1985: The Future of Warfare Was Supposed to Be Blinding
Imagine explaining to a military planner in 1985 that the laser weapons designed to blind enemy soldiers would never become the future of warfare. During the Cold War, some experts genuinely believed that bullets would eventually give way to directed-energy weapons that would simply remove an enemy’s ability to see. Then reality intervened. It turned out that permanently blinding someone wasn’t viewed as the humanitarian breakthrough some had imagined. The battlefield stayed remarkably old-school, and the age of the battlefield ophthalmologist never quite arrived.