The Last of the Doughboys Talk About World War One While We Think About How 3D Printers May Change the Nature of Future Wars

Readers of WARN know that World War One has been my grognard topic of study for these last few years.

I started out with the Harlem Hellfighters, then watched Boardwalk Empire while jotting down notes about how great a resource that TV show is for understanding how race was made during the first part of the 20th century, and then kept reading more about the Great War.

I received a very good public education in high school; that education would have been much improved if we were taught something about how World War One helped to make the present. 

In keeping with my habit these last few weeks, here are a several "found topics" that I would like to share with all of you around the above theme for the weekend.

The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin is a great book which quite literally lets the veterans who fought in World War One speak to us. 

Other voices from the past can speak to us too. To point. African-Americans who were slaves in the 19th century can be heard here. 

Listening to the veterans of World War One speak touches me in a related way: have we forgotten the horrors of industrial warfare, just to have curiosity encourage us to fight on a mass scale as nation states again using technology that the iron mongers would like to see in action just to satisfy their own morbid curiosities and fatten their wallets?

In an era of unmanned aerial vehicles, resource scarcity, and lessons learned from fighting a counter-insurgency campaign for more than ten years in the Middle East, what will future wars look like for the United States? 

The public assumes American dominance on the battlefield; the experts know better given that her military has not fought a peer competitor in many, many, many years.

Wars, conflicts, battles, and engagements, of maneuver which feature coordinated armor, infantry, artillery, and integrated air support are not the past-present. They are the future. And the United States military is quite rusty in using those most basic of skills.

The book Fighting the Future War is a great read. It is a compilation of science fiction stories from the first three decades of the 20th century, and how their authors thought about "the future". Fighting the Future War contains stories about sentient robots, giant mecha, poison gas, electricity guns, and all manner of dystopic predictions. More than a few of the chapters resonate because of how useful they are for imagining our present 21st century.

3D printers are all of the rage among hobbyists, geeks, and first adopters who are trying to prepare themselves for a future of self-reliance in an era of resource scarcity. I remember first reading about 3D printers in Omni magazine while in elementary school. I was so impressed by how a fax machine-like device could "print" wrenches and other tools for researchers and explorers at the South and North poles. It was like Star Trek made real. 

We get old pretty fast, do we not? Such technology is now maturing. Just as it could help with space exploration, 3D printers will also complicate war-fighting by making logistics and supply chains much easier and simplified.

Writing for the Armed Forces Journal Lt. Commander Michael Llena highlights some of the possibilities:

Three-dimensional printing, a fast-moving technology that is still in its infancy, promises to upend the way we think about supply chains, sea basing and even maritime strategy. But it also requires us to think hard and carefully about the threats it enables and the vulnerabilities it introduces. 

As Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Neil Gershenfeld puts it, the revolutionary aspect of 3-D printing is that it allows us to make things into data and data back into things. For the Navy, the technology promises to shift inventory from the physical world to the digital one. Instead of actual parts, a ship might carry 3-D printers and bags of various powdered ingredients, and simply download the design files needed to print items as necessary. 

Certainly, today’s ships and subs are not going to make everything they need on board, although it is tempting to imagine better uses for freed-up storage spaces. Today’s printers are generally limited to printing parts made of just one material, and variance is a big issue. But the development of multiple-material devices is well underway, and the technology is racing ahead. Perhaps closer at hand is a distributed global production network in which sailors and Marines send an email with a digital scan or design for a part they need and have it created at the nearest certified printer. 

Thinking bigger, the fleet might convert some Military Sealift Command ships into floating factories that can take print-on-demand orders from the battlegroup. 

The things that might be ordered go far beyond mere parts. Several university labs and at least one defense contractor have turned out UAVs comprised entirely of printed parts, excepting the motor and electronics. A Virginia Tech lab that started printing on a Friday had by Sunday completed an aircraft that could be folded up and stored in a backpack.

3D printers will also introduce their own challenges: how do you supply the resources necessary for those devices to keep functioning? Will that resource chain then become a target like any other, which protecting, will take more than the equivalent resources of what 3D printers can produce in terms of supply?

World War One was, like the Civil War on a smaller scale, an industrial war. What happens when relatively cheap technology like 3D printers are introduced?

3D printers would appear to be a force multiplier for both the attacker and the under-resourced defender if they are similarly equipped. 

World War One, quite literally, ate human beings alive. 

Could 3D printers and other related technology represent a similar paradigm shift that the general public and many war planners are not prepared for? And just how inaccurate are our predictions of future warfare more generally?