What World War I Can Teach Us about Misjudging Tech and Social Change (2020)

His point was that economic interdependence in the current age(1910-1860) meant that changing the international order by force of arms would not lead to a more favorable outcome for the aggressor. In fact, quite the opposite. The aggressor's economy would be wrecked even in victory no matter the length of the war. Economic isolation from world trade and credit would be devastating.

If he was claiming that war was impossible would he bother to write a book arguing that the benefits of war were not commensurate with the cost? The entire reason he wrote the book was to dissuade 'militarists' and stop the buildup of military potential that began with the dreadnought race and germany's more aggressive wilhelm foreign policy. The book was almost directly aimed at a german audience as a result.

[^1]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38535/38535-h/38535-h.htm#Pag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Illusion

I think you have it exactly backwards. France had a significantly slower population growth. To give one example of how this impacted the military caculus: Germany was able to easily expand its army in 1911 and 1913 and still have a large reserve pool of manpower but France had to increase the term of service from 2 to 3 years and expand its conscription to almost the entire adult male population of fighting age; which led to riots and political chaos. At the time of the outbreak the French army had been expanded so rapidly that training had to be cut significantly.

>> However, the types of wars in which the Great Powers of the time were involved - and from which their military planners derived their assumptions about war with modern weaponry - were mainly colonial conflicts against relatively under-armed opponents, eg. the Boer war, which the Great Powers typically "won." The outcome of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) was shocking enough to change the calculus for planning the European war, as Russia was now seen as a less able ally for France... and on and on such analysis could go!

I would strongly disagree. Russia lost the Russo-Japanese war mostly due to inept military execution and the difficulty of troop transportation through an incomplete Trans-Siberian railway; hardly relevant to a european total war. You could argue( and some less astute observers at the time did) that Japan's victory through aggressive assaults on static russian positions 'proved' that offensive power would carry the day to a decisive conclusion.

Both sides also believe that the other side will inevitably fail because the other side's political system and ideology is so broken.

But because of the first point they both feel confident that the collapse of the other is going to be containable and controllable.

The technological developments (even if morally wrong) are autonomous fighting vehicles that rain mayhem and destruction; and engineered viruses. A failed state can still cause the other side to lose a war, leaving no winners.

PRC reclaiming Taiwan. Probably biggest friction point for hot war between great powers in 5-30 year time scale.

Technologic assumptions is ability to complete / disrupt kill chains of modern anti ship missiles and implications on expensive naval assets to maintain hegemony. My long term assumption is that cost benefit analysis will favour missiles. Interception typically requires multiple equally expensive interception vehicles + limited magazine depth means navies outside of friendly A2AD will be difficult to sustain long term. Right now it's a battle between unverified Chinese ability to complete kill chain which requires a host of external inputs versus US ability to shoot down increasingly sophisticated missiles. I think technology is going to make kill chain increasingly irrelevant, cheap disposable UAVs + machine learning means eventually there's going to be cheap monitoring systems and shortened local kill chain - no need to use satellite or other sensors to track target if processing shifts onboard. I remember someone speculating about kamikaze commercial drones that target airplane intakes autonomously with sufficient training dataset.

My personal assumption is past the missile/interception conundrum is a world where naval force projection is supplanted by system of global UAV networks and mutual air superiority - it's easier to shoot down manned vehicles than unmanned because unmanned doesn't have to limit maneuverability to keep meat bag alive. Basically a status quo where defense becomes impossible. I'm imagining a conventional UAV first strike that wipes out an adversaries ability to make war, but in context of mutual air superiority between large power blocks, this works out to conventional MAD where starting war means immediately losing capability to sustain a war. Flournoy said she wanted Pentagon to develop capability to sink entire Chinese Navy in 72 hours. Imagine that but for assets and industrial base, in a world of UAVs, where more money goes into acquisition costs, I can imagine smaller countries being able to build sufficient arsenal to upset balance and unseat hegemons.

The observers from the West were very clear in their warnings towards the General Staff back home that the combination of barbed wire and rapid firepower was massively deadly and led to stalemates. Also, that cavalry was becoming outright obsolete in such conditions.

They were mostly ignored because they were young.

I don’t expect, yet also wouldn’t be surprised if, an Islamic fundamentalist group genetically modifies a pig-specific retrovirus so that any pig which catches it will start internally producing enough capsaicin that nobody will even want to eat pork.

I do expect software based attacks to achieve government goals.

I would be only a little surprised by private nukes or lunar mass drivers.

If mind-uploading becomes a thing, I expect totally novel forms of interrogation in addition to virtual hells (a la Surface Detail by Iain M Banks), and several other legal and political messes outside the scope of this thread.

3D printing, protein engineering, AI controlled mining robots, etc. will lead to synthetic von Neumann machines that radically transform industry, giving small states or mid-sized criminal gangs significant war-fighting capacity.

AI can out-strategise humans. Who trusts it, wins — unless the AI was made wrong, in which case who trusts the AI, loses. Nobody will know if the AI is right or not until too late.

A/B testing propaganda, so perhaps you can fool all of the people all of the time.

Most of these are better as Hollywood plots than as real concerns. Whatever does eventually happen will seem obvious after the event, but will seem like science fiction right up until that point.

My guess: Asymmetric warfare suddenly becoming very weak. I think there's more than one way that could happen; but won't say more lest it cause more things to hit the fan than are hitting now.

I'm reminded of a passage in Neuromancer:

         "Screaming Fist."
         "Famous. Don't  they teach  you  history these days? Great bloody
    postwar  political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your
    brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers,
    all of that.  . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit  of patriotic young flesh
    in order  to test some new technology. They  knew  about the Russians'
    defenses,  it came  out later. Knew about the  emps, magnetic pulse weapons.
    Sent  these  fellows in  regardless, just  to see." Deane shrugged.  "Turkey
    shoot for Ivan."

That the Germans were unable to take advantage of their new tech shows how slow they were to evolve their thinking as well: Had they even a hint of previous (and later) Prussian mobility, the war could have turned out much differently. There is a reason LMG-centric squad tactics were near-universal doctrine.

Disclaimer for the next bit: I'm Canadian.... Arthur Currie took a different approach, saying 'pay the price of victory in shells—not lives'. He emphasized training, mobility, preparation/repair of supporting areas, and rapid deployment of defensive structures, e.g., barbed wire, etc., to protect and defend gained ground against counterattack (at which the Germans excelled). We get a little chuffed about Canada's Hundred Days.

Likewise, today is similar. It’s pretty obvious how you take out a modern country. Information campaigns and taking out infrastructure over the internet are cheap and effective. Witness the complete collapse of Texas today as an example.

British had its long range gunnery using advanced mathematics super secret, and though nobody else can do beyond the horizon accurate artillery fire besides them.

Unknowingly, so were Germans.

And they clearly are using that as an illustration of ONE of the technologies that mirrors today's revolution. I just feel we read different articles if you don't think they covered this.

Android and ios devices are made in China by Foxconn. Most peoples phones run on chipsets made in China

For Huawei, read "ipr here, but made there"

But it's more complicated than that because a lot of patients of 5G is own by American companies. Technology is a very messy tangled web of cooperation and competitiveness.

Machine guns had already been employed extensively in colonial conflicts. Everyone was familiar with them and how they effected tactics. People just didn't know that a war with both sides having them combined with modern artillery would turn into an entrenched stalemate.

The video camera has been capturing history in increasingly high resolution for ~100 years now. You don't have be a world war champion to own a video camera.

Unfortunately, very often history as it is taught in schools seems to tend to bypass these more important core reasonings as to the causes of things, so I can understand your viewpoint from that angle, but it doesn't mean there isn't an immense amount of value to be had in understanding the past (even if hidden) to understand the possibilities of the future.

For me, this mostly centers around the analysis of soft-power machiavellianism at the upper echelons of government and it's shadow coterie, for example. Articles like this one miss the forest for the trees by getting too hung up on technology and not the people and ideas behind them.

Allow me to demonstrate this by declaring a great irony of this article given the source of the document (the Carnegie foundation).

In 1982, G Edward Griffin interviewed Norman Dodd, an banker who in 1954 was the staff director of the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations (Reece Committee). In this interview, he said the following:

Griffin: Mr. Dodd, you have spoken, before, about some interesting things that were discovered by Kathryn Casey at the Carnegie Endowment. Would you tell us that story, please?

Dodd: Sure, glad to, Mr. Griffin. This experience you just referred to, came about in response to a letter which I had written to the Carnegie Endowment Center, National Peace, asking certain questions and gathering certain information. On the arrival of that letter, Dr. Johnson, who was then President of the Carnegie Endowment, telephoned me and said, "Did you ever come up to New York?" I said, “Yes, I did, more or less each weekend.” And he said, "When you are next here, will you drop in and see us?” Which I did. And again, on arrival, at the office of the Endowment, I found myself in the presence of Dr. Joseph Johnson, the President, who was the successor to Alger Hiss, two vice-presidents and their own counsel, a partner in the firm -- a fellow by the name of Cromwell. And Dr. Johnson said (again after amenities), "Mr. Dodd, we have your letter. We can answer all those questions, but it would be a great deal of trouble. We have a counter-suggestion. Our counter-suggestion is that, if you can spare a member of your staff for two weeks, and send that member up to New York, we will give to that member a room in the library, and the minute books of this Foundation since its inception. And we think that, whatever you want to find out or that the Congress wants to find out, will be obvious from those minutes."

Well, my first reaction was they had lost their minds. I had a pretty good idea of what those minutes would contain, but I realized that Dr. Johnson had only been in office two years, and the vice-presidents were relatively young men, and counsel also seemed to be a young man. I guessed that, probably, they had never read the minutes themselves. And so, I said that I had somebody and I would accept their offer. I went back to Washington, and I selected the member of my staff who had been a practicing attorney in Washington. She was on my staff to ensure I did not break any Congressional procedures or rules. In addition to that, she was unsympathetic to the purpose of the investigation. She was a level-headed and very reasonably brilliant, capable lady, and her attitude toward the investigation was this: “What could possibly be wrong with foundations? They do so much good.”

Well, in the face of that sincere conviction of Kathryn's, I went out of my way not to prejudice her in any way, but I did explain to her that she couldn't possibly cover fifty years of handwritten minutes in two weeks. So, she would have to do what we call “spot reading.” I blocked out certain periods of time to concentrate on. Off she went -- to New York. She came back at the end of two weeks, with the following recorded on dictaphone belts.

We are now at the year nineteen hundred and eight, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting, for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?

Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the People of this country, than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department. And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly. And finally, of course, the war is over. At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out. At that point, they come to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, we must control education in the United States. And they realize that is a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone.

So they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion: that portion of education which could be considered domestic should be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation, and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American History. So, they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American History in the country -- people like Charles and Mary Byrd. Their suggestion to them is this, “Will they alter the manner in which they present their subject”” And, they get turned down, flatly.

So, they then decide that it is necessary for them to do as they say, i.e. “build our own stable of historians." Then, they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say” “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American History, and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so? And the answer is, “Yes.” So, under that condition, eventually they assemble twenty (20), and they take these twenty potential teachers of American History to London. There, they are briefed in what is expected of them -- when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association. And then, toward the end of the 1920's, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000) for a study of our history in a manner which points to what this country look forward to, in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in essence, a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is this: the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic American efficiency. That is the story that ultimately grew out of, and of course, was what could have been presented by the members of, this Congressional Committee, and the Congress as a whole, for just exactly what it said. But, they never got to that point!

Later in the interview, Dodd said "Yeah, I might tell you this experience, as far as its impact on Kathryn Casey is concerned. Well, she was never able to return to her law practice. If it hadn't been for Carroll Reece's ability to tuck her away in a job with the Federal Trade Commission, I don't know what would have happened to Kathryn. Ultimately, she lost her mind as a result of it. It was a terrible shock to her. It is a very rough experience for her to encounter proof of this kind."