Robert B. Rigg
The first half of the 20th century saw war unlike any that had transpired before. Elements were the same: people still fought over ideas and land, and it was still infantry on foot and civilians that did most of the dying. But the weapons! Fantastical, horrific weapons, like the machine guns that turned trench warfare from protracted stalemate to meat grinder, and fighters and bombers that burned through the skies. Or the armored tanks, which lumbered into history in the Western Front and then defined history from 1939 to 1945, changing centuries of prior thinking on how best to seize victory. From the vantage point of the middle of the 20th century, the coming decades of war seemed almost certain to be a new bloody spectacle, powered by technological marvels.
We have a prescriptive document from that era, just into the second decade of the Cold War, imagining exactly what future wars will looks like. This snapshot is “Soldier of the Futurarmy,” an essay published in the November 1956 issue of ARMY, a magazine from the Association of the United States Army. Its author was Robert B. Rigg, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army who was sent as an observer to watch Soviet forces in World War II and as an advisor to the Nationalist army in China in 1947. “Futurarmy” doesn’t appear to draw much from either of these experiences, except for when it envisions one foe of the future as communist guerrillas. Instead, “Futurarmy” is a direct look into ways war might change, written specifically for an audience familiar with modern war. And, taken as a whole, it serves to answer one big, unsettled question: is there still a place for infantry in a nuclear war?
https://www.popsci.com/meet-armored-soldiers-and-nuclear-artillery-future-war-that-never-was
