5 (That’s like 170 pages of reading, so do it over Christmas!)
  • Lee, Wayne E. Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History. Oxford University Press, (2016). Chapter 12

5.2 War Either Side of The Great Transition

Vaclav Smil refers to the transition from phytomass fuels to fossil fuels, and from animate to mechanical prime movers, as a great transition. In this lecture, we’ll be using this concept to analyse associated changes in the conduct of war. This creates an odd way of comparing the conduct of war, in that we’ll be comparing the conduct of war from the end of the phytomass fuel era, where humans and animals are still doing a lot of the work, to the earliest wars where we can say that the primary source of energy is generated by mechanical prime movers running on fossil fuels. Viewing the conduct of war in this way leads one to recognise the significant overlaps that can occur. After all, if we are looking for conflicts in which animate power is not a significant factor, then we would likely have to exclude World War 2, owing to the millions of horses used by parties to the conflict.

• Discussion Question:
  • When did the internal combustion engine fundamentally alter the character of war?
• Reading:
  • Smil, Vaclav. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, (2017). Chapter 6
  • Lee, Wayne E. Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History. Oxford University Press, (2016). Chapter 13

5.3 Prime Movers and New Domains of Warfare

One of the features of the fossil fuel era is that human beings have expanded their use of aircraft, and taken the first steps into space. Alongside this, we’ve seen the aerial domain become one of the most important domains of warfare, and major powers now rely upon space-based satellites for both intelligence gathering and military infrastructure.

This leads to an interesting question: how are these domains related to energy sources and prime movers? In this lecture we’ll be looking at the way prime movers both enable the exploitation of a domain, as well as how shifts in energy use and prime movers reshape human relations to different domains of warfare.

• Discussion Question:
  • Do technologies create domains of warfare?
• Reading:
  • Lee, Wayne E. Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History. Oxford University Press, (2016). Chapter 14
  • Johnson-Freese, Joan. Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Routledge, (2016). Chapter 2
  • Hallion, Richard. Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity Through the First World War. Oxford University Press, (2003). Chapter 16

5.4 The Nuclear Complication

This lecture addresses a key issue with periodising warfare in terms of fossil fuels and prime movers: nuclear physics. The discovery of nuclear fission and fusion enabled nuclear weapons, which fundamentally altered strategic competition and conflict between nuclear weapon states and their allies. The invention and development of nuclear weapons features as a significant shift in most histories of warfare and histories of technology. Does such a turning point in strategic affairs nullify the utility of periodising war in terms of energy sources? This lecture will cover the significant continuities and discontinuities of fossil fuelled warfare before and after the development of nuclear weapons.

• Discussion Question:
  • Does the destructive power of nuclear weapons matter more than prime movers?
• Reading:
  • Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, (2003). Chapters 1-6 (They are concise!)
  • Williams, Heather. “A Nuclear Babel: Narratives Around the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The Nonproliferation Review 25, nos. 1-2 (2018): 51–63.

5.5 War in the Anthropo-whatnow?

This lecture looks forwards to the future a bit. It’s a bleak one, since climate change is on track to kill a lot of people. We’re going to discuss the impact of high energy fossil fuelled society on the world, and the problems this poses for strategy. After all, we talk a lot about technology because for the last 100 years or so it has been the relatively unpredictable factor in a relatively stable natural environment, and the situation is going to be reversed in the near future, if it hasn’t been already. This lecture will cover some critical reframings of high energy society, notably the emergence of ideas of the ‘anthropocene’ where human impact on the environment is noticeable and sustained.

The second part of this lecture looks at the intersection of strategy and climate change, notably the key problem that fossil fuels are (with the exception of some nuclear powered ships) the defacto way of waging war. If war will continue, then so, too, will dependence on fossil fuels. Moreover, if we look to some of the emerging strategic problems in the future (for instance, conflicts over resource exploitation in the Arctic circle once the ice melts) we can discuss some of the problems of connecting climate change to strategic analysis. Lastly, we’ll finish by discussing how the periodisation of war and warfare around fossil fuels and combustion engines might help to connect strategic studies to climate change.

• Discussion Question:
  • Is it possible to imagine war after fossil fuels?
• Reading:
  • Smil, Vaclav. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, (2017). Chapter 7
  • Steffen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–67.
  • Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80.