The Joys of Weakness

On Chesterton's Mortars.

The bad thing about Mortars is that they have a short range…

British soldiers with Stokes 81mm Light Infantry Mortars during the Hundred Days Offensive, 1918.

Weakness can be mitigated, usually by an awareness of - and the sensible application of - a complimentary strength. But weakness is not a property you can remove from the world, and this is probably more true in respect to weapons.

When we look at things, we usually focus on their strengths. That is, the desirable properties they possess. That is what calls us to see those things in the first place.

But that adjacent weakness is not some coincidental travelling partner, like something that just happens to tag along. Weakness comes from the strength itself.

One example of this is ceramic armour. Relatively speaking, it is good at dissipating the force of a strike. It does this, for want of a better description, by breaking. Typical examples lack the kind of multi-hit performance that other armours afford. If you want your armour to absorb more blows, then breaking is an incompatible response. The weakness is derived from the strength.

There is no escaping limitation, because it is part of the whole of a thing. However, there are examples of where it appears that weakness is being removed from the balance sheet.

Jim Storr comparing the Khalid (a Jordanian Chieftain) with a Panther.

Prof Jim Storr, in his delightfully scenic treatise, Battlegroup!, uses the classic Firepower-Mobility-Protection triangle to illustrate an improvement in all directions for a Khalid tank relative to a Panther.¹ The implication for us is that, rather than being constrained to our normal ideas of balance, or relative strengths and weaknesses, it is possible to expand the ‘strength’ of a thing in what looks like all directions. They may be several decades that separate the platforms, but it unquestionable gives the impression, for our purposes, that weakness has been quashed.

However, as a particular weakness is removed, new weaknesses emerge, because the new thing has not just changed itself: it has changed the world too.

“What was but a dazzling construction on familiar ground becomes now the new ground itself as a new scientific, geographic, civil, or aesthetic grammar is articulated. Columbus’ voyage changed the shape of the world. He may have discovered America, but in doing so, he caused every other part of the world to be rediscovered as well. His discovery, initially of just another “part,” was of that extraordinary sort that “re-cognizes” the relationships of the parts to the whole.”²

And in this new world, choices are made among things.

An example of such a choice is the Gunners predicament of journeying into indirect fire. Some rounds may be lofted high over that slope, but the means of coordinating that fire was such a trifle that it wasn’t worth troubling oneself with too often.

One of the main limitations was communication. Once line was laid, it was worth ‘fighting through the frictions’. There were limitations there too, but all parties eventually learned that the anonymous firepower from the sky was worth the organisational strain. Once radios abounded, observers assumed a previously unimaginable level of ‘articulation’.³ But they also had to deal with the demands of a new culture focused on networks, problems such as jamming, and the consequences of a total commitment to invisible and instantaneous communication. The meme of “no comms no bombs” was inevitable.

An unexpected consequence of these mingling properties was the importance of lateral concentration. That is, the expanding range of indirect fire weapons, yielded not just the ability to plunge fire into the depths of the enemy, but also afforded a concentration of fire from neighbours. The whole of the artillery park was starting to look like a Grande Batterie, no matter where the tubes had settled down to their work.

Each change made the world anew. New problems emerged, as did new choices. And to choose one thing, is to exclude another.

“Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else... Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon.”⁴

Let us consider the humble mortar. An effective tool of such ingenious simplicity that even other arms are trusted with wielding it.

Mortars fire on a high trajectory, which is desirable because, relative to the flat trajectory of guns, the ammunition is rendered disproportionately effective for the same quantity of steel and explosive. It is also desirable for being ‘lofted’ over features built by nature and man, that might obstruct their flat trajectory fratres.

On the other hand, mortars fire on a high trajectory, which is undesirable because it disproportionally excites managers of airspace, who may be prompted to meddle in the important (and reliable) work of the mortar. The lofting of the ammunition also results in a long commute, relative to the horizontal distance travelled. Much like all scenic routes, the price of a great view is time.

Mortars possess another weakness: a short range. This prevents the tickling of as many targets as the observer would like. Additionally, the short range puts pressure on the mortar line to find a comfortable spot - one that is both near to their possible targets, and far from things that may stifle their work.

A short range, relative to their gunner colleagues, affords mortars a strength less often recognised: protection from theft.

An artillery observer, among a well-handled gun park, will find that the greater the range, the more neighbours that can be helped. When infantry attack, the answer to the question of how many guns are needed is: just one more. Thus, our stubby barreled friends avoid the family quarrelling among their gunner guests and are spared the insult of firing for someone else - each arm able to provide their particular flavour of high explosive for their own kin.

“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.”⁵

Things are what they are, and not something else. Weakness counts too.

GK Chesterton delighting in limitation.

The bad thing about Mortars is that they have a short range… But the good thing about Mortars is that they have a short range.

1. Jim Storr, Battlegroup! The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War (2021), page 103.

2. Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (1982), page 42.

3. To borrow a phrase from Archer Jones.

4. GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy (2018), page 39.

5. GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy (2018), page 40.