Of course, in military strategy and technology, the unseen can sometimes be as important as the visible. Galileo’s experiments overthrew common sense; military experts today have to question acquired wisdom.
Up until Galileo, everyone knew that the heavier an object was, the faster it fell. Indeed, the principle was so well accepted that few people ever bothered to check. It was Galileo, however, with his experiments using inclined planes and rolling cylinders, who showed that falling objects fall with the same speed independent of their masses. This salutary lesson in the risks of assuming something to be true because many people believe it to be so has very real implications for the military strategist today.
Similarly, “ether” was also the scientific thought of its time. Since light was known to travel in waves-much like sound needed a medium, they reasoned. However, the experiments of Michelson and Morley in 1887 proved that light, too, travels through a vacuum, and the concept of ether had to be set aside. It was a classic lesson in the history of physics: established ideas have always to be questioned and should be supported by sturdy experimentation.
These theories have interesting parallels in the military context. Astrophysicists several decades ago realized that outer stars of galaxies were moving too fast to be held by gravity from their galactic cores. The hypothesis of dark matter was hypothesized to be an undetectable substance providing the missing mass. Considering all the efforts, including the Large Underground Xenon experiment, no direct evidence of dark matter has yet been found. That is similar to how the military works out the detection and study of new kinds of warfare and technology.
Another exciting case involves dark energy. During the late 1990s, a surprise observation was made by astrophysicists: the rate at which the universe expands was accelerating. This gave way to the speculation of some form of occult energy that exerts an “anti-gravity effect.” The Nobel Prize in Physics was given in 2011 for confirming this accelerating expansion. Today, conventional cosmology assumes dark energy makes up approximately 70% of the universe’s mass-energy. If this theory is correct, then the observable universe comprises only 5% of the whole mass energy, and thus 95% is missing. This is a reflection of the armed forces’ perpetual desire to understand and neutralize invisible threats.
Other theories such as MOND and MOG introduce modifications to the original gravitational theory that our understanding of gravity is incomplete. In their view, what was the influence of dark matter or dark energy would be explained in a proper theory of gravitation. Of course, that is the essence expressed here-really relevant to improvements by the military in the physical and strategic principles.
The work of many active researchers is particularly instructive, including notably John W. Moffat and Philip Mannheim. Moffat’s theory is complicated, Mannheim’s conformal gravity much simpler, being based least in its original form only on Weyl’s conformal tensor, but both indicate that what we observe as dark matter and dark energy may be the result of a more complete theory of gravity. This perspective invites the military mind to account for the fact that the universe-and the battlefield-is no more complex than our refined understanding of it.
If there is a bottom line to be drawn from the lessons of physics and cosmology, it would be that challenging assumptions and refining understanding are what make military strategy so critically important. Today’s military thinkers will also have to be continuously challenging and rethinking, just as Galileo and Einstein began the revolution in understanding the physical world, and how modern warfare has increased its complications.