Weaponry, Nonnuclear. The history of English conquest in America began with five native bowmen ambushing a scouting party of prospective Jamestown settlers, armed with matchlock muskets. Wounding two settlers before the scouting party could fire a single shot, the native warriors faded into the forest. This encounter symbolized the almost three‐hundred‐year war between Europeans and Amerindians.

Colonial Era through the Civil War.

The first colonists arrived in America during the seventeenth‐century European revival of the integrated system of heavy and light infantry and cavalry. But cavalry was useless in the forests, and the early militia manuals neglected the skirmish tactics of light infantry and instead emphasized line tactics with pike and musket. Matchlock muskets proved inferior, in a skirmish, to the Stone Age bows and arrows of native adversaries, and pikes were discarded in the absence of cavalry. With the introduction of flintlocks at the end of the seventeenth century, Native American fighters gave up bows and adopted the weapons of their European foes. The subsequent stages of the conquest of the Amerindian saw the introduction on both sides of rifled weapons, beginning with the adaptation of the Alpine hunting rifle as the “Pennsylvania” rifle.

In the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army regulars fought as light infantry armed with flintlock muskets and bayonets in skirmishing and line encounters, while in the South and on the western frontier, irregulars exploited the Pennsylvania rifle in stealth and skirmishing tactics. Though the War of 1812 saw no appreciable change in land weapons, it did witness developments in naval weaponry. Adapting the classic strategy of weaker powers, the United States opted for a navy of commerce raiders rather than capital ships of the line to blockade or to break a blockade. The feats of American frigates such as the Constitution —larger, more heavily armed, and built with heavier timber than their counterparts—helped counterbalance the fact that by the end of the war Britain's ships of the line had bottled up in port most American warships and privateers. The first submarine, invented by the American David Bushnell, saw action in the Revolutionary War.

By the mid‐nineteenth century, advances in physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and ballistics were influencing the manufacture of weapons. Shortly after the Russians introduced land and water mines in the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Confederate army in the American Civil War improved on them with a sensitive contact fuse for percussion‐type mines. These mines could also serve as torpedoes, to be delivered by being secretly attached to hulls or by ramming at the end of a spar. The infantry of both armies in the Civil War for the first time used muzzle‐loading rifled muskets, while cavalry with breech‐loading carbines fought dismounted. New rifled artillery, though present, was not sufficiently developed to make a significant impact on Civil War battlefields, nor did the machine gun, invented by the American Richard Gatling in 1862, play any role.

Through the mid‐ and late‐nineteenth century, the combined impact of the steam engine, the screw propeller, and metallurgical developments in iron and steel on both armament and armor revolutionized naval war. The American Robert Fulton built the first steam warship (1814) and the first screw‐driven vessel of substantial size (1839). The first screw‐propeller warship was the American Princeton, launched in 1843. Meanwhile, stronger hooped guns (built‐up rifled artillery) gradually replaced cast‐iron guns. Hooped guns designed and built by the American Robert Parrott saw action in the Civil War, which also witnessed the first battle between ironclads in the famous Merrimac and Monitor duel off Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1861. Building on French and British precedents, the U.S. Navy's monitor class of ironclads, armed with advanced American‐designed Dahlgren guns, figured prominently in the river and coastal conflicts of the Civil War. By the mid‐1860s the era of iron was giving way to that of steel, as lighter and stronger steel plates became cheap enough to compete with iron in ship design.

Late Nineteenth Century through World War I.

Naval and coastal gunnery, which had benefited from the development of the shell gun in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, improved even more with the rifled breech‐loading steel gun and slow‐burning powders, introduced between 1860 and 1885. Firing enormous shells with great velocity, range, and penetration, naval guns combined with increasingly thick steel armor to produce the modern heavily armored big‐gun battleship, first represented by the British‐built Dreadnought in 1906. The development of the “director” system of fire, involving electrical controls and mechanical computers, greatly improved accuracy. Meanwhile, beneath the sea, the Confederate submarine Hunley was the first to sink an enemy warship, delivering a spar topedo.

Turn‐of‐the‐century American politicians, followed the lead of naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Spurred on by the American destruction of two Spanish fleets in the Spanish‐American War, they moved toward a modern battleship navy supported by cruisers that could challenge for control of the sea. In 1900 the U.S. Navy acquired its first modern submarine, fitted with torpedo tubes and running submerged on electricity from storage batteries.

In World War I, U.S. infantrymen fought with magazine rifles, light and heavy machine guns, mortars, grenades, and sometimes, flame throwers. They were supported by bombardment from modern artillery equipped with indirect ranging and firing devices, shooting shrapnel shells that exploded over entrenched defenders. Early in the war, assaulting infantry forces were often pinned down by artillery and machine gun fire; later, and increased complement of light machine guns, combined with tanks and airplanes (a recent invention), restored the offensive. The widespread use of poison gas in the 1914–1918 conflict resulted in the founding of the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service in 1917.

On the eve of World War I, Germany put gyroscopic compasses on its U‐boat (submarine) fleet and introduced engine improvements that extended their range from 1,000 to 5,000 miles, making them deadly commerce raiders and a threat to the anchorage of the British fleet. The Allies' development of the convoy system, with destroyer escorts using new hydrophones for detection and newly invented depth charges, restored the balance of power and avoided disaster.

World War II.

During World War II, aircraft carriers and landing aircraft dominated American fighting in the Pacific. Marines and infantry went ashore in landing craft, supported by the guns and rockets of surface vessels and land‐ and carrier‐based aircraft. Meanwhile, the submarine fleet devastated enemy shipping, while Army Air Force bombers destroyed Japan's cities. In the Pacific as in Europe, Americans fought with greatly improved airplanes, bombs, automatic guns, tanks, surface ships, submarines, torpedoes, rockets, and mines. All sides developed chemical and biological weapons, but except for Japanese experimentation against the Chinese army and civilians, refrained from using them. The largest U.S. weapons development program during the war after the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb was the 4,000‐person program to develop biological weapons.

World War II saw the development of motorized and armored divisions combining infantry, artillery, tanks, and air support. It also witnessed the introduction of radar and electronic computers, allowing for the precise detection of submarines and antiaircraft batteries, as well as the development of fire‐control systems. Toward the end of the war, electronic bombsights, which could aim through clouds, gave American bombers some precision‐bombing capability. The proximity fuse, a small radar set that detonated a shell in proximity to its target, eliminated the necessity of computing the time of flight and presetting the fuse. Invented by the British and developed by the Americans, this fuse proved to be a devastating antiaircraft weapon. World War II also saw the debut of an old invention, the rocket, as an effective weapon. The American invention of napalm, a jellied incendiary, provided the means for firebombing enemy cities and for designing an improved flame thrower, which American troops used extensively in the Pacific.

Korean War through the Persian Gulf War.

Postwar weapons development concentrated on improving World War II systems. The Korean War (1950–1953) was fought largely with World War II–type weapons and systems, the major innovation being the widespread use of jet aircraft. Later in the 1950s, aircraft, warships, armored vehicles, guns, and rockets all benefited from improvements in propulsion, radar, and computers. Bacteriological and chemical weapons development flourished along with nuclear weapons. During the Korean War period, the United States included biological warfare in its emergency plan for general war against the Soviet Union and China, thus becoming the first nation to incorporate biological weapons in offensive military doctrine. There is evidence that U.S. forces experimented with these weapons during the Korean War.

The U.S. phase of the protracted Vietnam War (1961–1975) combined existing weapons systems with the maturation of the helicopter. Armed with heavy machine guns and rockets and carrying a dozen or so soldiers, helicopters were used in a search‐and‐destroy strategy against elusive enemy units. Their weakness was their vulnerability to antiaircraft fire. The major technical innovation in the Vietnam conflict was the guided bomb. Developed in the 1960s, the “smart bomb” used a sensor to lock onto an image or respond to reflected laser‐beam radiation. The United States also used “Agent Orange,” to defoliate and uncover enemy supply routes.

By the early 1970s the growing use of nuclear‐powered engines was revolutionizing conventional as well as nuclear naval warfare. The threat of the attack submarine as a weapon against surface ships was increased by its ability to stay submerged and undetected while traveling at high speeds for long periods of time. Nuclear‐powered surface ships could spend almost unlimited time away from base.

In the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991, the United States introduced the Stealth bomber, which did not reflect radar signals, and a missile that honed in on enemy radar. The power of the Iraqi army's ground weapons system matched that of the United States, but a combination of the U.S.‐led coalition's superiority in air power, antiradar missiles, and electronic technology proved decisive. The Gulf War (like the Egyptian‐Israeli War of 1973) emphasized the importance of weighing up offensively and defensively with state‐of‐the‐art technology in a modern conventional war, just as Vietnam displayed the limitations of modern weapons systems against guerrilla warfare fought from a pre‐modern logistical base—a lesson that brought the American way of war full circle from its conquest of the native peoples, though with a different outcome.
See also Chemical Industry; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Indian Wars; Iron and Steel Industry; Military, The; Pharmaceutical Industry; Steam Power.

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Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, 1985.
Archer Jones , The Art of War in the Western World, 1987.
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Edward Hagerman