Big is Dangerous!

One of the interesting questions in military strategy is the value of big aircraft carriers, the aircraft launch platforms of choice for the nations that can afford them, all in a world that is rapidly shifting to GPS-driven/satellite monitored drones and missiles designed to sneak past an enemy’s most elegantly-crafted defense systems. When you think about U.S. fleets, and the U.S. Navy is the second largest air force on earth (behind only the U.S. Air Force), they are basically built to protect the single vessel at the center, the anchor aircraft carrier. We have eleven big nuclear-powered carriers and six numbered blue ocean battle fleets (with 40-50 ships each, plus or minus).

There may be a second carrier or one devoted to smaller, specialized support aircraft in a fleet, but all the frigates, destroyers, cruisers supply ships, fast attack submarines, etc. that comprise the fleet are aimed at protecting that main carrier. Those big “boomers,” submarines that carry 24 SBM missiles with multiple warheads, roam the oceans separately, isolated from the big fleet surrounding carriers.

One aircraft carrier. One ship, costing billions and billions to build, with aircraft costing billions and billions to build and maintain… one target that is worth so much to an enemy… big, easy to spot and impossible to conceal. Protected by a huge fleet, costing billions and billions to build and maintain. A futuristic beam from a killer satellite, a long-range torpedo (perhaps not radio controlled but monitored by a fiber optic cable many miles long), a barrage of missiles or drones… all focused on that carrier. The very definition of vulnerability. And while a great big carrier with tons of aircraft is very intimidating, it is also a big, fat juicy target for a sophisticated enemy to take out. Think of how much damage can be inflicted by taking out a single big U.S. carrier!!!

When you think of it, big has always carried the double-edged sword of intimidating/mega-powerful with the obvious vulnerability of being easy to spot and requiring too many resources to maintain. Like dinosaurs. Are carriers the new next military dinosaurs? Nature seems to reflect this paradigm very well. Evolution has routinely taken out the biggest reptiles, the biggest mammals, dooming them to extinction… replacing them with smaller, more efficient killers with better instincts, perhaps the ability to hunt in packs, with vastly better brains. And while today’s blog may seem like it’s about military obsolescence, it’s really about nature’s endless proclivity against “big.”

In today’s world, long past the era of dinosaurs, the biggest animals are mostly mammals… and virtually every large animal on earth, from giant whales and elephants to still-big gorillas, rhinos and tigers, is on a short march towards extinction. What do each of those endgames have in common? Brain-heavy humans are killing these larger beasts and stealing their habitats.

This decimation of larger species is the subject of a recent article in Science magazine (Body size downgrading of mammals over the late Quaternary, published April 20^th, presented by a team of scientists led by University of New Mexico paleoecologist Felisa Smith), which tells us: “Since the late Pleistocene, large-bodied mammals have been extirpated from much of Earth. Although all habitable continents once harbored giant mammals, the few remaining species are largely confined to Africa. This decline is coincident with the global expansion of hominins over the late Quaternary.” The Quaternary covers the most recent 2.6 million years of Earth's history.

The April 28^th Los Angeles Times summarizes this study: “Thirteen thousand years ago Southern California was crawling with enormous mammals — all of which are extinct… There were massive mammoths three times bigger than modern-day elephants, giant ground sloths up to 20 feet in length, and strange, armadillo-like beasts known as glyptodons that were roughly the size of a VW bus.

“And don’t forget the llamas, camels, dire wolves, cave lions and saber-toothed cats that all called Southern California home… Today, the largest local land mammal is the bighorn sheep, which weighs about 300 pounds… And a similar trend can be found on all the continents of the planet… Over the last 100,000 years, the mean body mass of mammals in Eurasia dropped by 50% and by an order of magnitude in Australia. More recently, there was a tenfold drop in the average size of mammals in the Americas.

“So, what led to this dramatic shift in mammal size worldwide?... According to a recent study in Science, the answer is us… ‘When we look at the fossil record, what we find is that every time hominids get to a new continent, there is an extinction event, and that extinction is always large-bodied animals,’ said Felisa Smith… Her research also revealed that if this pattern continues, in a mere 200 years the largest land mammals left on Earth will be the size of a domestic cow… ‘And it shouldn’t escape your notice that we take care of cows,’ she added. ‘If they survive, it’s because we want them here.’

“Scientists have long known that the big land mammals were the first to disappear in extinction events that occurred in the last 125,000 years, but there was disagreement about why that might be the case… Some argued that the biggest animals may have been more susceptible to changes in climate or the environment. Others thought the increasingly skilled hunting prowess of Homo sapiens was the culprit.

“What Smith and her colleagues found is that it wasn’t just our own species that was responsible for these global changes in animal size; instead, it was the rise and dispersal of hominids in general… ‘We are not the only species of homos that ever hunted,’ she said. ‘Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and Denisovans all used tools and hunted as far as we know.’

“For this study she set out to discover what effect hominids as a group had, and whether it could be detected… Her first step was to look at the fossil record going back 125,000 years to see if the extinction of large mammals on the various continents coincided with when the first hominids arrived there.

“This line of inquiry revealed that mammal body mass did indeed drop dramatically when hominids arrived in in Eurasia about 100,000 years ago, when they arrived in Australia about 60,000 years ago and when they migrated to the Americas about 13,000 years ago.”

In the end, whether you are talking about individual military vessels or larger mammals, the writing is on the wall, as unpleasant as that reality might be: big is not only not beautiful, but size alone can be a profound vulnerability, one that attracts predators and hunter-killers. And today, those hunter-killers are really smart and very well-equipped human beings. They kill big mammals and yearn to kill big military ships.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the overriding trends and realities against bigness within our ecosystem, from nature to man’s technology, are frightening in synch.