Best Defense book excerpt — Ford’s ‘Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation’

Author’s note: Weapon of Choice maps military innovation from the battlefield to the bureaucrat, from soldier to scientist. In the process I show how power is distributed across the military-industrial complex, revealing that engineers and scientists are less important to innovation than had once been the case and that soldiers are now more exposed to the arms industry’s ambition to gold plate existing tech than develop something properly innovative. In this excerpt I argue that industry exploits infantry culture to shape soldier’s weapon preferences. — Matthew Ford

At 07.00 on 10 September 2000, elements of Britain’s 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (1 PARA), started their assault on positions held by a gang known as the West Side Boys in Magbeni, Sierra Leone. Armed with SA80s, a number of belt-fed 7.62mm GPMGs and various other pieces of combat paraphernalia, the soldiers jumped from the back of hovering Chinooks and landed chest-deep in a swamp. Though they knew they would land somewhere marshy, the troops of 1 PARA did not expect to have to carry their weapons above their heads as they struggled to reach dry ground. Once out of the wet, the objective was to support the SAS as they rescued members of the Royal Irish Regiment held hostage by the gang. Now carrying link ammunition covered in mud and grime, the GPMGs would be prone to stoppages at inopportune moments. Professional and well-trained, however, the soldiers of 1 PARA would be up to the task of suppressing any opposition from the West Side Boys.

Even though the Paras recovered from their initial surprise at landing in a swamp, a number of questions might be asked as to why they would take heavy and unwieldy equipment like the GPMG into the close and difficult terrain around Magbeni. A civilian analyst questioning this kind of decision might be accused of lacking the professional skills and experience to judge what’s appropriate in any one engagement. Soldiers have been ‘flesh witnesses’ and only they can really understand the situation that was faced.

Nevertheless, the decision to take the GPMG, poses an interesting set of tactical–technical questions about 1 PARA’s preferences. There were a number of contingent and practical considerations that framed weapon selection. Lighter 5.56mm support weapons like the belt-fed FN Minimi or SA80 LSW may not have been available or deemed insufficiently reliable. The choice of the GPMG, however, not only says something about how soldiers understood the tactical situation they faced but also to the way that these choices of weapon had been framed and constructed in the first place.

From the soldier’s point of view, a first order challenge lies in the professional desire to do the job properly. The soldier’s ability at fieldcraft and weapons’ handling speaks to this sentiment directly. The objective is to do the technical aspects of the job not merely correctly, but to do it with some ‘style’. To do this in battle, a place of well-documented chaos and sensory overload, demands a great deal of psychological and physical strength. In the circumstances, however, and as Robert Mason attests, there is a sense in which the act of doing something actually offers a feeling of being in control. Technologies that support this desire to ‘crack on’ and take action offer soldiers the opportunity to master events rather than be subject to them. More than this, those weapons that facilitate ‘cracking on’ and offer the chance to do so in ‘style’ shape technology preferences much more than users care to admit.

Recognising the opportunity that this presents, weapon manufacturers themselves have been very quick to identify new channels through which they can manipulate user preferences. In particular, manufacturers recognize that the user’s desire to be professional, offers an opportunity to turn soldiers into consumers, exploiting infantry preferences by direct selling. In relation to small arms, this starts with appeals to high status Special Forces units, units that have their own independent acquisition budgets, programs and means of selection. These influential units in turn frame the relative status and value of different equipment for the wider armed forces and stoke demand for technologies more broadly within the military.

In Weapon of Choice I explore how these insights into the shaping of soldiers’ preferences regarding small arms can be extended to examine the ways in which more sophisticated equipment is designed and selected. I ask how industry manipulates the decisions of the armed forces in favor of expensive equipment – an approach which arguably leads to a stagnating development cycle with NATO arms manufacturers who prefer to gold plate existing weapons systems rather than develop entirely new and innovative platforms.

(Excerpted with the permission of the publisher.)

Matthew Ford is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. He has a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London and is an Honorary Historical Consultant to the Royal Armories, a former West Point fellow and a founding editor of the “British Journal for Military History.

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