Rock Beats Laser / Real Life

• Although generally, overwhelmingly averted in native conflicts with European settlers, especially later on, there are a few occasions where the guys with the spears and the rocks come out on top. But first, it must be noted that one of the major common factors in the subjugation of native populations early in the colonization era were European diseases. These diseases, in fact, spread more quickly than the Europeans themselves did, killing large numbers of natives and throwing their societies into chaos before the colonizers were able to bring in proper armies. At least one historian has made the comparison of what Europe might have looked like if the Black Plague of the 14th century was immediately followed by another major Mongol invasion. Simply put, the numbers of people killed by European military technology is a minuscule fraction of the number who died from natural diseases like smallpox.
  • In 1879 the British Army suffered its greatest defeat at the hands of a native army at the battle of Isandhlwana. The Zulus, despite being equipped with iron spears and rawhide shields, were known for their tactical cunning, their rigorous training, and their suicidal bravery. The British were armed with the latest breech-loading rifles and even had some machine guns and cannon on hand. Feeling that their technological advantage rendered the result of the upcoming battle a foregone conclusion, they spread their forces thin and severely underestimated the numbers facing them. The Zulus ruthlessly exploited the Brits' complacency, easily out-flanking and annihilating the much better-armed force. One must remember that the reason that the Zulus were such a famous example is that they were an exception in more ways than one. The Zulus were an organized army optimized for pitched battles; while fearsome against other African kingdoms due to their numbers, discipline, and training, they were often soundly defeated and quickly worn down in other battles with the British, whose superior technology inflicted unsustainable casualties on Zulu forces. Natives who used the same tactics they used for tribal warfare and hunting generally lasted longer, even if they aren't remembered as fondly.
  • Spear throwers and slings, long forgotten in Europe, proved an effective weapon against Conquistadors. It was said by Cortés that the dents and holes left by these weapons were indistinguishable from those left by muskets. There are also stories of Spaniards replacing their metal breastplates with native cotton armor, as well as guns being outshot by arrows, spears, and slings. On the other hand, the Spaniards' use of cavalry, cannon, steel weapons were fairly instrumental in conquering the Aztec Empire. It mostly helped that there were plenty of other people who were ready to use the visitors to help take out the Aztecs once and for all, however.
  • During the Philippine-American War, Filipino fighters (largely armed with swords and machetes) resisted gunfire from the newly-introduced .38 Long Colt revolver by wrapping ropes around their bodies, which helped staunch bleeding. Even after taking direct hits, the natives were still in fine condition to rip apart their colonizers. Many no doubt died of blood loss later, but that didn't do the American soldiers they'd hacked up in the meantime any good. This forced the U.S. to bring the recently retired .45 Colt revolvers back into service, as a stop-gap until newer firearms and ammunition could be introduced. This led directly to the M1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol and the .45 ACP cartridge, to give both more shots and greater "stopping power" than the older revolvers. As it turns out, the .38 Long Colt cartridge penetrated well but did very little traumatic damage to victims aside from hits to vital points like the heart, lungs, or brain.
  • Speaking of the Filipinos, this was in force way before the Americans came, during the Battle of Mactan, where the Spaniard expeditionary force under Ferdinand Magellan (who died in the same battle) lost to local natives under King Lapu-Lapu. Although the natives were partly armed with steel weapons, many were armed with nothing more than bamboo lances tipped with poison. This trope was also taken nearly literally in that the Filipinos also took to hurling rocks, coconuts, jackfruit, and allegedly, their own bodily waste at the invaders.
  • Australian colonial history is bloodier than some might think, and the Aborigines often had the advantage. Colonists had muzzle-loading muskets; the natives carried four or five spears, and could throw them all in about the time it took the musket to be reloaded, often with the aid of a spear-thrower. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle also gave them an edge in stealth and tracking; it was fairly common for troopers to spend weeks chasing native sheep-thieves and never even see them.
  • American frontiersmen in the early 19th Century found themselves a similar situation as Australian colonists, before the revolver and repeating rifle were invented. The average American frontiersman, on a good day, would need about twenty seconds to reload his single-shot muzzle-loader. Twenty seconds was all a Lakota on horseback with a quiver full of arrows needed to make a pincushion.
• A note on military technology: New equipment is often designed to outperform or counter what is currently common, with effectiveness against even older technology being taken for granted as the current standard is always supposed to have superseded everything before it. Even if this assumption is not present, compromises have to be made during the design process and it is simply more logical to balance performance against the threats of today (which an army is almost certain to face on the battlefield) than those of a decade ago (which are likely to have been phased out altogether). As a simple example, medieval plate armor was designed to be effective against swords and spears, where the shape of the metal would cause the sharp edges/points to be deflected to the side rather than penetrate the armor; however, a sufficiently heavy club swung at a helmeted head can knock out or even outright kill its wearer. Similarly, modern bulletproof vests are designed to stop bullets by absorbing and spreading their kinetic energy over a larger area; however, a knife (or pretty much anything with a sharp point/edges) could force its way through by continual application of force. In any case, armed forces tend to hold on to old equipment for a long time due to the sizable investment, so if someone is beating your lasers with rocks, you should still have some rocks of your own to send right back.
  • Jamestown settlers seem to have taken this tip. After an attack by Pamunkey Indians left over 300 Jamestown settlers dead in 1622, the Virginia Company asked for specific military equipment from England. King James I agreed and sent various weapons and armor from the Tower of London to Virginia. Many of these were medieval or Renaissance-era weapons and armor (like bills, bows and arrows, calivers, brigandines, jacks of plate, mail shirts, and iron skulls). While these had become obsolete in Europe in the face of massed gun-toting soldiers in rank and file, they were well suited to fighting the Native Americans of Virginia in relatively short-ranged skirmishes. Simultaneously, the colonists retained or adapted some European military methods that worked in the context of Virginia, helped by fear of attacks by the Spanish (which didn't come to pass).
• A real-life example took place in the Millennium Challenge, a 2002 wargame carried out by the U.S. military (as mentioned in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell). A test for a new information-gathering system, it was unofficially a resounding failure. The opposing military, whose modern communications had been jammed or would be intercepted, communicated with the front by motorcycle courier and used light signals to launch planes. Most notably, they swarmed a U.S. naval force in the Persian Gulf using speedboats armed with missiles twice their size, with the magic ability to teleport around the game board. Backed up by regenerating shore-based missile batteries, he "sank" a fully-crewed aircraft carrier. The U.S. military reset the game, pointing out that the OPFOR commander's tactics were impossible under the circumstances, and were completely impractical given the operational environment, essentially amounting to an abuse of game mechanics. His supporters however, argued that the OPFOR commander was simply doing his duty to find whatever flaws in US strategy that a potential enemy could exploit, and that the ones in charge of the exercise were simply using it as a propaganda show to validate existing US strategy and placate the traditionalists. Either way, the entire exercise was discredited.
• Inverted during late 19th century by the Qing Dynasty of China when they clashed with the French in 1880s over Vietnam and then the Japanese in 1890s over Korea. China spent enormous sums of money buying up the very best European arms and equipment but did next to nothing to update their military doctrine, training technique, or organization, and were often hindered by internal division and corruption. Consequently, the Chinese were often actually better armed than both the French and the Japanese, but performed poorly against both.
  • The Battle of the Yalu River during the First Sino-Japanese War is an excellent example. The Chinese fleet possessed two German-built ironclad battleships and a third coastal battleships, which (at least on paper) were far superior to the protected cruisers of the Japanese, with bigger guns and thicker armor. However, the ships were a decade old, and during that time they had not been properly maintained, so they could not reach their top speed. Crews and commanders were poorly trained and unfamiliar with the advanced technology, and there wasn't enough ammunition for proper target practice. Some of what they did have was also over a decade old and failed to explode, some shells were the wrong size or type for the guns of the ships, and in some the explosive filling had been sold by corrupt officials and replaced with cement. The Japanese prevailed through superior training and tactics, and even though their cruisers had smaller guns, they were more numerous and could fire more rapidly, starting fires and crippling exposed items on the Chinese ships rather than punching through the armor.
• The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong during The Vietnam War provide a textbook case of how a technologically-inferior armed force can prevail against a far better-equipped enemy through a combination of sheer perseverance and ruthless cunning.
  • In fact, the Vietnamese employed tactics similar to those used by Le Loi's men in the Vietnamese rebellion against Ming Dynasty China in the 15th century. Politics aside, the main reason why the Vietnamese prevailed was because dense jungle nullified many of the advantages possessed by outside invaders, whether it was in armored horsemen or main battle tanks. As for the United States, its performance during the war provided a textbook case of how supposedly superior military equipment cannot ensure military superiority in local conditions, even if it worked as intended.
  • During the early days of radar-guided and heat-seeking missiles, many US military planners were so confident of their superiority that the F-4 Phantom fighter was initially designed without guns, as they believed that missiles would make Old School Dogfights a thing of the past. This was quickly disproven in the Vietnam War: Vietnamese pilots quickly learned to fight close to the ground, where ground clutter and thermal reflection greatly confused early missile guidance systems to the point of uselessness and could leverage the superior low-altitude/low-speed characteristics of their older and supposedly more primitive MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighter aircraft. Even if Phantom pilots managed to outmaneuver their adversaries, the lack of guns meant that they couldn't engage at closer distances; often the Phantoms had to resort to their superior speed and climb rate to escape. ^note A more detailed analysis can be found here. Somewhat a Dated History as it has since come out that a lack of training, rather than guns, combined with restrictive rules of engagement were far bigger factors in dogfight failures. ^note Contrast the US Navy having more consistent kills using Sidewinder missiles compared to the US Air Force installing gun pods on their aircraft yet still having an abysmal kill rate.
  • Earlier in the Vietnam War however, there is an instance where older American A-1 Skyraiders (propeller-driven ground-attack aircraft) managed to outfight more advanced North Vietnamese MiG-17s (jet fighters). Lacking air-to-air missiles, two of the Skyraiders used their 20mm cannons to shoot down one of the MiGs in a head-on pass. It was one of the few occasions since WWII that piston-engine aircraft were able to shoot down jet aircraft.
  • Improvised man-traps in general can be extremely effective in dense vegetation of all kinds, despite most designs being indistinguishable from what Stone Age hunters would've employed. One of the nastier tricks employed by Vietnamese guerillas involved a literal application of Bamboo Technology: pungi sticks. These were fresh bamboo shoots, cut to a point, hardened by fire, and used in several different types of traps, from swinging logs to pitfalls. If getting impaled didn't kill the victims, it would certainly take them out of action. Most notoriously, they were often covered in feces, which meant that any wound had a greater risk of becoming badly infected. To further add insult to injury, Viet Cong insurgents reportedly neutralized American M18 Claymore mines by urinating on them, which shorted out their electrical wiring.
  • On the other side of the Vietnam war, the US used older cluster bombs because their submunitions had much greater chances at failing to fire on the initial drop and becoming deadly unexploded ordinance. As it turned out, having a bunch of unexploded bombs on the ground was much more damaging to the Vietnamese than having a whole area blown away in one go. In fact one the United States' most lethal cluster bomb munitions was known as the Lazy Dog, and it was essentially a lump of steel shaped like a blunt-nosed dart. Simply using gravity, these things would build up the inertia of a fifty caliber round during their decent. Each one cost just pennies to make and thousands could be deployed by a single airplane. Additionally, Lazy Dogs could be deployed from any kind of aircraft imaginable, including C-130s, which would fake a mid-flight cargo ejection to lure NVA/Vietcong troops out in the open before spraying the area with them.
• The woefully underequipped Finnish army destroyed hundreds of Soviet tanks during the Winter War, using such equipment as Molotov cocktails and wooden logs. Hell, the Finns named the Molotov Cocktail after the Soviet foreign minister who claimed that the Red Air Force was dropping breadbaskets, not cluster bombs (thus, the Finns made a cocktail to go with the bread).
  • Played with in this case, however, the Soviets actually won the Winter War despite the Finns' best efforts (albeit the subversion is downplayed anyway because it was arguably a Soviet Pyrrhic Victory) and established a communist Finland satellite state puppet government, but they had to withdraw anyway to fight the Nazi invasion in WWII, making this work almost like a victory anyway.
• Repeated, to some degree, in Grozny during the First Chechen War, when Chechen fighters occasionally took on modern T-72s and T-80s with Molotov cocktails. More commonly, the Chechen weapons of choice were more modern RPG's and ATGM's, though. Either way, Russians lost hundreds of tanks in a disastrous assault on what was supposed to be a ragtag group of "criminals and outlaws." Worth noting, as the USSR and Russian Federation had universal conscription, many if not most of the Chechen fighters had previously served in the Russian military, hence their familiarity with anti-tank weapons and tactics.
  • Arguably more a case of 'Don't let your tanks roll into a city with infantry support along a road with huge blocks on both sides'. If you do expect the enemy to make scrap iron out of your tanks.
• In 1940, the Norwegian garrison at the Oscarborg Fortress guarding the approaches to Oslo sank the Blücher, a German heavy cruiser on her maiden voyage, using guns and torpedoes that were more than 50 years old (originally delivered by Germans, ironically). Not quite "rocks," but certainly quite old and outdated technology.
• Played with in Real Life with concrete bombs. Need a target in an urban area destroyed while minimizing collateral damage? Just use an airplane to drop a big lump of good old-fashioned concrete on it. Catch is, this blunt force weapon must be dropped directly on the target and thus requires laser-guidance or similar technology to be effective.
  • The "Rods From God" concept takes this a step further, replacing the chunk of concrete with large tungsten darts launched by satellites in orbit. They don't weigh as much an actual meteorite but they make up for it with the sheer velocity of what is essentially a solid metal meteorite.
  • Taken even further with the Hellfire 9X, which is a Hellfire missile with the explosive warhead replaced with multiple sharp blades that deploy right before impact, which is precise enough to take out individual people with minimal collateral damage.
• During the NATO operations in the former Yugoslavia, two F-117 stealth aircraft were lost (one was shot down; one was hit and managed to return to base, but never flew again). This was due to, among other things, old radar sets that operated on a wavelength that the aircraft weren't so stealthy against, combined with prodigious application of anti-aircraft cannons and SAM spam. Notably the same battery scored both. Partly attributed to carelessness on NATO's part, who flew the F-117s on the exact same flight path for every mission and sometimes without necessary electronic warfare and Wild Weasel support.
• It is nearly legendary that a SEAL team was put up against an "amphib" ship (looks like a small carrier — think "helicopter and Harrier carrier" and you've got it; they are used to deploy marines; an example would be the LHD) and quickly took out all the defenses... except for engineering, which was armed with foot long bits of pipe ("pipe wrenches", used to shut water tight doors) and safety netting, which they deployed at every level of the vertical shafts... basically, there wasn't any way to invade or drop a bomb without either exposing oneself to pipes or getting caught in safety net.
• The A-10 Thunderbolt II. Built according to design principles set out by World War II ground-attack aircraft, it was not very aerodynamic, had low-power engines designed for subsonic efficiency rather than performance, and originally had a bare minimum of electronic navigation and targeting equipment required to fly. It is also ridiculously durable, armed with the GAU-8 Avenger, a Gatling-style gun system the size of a VW Beetle that can punch through the top of a tank with superb accuracy^note Although, strictly speaking, since the gun was built first and the Thunderbolt was designed around it, the Avenger was actually armed with the plane. As it turned out, the emphasis on subsonic efficiency meant that the "Warthog" could loiter around combat zones for long periods of time and made it a very stable platform for carrying large amounts of ordinance and unleashing it upon its targets. There are few combat aircraft in the world that can claim to withstand more punishment, or to have successfully carried out more ground missions under fire, with significantly higher mission availability and fewer friendly fire incidents to boot.
  • ...If the A-10 was fighting in an area without serious anti-air defenses such as AA guns and missiles, or if there were no enemy aircraft capable of fending it off. Against an opponent who has access to any of those, however, regardless of how many people espouse its legendary toughness, its survivability goes way down. To make things even worse, it was originally envisioned as having a high casualty rate at best in its original role; hunting Soviet tanks while NATO fighters were fending off Soviet planes. As both sides were expected to have large numbers of vehicles and planes present in a hypothetical battle, all bets were off.
  • Perhaps damningly, the bare minimum avionics of the original variant of the A-10 made them vulnerable to friendly fire incidents (a blue-on-blue with British forces during the invasion of Iraq being the most infamous), especially because the pilots had to rely on a pair of binoculars before the later A-10C variant fixed the problem with more advanced avionics and IFF systems at the cost of the A-10's ability to operate from anywhere as bare as a dirt strip.
• The Bismarck was attacked by a small squadron of the obsolete Fairey Swordfish biplane, outdated and primitive even before the war started — though not, as is occasionally assumed, a World War I design, having been designed in the 1930s (the Swordfish was simply obsolete before it was even designed). One of the planes crippled the battleship by taking out her rudder with a torpedo hit, leaving her unable to do anything but steam around in circles until the rest of the Royal Navy caught up. The Bismarck couldn't track and hit the slow-moving, low-flying biplanes since she had been designed with medium-velocity C33 105mm anti-aircraft guns but these had been substituted while under construction for the more modern high-velocity C37 105mm. Nobody told the fire control designers about the change and the fire control system was still optimized for the C33. As a result, the fire control system unerringly pointed the guns at the wrong place and overshot the planes. Also, since the Swordfish were mostly built out of cloth instead of metal, shells and flak tended to just punch straight through planes without causing significant damage. By some incredible chance five Swordfish were damaged but none shot down. Important to note the hit on the rudder (which was blind luck, ordnance from planes at the time couldn't really be aimed reliably in the middle of a flak barrage along with nasty maritime weather conditions) was the only hit by the planes that actually did any damage to the Bismarck. Outside of that, this trope was not Truth in Television as the planes' out-of-date torpedoes were too weak to inflict serious damage to anything besides the rudder.
• Sometimes older fighter aircraft can best the planes that were much more advanced. This is especially true if the former manage to catch the latter at their own airbase and strafe the crap out of the place (early warning radar generally doesn't detect planes that fly at tree-top altitude).
• Shaped charge munitions can be easily made far less effective or nullified completely simply by putting up a relatively solid obstacle in their path to detonate the warhead before it reaches the target. This is the principle of spaced armor, where auxiliary plating is not applied directly to the hull of a vehicle, but suspended at a particular distance from the hull plate. As it turns out, forcing the resulting explosive jet to travel two feet through open space will protect a vehicle far better than 6 more inches' thickness of steel armor.
• During the 1990s at the National Training Center, the resident OPFOR had no trouble employing simple effective countermeasures against advanced American equipment, including digital C4I systems and Apache Longbows. In one occasion, a group of Longbows launched their entire load of simulated Hellfires on burn barrels that looked like a group of armored vehicles on their sensors, before being shot down by MANPADS teams waiting by their battle positions.
• The US army discovered that insurgents could use cheap, commercially available equipment to intercept and view camera footage being transmitted by American UAVs. However, this is subverted, as the information would not be particularly useful to them and in the case of hunter-killer drones, would only tell them how many more seconds they have to live.
• China has been arming its police officers with crossbows instead of traditional guns. The reason for this is because China has to defend against Islamist rebels crossing the border from Pakistan, and crossbows allegedly have less chance of setting off bombs than a gun. This also makes it less likely for anyone else to get ahold of a gun. This has cultural tradition behind it, as well: crossbows have been used in China for at least 2400 years.
• Similar to the above, during the breakup of Yugoslavia, the crossbow manufacturer Barnett sold crossbows to Serbian paramilitaries due to crossbows not being banned under the UN arms embargo. The Paramilitaries and even some army units used the crossbows as virtually silent sniper weapons. The crossbows also had a terrifying effect on the soldiers who came under attack from them, as the crossbows were so quiet they never knew they were being attacked. During the mentioned breakup of Yugoslavia, one of the main weapons of the rebelling side, with less than half the men, all the siege and air war machines moved to Serbia, were sinks and heating boilers carried and dropped by firefighting aircraft with over 80 year outdated engines.
• Since the Vietnam War, a popular and easy way to mark mines and explosives was to put some shaving cream on them. In the Afghanistan and second Iraq Wars, soldiers use silly string to check for tripwires, since the foam can reveal their positions yet is light enough not to set them off.
• During WWII, the Allies were using a Polish-designed metal detector to find mines. The Germans got around this by making them almost completely out of wood or GLASS. However, the problem then would be that no one could find them after the war was done, and so mines made out of non-metallic materials were subsequently outlawed by the later Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
  "And those little wooden bastards the mine detectors don't pick up..."
• Played with during the US war in Afghanistan. In 2001, US Special Forces that were inserted in the country to assist anti-Taliban tribes were forced to learn how to fight on horseback, as this was the tribesmen's primary method of transportation. While it is true that cavalry charges were on occasion somewhat successful against Taliban mechanized units, what is often not mentioned in the rock beats laser narrative is that smart bombs and other aerial support were called in by the US special forces ahead of the charges and were essential to their success — without air support, the horses would be easily driven off by enemy armor.
• There has been a resurgence of interest in blimps and other lighter-than-air aircraft, which have a number of advantages over fixed wing aircraft such being cheaper to maintain, longer flight time, and greater carrying capacity. The US is already using several blimps as testbeds for carrying radar equipment to bolster air defense systems.
  • During World War II, the US Navy made considerable use of blimps as maritime patrol aircraft. Shore-based planes couldn't reach out far into the ocean, and especially early in the war, there weren't nearly enough aircraft carriers to cover all the convoys. Blimps were superior to planes in that they could stay aloft for days and were more than fast enough to keep up with ships. Not only did they use optical and later radar spotting to detect submarines, they were also fitted with machine guns and depth charges to directly attack, so advanced German U-boats were endangered by giant helium balloons.
• The Naval Battle of Campeche, fought in 1843, pitted warships of the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Yucatan (both of which had declared independence from Mexico) against warships of the Mexican Navy. It has the distinction of being the only time that sailing ships have defeated steamships in battle.
• The Russian Antonov An-2 is a large all metal Bi-plane designed after WWII as an agricultural and transport plane. Today, it is still in service because it is very forgiving to fly: it can take off from anywhere, is near impossible to stall, and can actually travel backwards if heading into a strong enough wind. North Korea still employs them for actual military uses, including as a transport plane for special ops teams.
  • It's also relatively difficult for fighter aircraft to shoot down as it can move so slowly that fighter launched missiles won't be able to effectively target it.
• The Polikarpov Po-2, a 1928 wooden biplane used mainly for flight training and dusting during peacetime, was successfully fielded by Soviet night bomber units in WWII: they could glide over German army camps with the engines turned off, undetected until they actually started dropping bombs on the barracks. The Po-2's top speed was also lower than the stall speed of German planes (the slowest speed a plane can do without actually losing the ability to stay airborne), which meant that pursuing German fighters would only be able to shoot a short burst of fire at the Po-2 before actually overtaking it. While Po-2's couldn't carry much more than a few small bombs or grenades that the observer had to toss by hand that did relatively little physical damage, they caused a great deal of disruption to the Germans by causing nightly commotion without any warning with near impunity. During the Korean War, Po-2's would return to the same role, this time harassing American and other UN forces by night, earning the nickname "Bedcheck Charlie"; their small radar cross section and low and slow flight made them very difficult to detect and intercept. Their preferred targets were American airbases where they damaged a number of jet fighters, including F-80s and F-86's, while occasionally burning fuel dumps and definitely costing pilots sleep. Since American fighters of this era were much faster than the German fighters a decade before, they had even more trouble with the pesky little biplane: the many and varied fighters (F-82 Twin Mustangs, F-80 Shooting Stars, F-86 Sabres, and F-94 Starfires) that USAF threw against Po-2's could not shoot down a single one. The only American aircraft that successfully brought down a Po-2 in air combat, incidentally, was the lumbering (and quite slow) AD-1 Skyraider, a piston-engined attack bomber designed (but not fielded) near the end of World War 2. In return, the Po-2 is also the only biplane credited with a documented jet-kill, as one Lockheed F-94 Starfire was lost while slowing down to 110 mph – below its stall speed – during an intercept in order to engage the low flying Po-2.
• During 1960s, Britain faced the prospect of a possible conflict with Indonesia over Northern Borneo. Since the Indonesian Air Force still operated World War 2 era P-51 Mustangs, British ran an exercise to examine how modern jet fighters might fare against World War 2 era piston fighters. English Electric Lightnings (a Mach 2 capable jet fighter) were pitted in mock battles against Supermarine Spitfires borrowed from the Battle of Britain Memorial Squadron and these showed that it was nearly impossible for Lightnings to fight Spitfires as their flight characteristics were so vastly different—the jet simply could not slow down enough to engage the Spitfire. While the rock (Spitfire) could not actually "beat" the laser (Lightning), the laser couldn't stop the rock.
• Taking the trope literally, lasers in real life do not (yet) make very effective weapons, due to prohibitive power requirements, range limitations due to the "blooming" effect caused by the atmosphere, and various other drawbacks. Basically, any laser weapon that can be built with modern technology will be outperformed by a more conventional weapon. This only applies to lasers intended for causing physical damage to enemy targets, though. They are still quite effective in target guidance systems, gun sights, and for blinding enemies. They are also finding use in missile defense systems.
• After the reunification of Germany, NATO managed to get their hands on Soviet-made East German weapons systems — which resulted in some shocking instances of this trope. NATO had created advanced flares designed to spoof IR missile guidance systems, and so NATO seekers in Sidewinder missiles had been improved to compensate for such flares. The Soviets, however, continued using cruder dirty-burning flares. In a serious technological oversight the Sidewinder's developers had optimized the missile seeker to discriminate the thermal patterns of NATO flares on the assumption that the Soviets had developed something similar. You know where this is going. This oversight was corrected in later versions of the missile.
• In World War II the American codebreakers were easily able to break Japanese codes, yet the Japanese were never able to do the same, primarily because the Americans employed Navajo speakers who created a code from their native language, and since the Japanese did not have anyone who knew the language, they stood no chance of deciphering the American signals. Army forces in Europe sometimes employed a similar tactic, with other Native Americans using their languages, though they didn't go so far as to create codes from them as the Navajo did. A similar trick was used by the Italians during World War I, as they recruited radio operators from Sardinia and had them speak in their local language, that only other Sardinians could understand.
• At the Second Battle of Bull Run, Confederate troops ran out of ammunition and repulsed several Union attacks with hand-thrown rocks.
• US nuclear missile silos are controlled by computers that still run on 8-inch floppy disks. The reason is because not only were these silos built decades ago when more advanced computers were unavailable, but also the fact that because practically nobody else uses floppy disks and the computers cannot connect to external networks like the internet, they are essentially impossible to remotely hack.
• An aerial drone was being used to film the proceedings of a medieval Faire in central Russia, when one warrior threw a spear at it and knocked it out of the sky in an epic feat of Camera Abuse. He made the throw just for a lark, and was surprised when he actually hit the thing. Everyone thought this was very amusing, and a rune stone was made depicting the spear thrower killing the drone monster.
• The Great Emu War, when the Australian military in 1932, equipped with Lewis light machine guns, fought the emu population of Australia, as they were ravaging farmland. The emus won, making it the subject of plenty of jokes by Australians. Can't get more rock than an animal that can't even use tools, after all.
• There is an allegation that a perturbed Spaniard managed to shoot down a lightweight recon helicopter with a stone. Whether this is possible or not is hard to say, as helicopters are notoriously fragile and extremely sensitive to even the slightest forms of rotor blade damage. You be the judge.
• With the advent of GPS, many modern militaries have become increasingly reliant on it or similar systems as a navigation aid or to guide their weapons. However, there are a number of high-tech counters to GPS that involve jamming or spoofing the signal, or just outright shooting down the GPS satellites. To get around these high-tech GPS counters, the US is reviving an old Cold War era technology: astro navigation. It was essentially a mechanical computer that tracked the user's position in relation to the stars that was installed in ballistic missiles and high-flying aircraft like the SR-71 Blackbird and B2 Spirit. And today, astro-nav is greatly benefited by advances in miniaturization and digitization. Since astro-nav is a completely self-contained system that does not require a connection to an external source, it is completely unaffected by anything that would counter GPS.
• The reason that the US Navy held onto the Iowa class battleships for so long wasn't because they were invincible, but because it forced the Soviet Union to invest in weapons that could counter them. The sinking of the Italian battleship Roma proved the guided armor piercing missiles were an effective counter to battleships and the pacific proved appropriately armed aircraft could do the same. So everyone phased out battleships and as a consequence, everyone phased out anti-battleship weapons. So America just dusted its own battleships off, strapped missiles on them, and showed them off to a world that had no counter to battleships.
  • During the Falklands conflict, there was a lot of fear in the Royal Navy that Argentina's American built WWII-era cruiser, General Belgrano^note Known in her former life as the USS Phoenix could pull something similar in combat. The Royal Navy simply didn't have missiles with enough penetration to defeat the cruiser's armor, and didn't have ships with enough armor to withstand the cruiser's guns (fifteen six-inch guns that could fire a combined 150 rounds per minute, with a range of 14.7 miles). Fortunately for the Royal Navy, they had some rocks of their own, and sank the Belgrano with a WWII era torpedo (albeit fired from a nuclear-powered submarine).
• Subverted by the Battle of Adwa, the decisive battle of the first Italo-Ethiopian War. While the Ethiopians did have a number of soldiers still wielding antiquated weapons like swords and spears, their Emperor Menelik II was a Magnificent Bastard who'd acquired a small arsenal of modern weapons through diplomacy with Italy's European rivals Russia and France and, once Italy caught on and blocked that, a larger one from Italy itself.^note The whole reason for Menelik's beef with Italy was that when the Italians helped him defeat his rivals he signed a treaty that made Ethiopia an ally of Italy, only to later find out he had been scammed into becoming a protectorate... And as said treaty allowed him to acquire modern technology from Italy on credit, when the Italians blocked the acquisition of French and Russian weapons he took advantage of the treaty to acquire weapons directly from his enemy, and went for the most modern available It's been argued that the Ethiopians were actually better equipped than the Italians, who were trying to use up their stock of outdated weapons and ammunition. The Italians also had inaccurate maps and suffered from poor morale, while the Ethiopians obviously knew the terrain and forced the Italians to fight in an area of their choosing.
• During the Third War of Italian Independence (the southernmost front of the Austro-Prussian War), the Italian fleet was trounced by the Austrian one at Lissa. While this was mostly caused by divisions in the Italian hierarchy, poor organization, and the general incompetence of the admirals, during the fight the extremely modern Affondatore (the only ship in either fleet with turret-mounted guns) suffered heavy damage from the engaged Kaiser, a wooden sail-propelled ship of the line (which was also badly damaged but still came out in a better state).
• Humans are better able to defeat more "complex" critters than "simple" organisms or even are-they-even-organisms. Most animals big enough to be punched in the face can be taken out with a spear or if need be with firearms. Mosquitoes are already a bit more difficult as they have both stealth and numbers. Bacteria get harder still, as they cannot be seen by the naked eye, but at least there are Antibiotics which attack the structure and/or metabolism of those tiny bastards. But what do you do against something that doesn't have the structures an antibiotic could act against? Or, for that matter, a metabolism? Viruses are notoriously hard to "kill" because the question of whether they are "alive" to begin with could just as well be answered "no". And don't even get started on Prions which are a further degree of Nightmare Fuel than even viruses.
• The initial invasion of Saint Helena by the Dutch in 1673 was repelled by English settlers throwing rocks. More of a case of 'rock beats musket' but still points to the English for guts.
• The chariot was the pinnacle of the efficient war machine towards the end of the Bronze Age (about 1200-900 BCE): It was a lightweight carriage drawn by two horses and occupied by two soldiers, one to steer the horses and another equipped with a composite bow. These chariots could make very fast and effective hit-and-run attacks on the enemy, as they could easily outrun any enemy on foot, reaching enemy troops very fast, doing quick damage, and running away before the enemies could react or reach the chariot. Most Bronze Age empires based their military power primarily on chariots. Towards the end of the Bronze Age, and thought by historians to be one of the (many) reasons for the downfall of almost all empires of the time (except Egypt) and leading to the end of the age, almost all of the Mediterranean empires were attacked by the so-called Sea Peoples (who are thought to be from either the western Mediterranean, central Europe, or both). The attacks of the Sea Peoples were devastating, and city after city and empire after empire fell to their attacks. Even the strongest military forces with highly trained chariot units did not stand a chance. What was the overwhelming technology used by the Sea Peoples to overwhelm the best military forces of the Mediterranean empires? What took down the pinnacle of military design, the chariot? Some kind of superweapon? No. Foot soldiers with spears. That's it. Technologically extremely primitive, pretty much stone age technology, but surprisingly effective. (It's hypothesized that one common tactic used by the Sea Peoples was to simply surround the attacking chariots, blocking their escape routes, and simply overwhelm them by sheer numbers.) One problem with the chariots was the typical problem with advanced super-weapons: They were very expensive to build and maintain, and thus very slow to replace if one was destroyed. When the defending military forces started running out of chariots, there was no way to replenish them in time to keep stopping the invasion.
• Downplayed during the first world war with cavalry charges having some success. In August 1914, during the Battle of Mons, cavalry on cavalry clashes were common and while entrenched German soldiers and barbed wire hampered a cavalry charge, it didn't entirely stop it, allowing a temporary British advantage, until the Germans counterattacked with their cavalry, driving the Allies to the Marne. The first battle of the Marne in September 1914, known as the taxicab battle (because of French taxis bringing soldiers to the warfront) was largely a stalemate until British and French cavalry, sensing an advantage, charged over the Marne through machine gun fire and chased terrified German soldiers to the Aisne. The German general at the time thought that Germany just lost the war. This trope would be mostly averted through the remainder of the war, as the traditional cavalry charge by October 1914 had become replaced by dragoon style fighting where they charged over the trenches then dismounted to attack the entrenched soldiers. During late 1914 and early 1915, these pseudo-"cavalry charges" still took place, but with limited success. The gains would be lost within a day and neither side could break through. From summer of 1915 through 1918, cavalry charges would become so rare they'd be unexpected, with their success reasons subverting this trope, aided by tanks and aircraft. A lone cavalry charge in 1916 by General Haig that temporarily succeeded before being lost became the cautionary tale during the postwar period of the futility of cavalry charges. Nonetheless, a "cavalry charge" at Beersheba succeeded, being done dragoon style (the Ottoman soldiers were not expecting a charge so they panicked and were ineffective), the Battle of the Moreuil Wood in spring 1918 was the last true successful traditional cavalry charge, bugle call and all. Although most horses were lost to machine guns and barbed wire, it wasn't a Pyrrhic Victory for the reason that along with breaking through and actually winning, despite the great loss, it completely froze the German spring offensive and turned the tide of war. In late 1918, there was a final charge during the later phases of the war by the Belgian Guides (fought dragoon-style) which was the most successful charge since 1914, despite being aided by tanks, the tanks got stuck so it was the Belgian cavalry who win the day.