Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

If you go back to the Middle Ages, the state-of-the-art weapon system was the armored knight. He cost a fortune to train, feed, and equip. But a mounted armored knight could overpower almost any number of peasants on a battlefield. And the distribution of political power in medieval society reflected that; authority was vested in a tiny minority, and the people had no choice but to obey. “Then, with the advent of gunpowder, that all changed. Suddenly you didn’t need a highly trained specialist warrior to win on the battlefield. All you needed was a warm body who could fire a gun. Anything they could aim at, they could kill. And at that point the edge in warfare went not to highly trained warriors, but to the side that could field the most people. At which point we saw the rise of nation-states—and nationalism as a concept—as the logistical requirement for fielding an ever-larger conscripted army. But this changed the political dynamic. The nobles could no longer ignore the demands of their subjects. Those subjects now had the power to kill them or refuse to fight in their wars, and so kings began to cede more political authority to representative bodies of the people—parliaments, and so on.”