Military engineering

Modern military engineering includes a wide range of technologies and practices, all dedicated to supporting or augmenting the armed forces of a country. In practice, any engineering technique, ranging from road building to designing missile guidance systems, that is used in civilian life can also be considered military engineering if the engineering work has a military objective. Thus, a bridge built by a county highway department during peacetime would be considered civil engineering, while a bridge of the same design erected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to allow troops to cross a river in combat would be military engineering.

Origins of Military Engineering

Military engineering dates back to prehistoric times. If military engineering can be defined as the application of technological knowledge to provide people with a defense against their enemies, military engineering is possibly the world’s oldest profession. The first person to realize that erecting a barrier around a camp site would slow down intruders or to become a specialist in inventing weapons such as the bow and arrow might arguably have also been the first military engineer.

As civilizations arose in the Middle East, China, and elsewhere, military engineering evolved from designing simple defensive systems, such as ditches or brush barricades, to designing elaborate fortifications. Offensive weapons also increased in size and variety. One thousand years before the common era, the Assyrians, Egyptians, and other civilizations in the Middle East were building siege towers and battering rams to use in assaulting the cities of their foes. Frescoes from the walls of ancient cities such as Babylon and Ur depict siege machines being used in battle.

At this time, no distinction existed between the military engineer and the civilian. The same engineers who designed the machines and weapons used in combat were employed by their governments to design the roads and bridges that linked their kingdoms, the devices used in constructing palaces and temples, and the water supply systems for their cities. Those who would be termed engineers in the twenty-first century were called by many different titles over the centuries, from artificer to machinator, but the products of their ingenuity were the direct ancestors of modern military engineering.

The Greek mathematician Archimedes is perhaps the most famous of these ancient engineers. Archimedes is remembered for his many early scientific discoveries, such as the principle of buoyancy, but his primary employment was in fact that of a military engineer. In addition to inventing devices such as the Archimedean screw used for raising water for irrigating crops, Archimedes devised numerous military machines. His military inventions included a grappling device and an improved version of a device known as a dolphin, a heavy weight dropped onto enemy ships and intended to smash through the deck planking and hull below. Archimedes was only one of numerous Greek and Roman military engineers, however. Others included Diades, an engineer who served Alexander the Great and wrote the first known book on the art of building siege craft, and Nonius Datus, a Roman whose responsibilities for the empire included building both roads and aqueducts. The work of engineers such as Datus allowed the Roman Empire to extend its control as far as it did: Well-built roads linked the various outposts of the empire, allowing both rapid communication and the swift transport of army troops.

Military Engineering in Asia

Following the decline of the Roman Empire, military engineering in western Europe went through a period of several hundred years during which few notable developments occurred. The same was not true of other regions of the world. China had long been noted for its advances in metallurgy, shipbuilding, and other aspects of military engineering. The Chinese learned to cast metals, both bronze and iron, long before any other society. It was also in China that the first known use of gunpowder occurred, during the eleventh century. The Chinese first developed incendiary devices—firecrackers, small bombs, and a fire lance—that, when used in battle, frightened their enemies with smoke and noise, even if little actual damage was done. They quickly progressed to simple cannons, although European engineers seem to have moved faster in developing cannons once the principles behind gunpowder became more widely known.

The Chinese also excelled in the construction of large ocean-going ships. By the fifteenth century, Chinese naval forces had explored the Indian Ocean and sailed as far as the coast of East Africa. Chinese ships employed watertight bulkheads, an innovation European ships did not use until late in the twentieth century, and thus were virtually unsinkable. Internal politics affected Chinese military engineering, however, and in the mid-fifteenth century, following the ascension to the throne of an emperor who disliked innovation, many inventions were suppressed or allowed to be forgotten.

Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

As nation-states gradually emerged in Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire, military engineers continued to build siege machines: assault towers and catapult weapons such as trebuchets. The basic design of these machines had been known and remained unchanged since the time of Alexander the Great more than one thousand years before. Defensive structures such as moats and high-walled fortresses also remained essentially unchanged. Castles had curtain walls, or defensive walls, that were tall but thin in proportion to their height. Several innovations affected warfare—the discovery of the stirrup, the invention of the crossbow—but changes overall were slow until gunpowder reached the west from China.

The high cost of both gunpowder and guns initially limited their impact on warfare. In addition, early cannons and the powder they used were often unreliable. Cannons frequently exploded on the battlefield, killing the men who fired them. By the fifteenth century, however, and the beginning of the Renaissance, artillery weapons had entered common use in warfare. The invention of large cannons quickly rendered the traditional curtain-walled castles obsolete. Rather than laying siege to a fortress or town and waiting until the inhabitants surrendered because of impending starvation, invading armies could quickly blow holes in the walls. Large bombards could throw stones weighing as much as 900 pounds with more force than the traditional trebuchets and catapults and from a greater distance.

As siegecraft changed, so did the defensive structures built by military engineers. The medieval castle with its vertical curtain walls disappeared. In De re aedificatoria (1485; The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti in Ten Books, 1739), Leon Battista Alberti instructed readers to lower fortress walls, to slope them so projectiles would roll off, and to make walls thicker to provide solid gun platforms for defending cannons. Within a comparatively short time, a new style of fortress appeared in Europe: the star-shaped bastion with thick, sloping walls and projecting salients that allowed defenders to cover the walls with flanking fire. This style of fortress would dominate military engineering into the nineteenth century.

The Early Modern Era and Engineering Education

As the world entered the Industrial Revolution, training for engineers became more formalized. Before the seventeenth century, engineers received their training through apprenticeship. Further, many of the artificers and scholars whose work came to be recognized as examples of military engineering were not trained as engineers at all. They were artists, inventors, and scholars who supported their other work by devising military machines or strategy for their royal patrons. Alberti, for example, is remembered for his work as an architect, not as an engineer, but his treatise on fortress design is clearly an example of military engineering.

The military forces of many nations established training programs for their artillery officers. Following the French Revolution (1789–1792), in 1794 France combined its military artillery training program with a new école Polytechnique (polytechnical school). The école Polytechnique is considered by many historians of technology to be the first true engineering school. In 1802, the United States followed with the establishment of a military academy at West Point, New York.

The curriculum at the école Polytechnique and other engineering schools modeled on it, including West Point, focused heavily on construction techniques: bridge building, harbor construction, fortifications, and so on. Instruction in ordnance was also included but formed a smaller component of the course work. Many men who enrolled at the military academies early in the nineteenth century did so to gain training as engineers and not out of a desire for a military career. They learned how to build bridges, roads, canals, and dams, and then went into private practice as civil engineers. It was during this time period, in fact, that the term “civil engineer” first appeared, as civilian engineers sought to differentiate themselves from military engineers. To the nineteenth century engineers, it was not the type of work they were doing that determined whether a person was a civil engineer or a military engineer but instead the setting for that work.

As the nineteenth century progressed and a plethora of technological advances in machinery and electricity appeared, engineering education became more complex. Courses were added in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and so on. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the typical military engineer was likely to be an expert on construction techniques, with perhaps a general knowledge of ordnance. By the end of the nineteenth century, military engineers who completed their training might be experts in electrical engineering, construction engineering, chemical engineering, or any one of a variety of rapidly evolving specialized areas within engineering. The term “civil engineer” came to refer to engineers who specialized in construction—bridges, dams, buildings—rather than simply engineers working in a civilian setting. When civilian engineers employ their construction knowledge in a military setting, they are referred to as combat engineers.

Military engineers played key roles in World War I, World War II, and the other conflicts that occurred during the twentieth century. Combat engineers constructed bridges and airfields under battlefield conditions. Aeronautical and electrical engineers worked with scientists in designing new weapons such as the atomic bomb and defensive systems such as radar.

Modern Military Engineering

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, military engineering had evolved to the point where it was impossible to describe anyone as a typical military engineer. If a military engineer is an engineer whose work has military applications, then military engineers do everything from design portable bridges to work on complex aircraft avionics systems. Developments in military engineering continued to crossover with and influence civil engineering and other nonmilitary realms. For example, many technological breakthroughs first made by military researchers find their way into broad everyday use, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) initiated by the US military as early as the 1970s but made ubiquitous in cars and smartphones in the twenty-first century.

Ironically, the one group of engineers within the United States who would seem to be the most visible military engineers, the members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, work on projects that are of benefit primarily to civilians. Congress created the Corps of Engineers to provide harbor and river improvements to allow for swift transportation and thus enhance the internal and external security of the country. Today the corps is responsible for overseeing navigable rivers, keeping them free of obstructions, and providing for flood control on major rivers such as the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi. The corps maintains numerous dam and lock systems and supervises construction of harbor improvements both on the ocean coastlines and on the Great Lakes.

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