Through­out his­to­ry, mil­i­tary forces have inno­vat­ed and adapt­ed a wide range of weapons for war­fare, demon­strat­ing the end­less cre­ativ­i­ty and resource­ful­ness in the art of com­bat. Dogs, once used by the Sovi­ets as sui­cide bombers and by North Korea for sim­i­lar pur­pos­es, high­light the diverse appli­ca­tion of liv­ing crea­tures in war­fare. The Ger­mans, dur­ing World War II, devel­oped the Goliath tracked mines—a remote-con­trolled bomb, pro­duc­ing over 7,500 of these sin­gle-use weapons.

Assyr­i­an siege tow­ers from the 9th and 8th cen­turies BCE and the curi­ous, ulti­mate­ly aban­doned, Tsar Tank of Impe­r­i­al Rus­sia in 1914 under­score the long his­to­ry of siege and armored war­fare. In mod­ern times, the US Mil­i­tary’s research into pulsed ener­gy pro­jec­tiles (PEP) indi­cates the ongo­ing evo­lu­tion towards non-lethal means of com­bat, herald­ing a future where war may become less about tak­ing lives.

Kevlar’s inven­tion in 1965 by Stephanie Louise Kwolek and the Roman cen­tu­ri­ons’ use of the gla­d­ius both exhib­it how com­bat gear and per­son­al arma­ments have evolved to meet the chang­ing demands of war­fare. From the ancient Egyp­tians’ mas­ter­ful use of char­i­ots, intro­duced by the Hyk­sos around 1650 BCE, to Robert Main­hardt and Art Biehl’s devel­op­ment of gyro­jet guns in the 1960s, the tools and tech­nolo­gies of war have con­tin­u­al­ly adapt­ed over the cen­turies.

The US Army’s tran­si­tion to the M4A1 car­bine from the M16 in 2010, along­side the inven­tion of unique weapons like the uru­mi from India and the con­tin­ued use of tra­di­tion­al tac­tics like the “Parthi­an shot” by ancient Iran­ian peo­ples, show­cas­es both inno­va­tion and the endur­ing val­ue of his­tor­i­cal strate­gies in mil­i­tary doc­trine.

Despite advance­ments, some projects like the high-cost air­borne lasers have been scrapped, while oth­ers like the vor­tex ring gun and the per­son­nel halt­ing and stim­u­la­tion response rifle (PHASR) explore non-lethal meth­ods of engage­ment. The var­ied his­to­ry of weapons devel­op­ment, from the mun­dane to the bizarre, illus­trates the breadth of human inge­nu­ity applied to the sci­ence of war, from the ear­li­est record­ed his­to­ry to the spec­u­la­tive future of com­bat.