“In antiquity, when you divided the number of people fighting by the area they would typically cover, on average it would take a Greek hoplite and five hundred of his buddies to cover an area the size of a football field. This is why in movies like Spartacus or 300 you can see teh entire army during a battle. By the time of the American Civil War, weapons had gained such power, distance, and lethality that roughly twenty soldiers would fight in that same space of a football field. By World War I, it was just two soldiers in that football field. By World War II, a single soldier occupied roughly five football fields to himself. In Iraq in 2008, the ratio of personnel to territory was roughly 780 football fields per one U.S. soldier.
During World War II, roughly 108 planes were needed to take out a single target. By the time of the airstrikes over Afghanistan in 2001, the ratio had flipped; each plane was destroying 4.07 targets on average per flight.”
Michael E. O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare
We have the technology to stretch our response to cardiac arrests.
We adopt tools that fit the task, and engage heroes who use these tools.
