I'm surprised more people don't compare books like Pinker's Enlightenment Now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now) to The Great Illusion
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion) which claimed war was impossible due to economic interdependence and new massively destructive weapons(published 1911). Pinker makes many similar points about progress and the reduction of violence in the 20th and 21st century, which for me is actually a worrying sign.
Angell's argument was more along the lines that war cannot be strictly justified by economic, financial, or security incentives: "(2) War is not impossible, and no responsible Pacifist ever said it was; it is not the likelihood of war which is the illusion, but its benefits." [^1]
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.
A new lap of the arms race is almost always increases the likelines of war, not decrease as every side believes in superiority of its weapons.
Equally so, believe that nuclear retaliation we will stop a war "will only hold so until it doesn't"
In WWI every side knew how terrible, and devastating the artillery has become — to the point of making the infantry warfare obsolete, and plainly suicidal for an enemy with inferior artillery.
It's just both sides mutually believed to have a trump card, and that the one suicidal there was their enemy.
Indeed and his predictions were quite accurate: WW1 devastated the empire's involved. No one came out on top from a war of conquest and it was the end of monarchies in Europe.
As usual, then just as now, the devil is in the details. If you garner enough support and do it in a far enough place from where most of your economic and political interests lie, then you're pretty much safe with waging decades of war or get away with genocide.
King Leopold II of Belgium got away with killing 10 million Africans right around the period mentioned (1865-1909) with barely a mention then or now. And the US has been waging war in the Middle East under one pretext or another for several decades now without being pushed into isolation.
You should give Pinker a closer read. He does not say that progress is uniform in space or time. He certainly acknowledges there can be set backs. This is exactly why he emphases the importance of reason - to avoid the setbacks that would come from poor decisions.
I've read both Enlightenment Now! and The Better Angels of Our Nature and agree. Pinker has never said progress is uniform, or even preordained, for that matter. Both books are more descriptive than prescriptive, relying on hard data instead of theories, and appeal to the values of the enlightenment, i.e., the use of facts and reasoning for solving the problems that inevitably come with technological progress.
I would encourage IceHegel to read the books more closely too.
I own and have read both. They are fine books, but they don't deal with the potential for violence with much depth. It's hard to know what "hard" data to use to estimate potential violence, but an economist isn't getting higher than a B- if they leave the term out of their regression entirely (as Pinker does).
Pinker also says repeatedly in both books that humans feel worse about the way things are than they should because our picture is anecdotal and distorted.
Maybe, but we might also dislike the present age because there are possible future worlds that appear much worse than the futures worlds imagined by past ages, even if those ages themselves were more violent/less educated/more unequal/etc. than our own.
I know we should not judge person and only ideas but it seems like all of Pinker's ideas are tok shallow for an academic. For example,
Also, Pinker wrote a book on how the mind works, which is very very wrong (my wife, who's a psychologist absolutely hates it).
She asked me to read a small article called "That's not how the mind works" by some guy at MIT to explain.
Then I've also read his book on "How to write" and as an avid reader, I'd say we'd not have had Shakespeare if we followed his advice.
And now you're telling me that his other books are also very shallow? Does he not realize it?
Just like all of the edge.org/Epstein people (if you’re unaware, Pinker is accused of raping a 15 year old girl and spent extensive time with Epstein), he’s all smoke and no substance. In fact the “third culture” group has proven to be amoral and completely corrupt.
Perhaps you read an excerpt… it's a 128 page book.[1] Also, Fodor was a Rutgers guy, out of Columbia and Princeton, though this was published by MIT Press.
He's not trying to deal with the question of potential violence, though. As the parent comment said, his books are mostly descriptive and just lay out data pertaining to extant trends. It's not a book about possible existential risks or tail risks. These are important topics to address separately, and I don't think that Pinker would dispute that (although he is a little too dismissive of AI risks for my taste, but that's separate from those books).
You may wish to read his reply to Taleb's critique of these books, where he addresses the criticism that he ignores tail risks.
Always good to learn something new - I had no idea that the amazing La Grande Illusion [1] (1937) took its name, somewhat ironically, from a book published decades earlier.
I find both interesting and terrifying the dual-entanglement of modern technology: how the Internet, AI, quantum computing, and satellites provide huge economic growth and utility to the world while at the same time making war deadlier and more dangerous than ever. In the Cold War era everybody sat down and said war was too dangerous to fight anymore because of nuclear proliferation, but then found ways around that by fighting proxy and economic wars in non-nuclear areas.
Cyberwarfare is a continuation of this, allowing countries to attack each other by knocking out infrastructure and spreading disinformation. I'm scared of the instability and havoc these new developments will wreak on our world. I hope leaders have the foresight to predict and manage the harm these technologies can cause, maybe with treaties banning the proliferation of dangerous cyber capability. The world failed to do this in WW1, but was somewhat successful with nukes.
I cannot help but wonder if a free and open internet should only exist within national borders, and between treaty partners, but severely restricted, monitored, or even cut-off between rival nations.
It was the rise of information sharing that finally ended the Cold War. I would argue that inherently unfair closed internets will lead to a modern "hot war." Because when you get trapped in bubbles of positive feedback loops, with only your own propaganda being spun up like hyperdrives, you can't ameliorate extremist views with actual realities.
I'd agree with you but the scale and automation of cheap, targeted misinformation campaigns can be highly destabilizing, and can even be used to whip up animosity of the public against allies. No, I do not think a simple analysis will do in this case.
Just to give a counter point to this - I honestly think that the UK (where I live) would be better off if it didn't inherit services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc from the US. Certainly in my circles of friends and family all social media does is spread misinformation and rumours. Schools use Facebook for connecting with parents, which I think is pretty lazy of them and we should have a national system for this.
Obviously there are some services that are great for the UK which are American (AWS?), so if there were nation-only Internets then it would be good to pick and choose which services from other nations you could use in your own.
Is the problem really that Facebook et al are American, though, if the term even applies to multinationals?
Say a company based in the UK had the exact same basic business plan of collecting your data and selling it to micro-targeting ad agencies and political campaigns. Would it not have the same prime metric of "engagement" and stimulate the same rage bait and limbic system responses? Would people not end up in ideological rabbit holes? Would it then not be equally problematic? What if said company had a monopoly?
Now that you guys have left the EU, is the UK regulatory framework anywhere close to the GDPR? Are there other factors that would prevent it happening in your back yard?
In other, tongue in cheek words: what are you on about, mate?
>> Is the problem really that Facebook et al are American
Kinda. American's seem to take capitalism to the extreme (honestly I do like America and Americans). I'm all for an open market but there are limits that we should enforce.
>> Say a company based in the UK had the exact same basic business plan of collecting your data and selling it to micro-targeting ad agencies and political campaigns. Would it not have the same prime metric of "engagement" and stimulate the same rage bait and limbic system responses? Would people not end up in ideological rabbit holes?
Yes - but I don't think those companies would end up as oligarchies, as Facebook / Twitter / etc have become, due to the "national" limitation that they would endure. They wouldn't be able to influence the elections in other countries. Competition would be easier (you try starting a company to compete with Twitter, it can sway public opinion to stay top-dog).
To be clear, I meant internet should remain open between allied States, with no mention of wealth, but do imply some level of enforcement responsibility.
From my understanding of the period, one might describe WWI as "anticipated, but not comprehended;" one of the catalysts for the war was a general understanding on the European continent that France and Germany were going to re-litigate the Franco-Prussian war at some point, as well as an understanding in Germany that time was not on their side due to the demographic changes in France - higher relative population growth - and economic changes in the Russian Empire allowing for more rapid and effective military deployment.
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!
With respect to this article, I would take the lesson of the early 20th century and WWI and ask:
Is there any major geopolitical development that is generally assumed to be inevitable, and how might modern technology upset the assumptions of the powers-that-be in their planned response to that event?
>> demographic changes in France - higher relative population growth
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 China and the USA think that any invasion into their territories will inevitably fail because of the strength of their armies and because of the long supply chains that their enemy would need to maintain to hold a position.
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.
I suspect, though I hate to say it, that the biggest change autonomous war vehicles will make is that democracies will come to really, really love war; now that it won't cost voters' sons and daughters.
Maybe that means war can become just a national competitive pass-time like video games or e-sports on a much bigger level. It's the carnage and damage to life that is the ugly part of competition or sport or combat - if we can save the lives but still allow nations to challenge themselves in competition with others, so be it. Let's sanction the next version of the Olympics and end the concept of war as it has existed until now.
You mean hate. The average person on the street doesn't want wars and the inevitable retaliation. Some terrorists are just informal soldiers that felt like they didn't get a fair chance at fighting back. There have also been rumors about terrorists targeting drone pilots.
That is a brilliant summary of the US China strategic situation! I normally think of it from the US point of view-- China can't really invade us, a war would be catastrophic for them economically. You made me realize how symmetrical that thinking is. Yikes!
A us China war would be ecconimc suicide to the wrold ecconomy. To the point that countries we think of as poor come out ahead. (Where would Brazil cast their alliance is an interesting question, as one of the few powerful countries that could make a difference that isn't commited already.
I’m not sure I’d describe any continental European country as having won World War Two, except perhaps Russia.
France could be described as a winner in World War One, but their economy grew slowest before both wars, not after.
You mean you were thinking US might invade China? Yeah, that was never a possibility.
The US might be able to cut off China from a lot of trade by locking its seas and sinking its ships, though. China is still playing catch-up on maritime supremacy.
Another underrated development is cheap, re-useable launch to LEO. If the US can just park a few thousand telephone-sized depleted uranium rods in orbit for cheap, and strap on a guidance system, that's a pretty big strategic advantage.
You have to supply those autonomous fighting vehicles. Worst case scenario, you use a hypersonic nuke to blow the local base up. You don't even need ICBMs.
>Is there any major geopolitical development that is generally assumed to be inevitable, and how might modern technology upset the assumptions of the powers-that-be in their planned response to that event?
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 counter to that is missiles have limited fuel. Those shooting them down have a larger fuel budget because the missile is coming to a known target, and forcing the missile off course is as good as destorying it.
Fuel budget = magazine depth. It takes more missiles to shoot down missiles, does not favor defense. Every missile designed for intercept is one less missile in inventory for attack. Forcing missiles off course is going to become increasingly difficult as kill chain condenses, the more loop shift towards onboard sensors the more difficult to disrupt.
UAVs are potentially just larger missiles with more fuel and ability to out maneuver smaller missiles, made more difficult with addition maneuverability when biologic limitations removed. I imagine scenario converging to large performant UAVs with high performance envelopes trained to dodge anti air-missiles with relative impunity, shifting battle space to mutual air supremacy and race to destroy asset fastest. Essentially the end of hegemony via naval force projection.
Interestingly, the trench war episodes during the Russo-Japanese war (siege of Port Arthur) were a good demo-version of the Western Front ten years later.
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.
There just wasn't another way in sight. Everyone knew what didn't work. Nobody knew what did. The tech wasn't yet there for tanks - those that were built for WW1 looked impressive but changed little, like bringing elephants to a battle.
Unfortunately the belligerent parties were all too good in propaganda for their own sake.
Even if the war was going nowhere, the civilian population was whipped into such hatred of the other that "old fashioned" peace talks just weren't on the table.
Predicting that some tech will surprise us is easy, predicting which one and how is almost impossible — in part because any obvious consequence will be defended against.
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.
I agree that I would also thoroughly enjoy self-spiced pork (hopefully the retrovirus also mutates pigs' TRPV1 protein to be the bird variant, which is unaffected by capsaicin)... but was it really the commenter who got it backwards? Or is it the hypothetical Islamist fundamentalist group who does, with their lack of understanding of consumer preferences causing them to not realise the paradoxical consequences of their action in this scenario?
It will begin by releasing the locked-in, eliding the server nerve. The justice department will adopt it as an alternative consequence for crimes. The memories of the murdered are extracted and the perpetrator forced to experience the pain, the fear, the twilighting faces of those loved and now lost. It becomes an awakening. By experiencing deprivation we become willing to sacrifice more to reduce the deprivations of others. A post scarcity society is within reach, but becomes fractured. What is the machine for? To impress empathy upon man and sustain an endless modesty? To subdue, to control and assure plenty for your few?
>> Is there any major geopolitical development that is generally assumed to be inevitable, and how might modern technology upset the assumptions of the powers-that-be in their planned response to that event?
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.
The increase in surveillance states is potentially countered by the increased velocity by which ideas can spread and people can communicate with each other.
Nah. That doesn't counter it, because that sword cuts both ways. You know the thing I don't want you to know, but I can figure out you know it just as fast.
They can't kick down all the doors. If ideology spreads faster than doors can be kicked down the increased velocity of information is a net win for the offense.
And I would die on the hill of plugging the 2nd Amendment as a damn near sacred and last insurance policy for the average person. That it is attacked when it's the obvious conclusion or tool of choice for the scenario you two are describing in this thread, is just evidence that it must continue to exist.
Your gun won't protect you when Big Brother comes knocking at your door. Even if you can make it too difficult to actually take you by force, which I doubt you realistically can, the state can simply make your life sufficiently difficult (e.g. no way to get employment, no credit lines, no education for your children, no electricity) that the act of actually imprisoning you doesn't matter anymore.
We are talking about a far future outcome where we have no choice left. I want to avoid that future, but if it came to it I’d at least want to have a chance.
"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."
Generals like Haig the Incompetent, had very little reliable information what was happening in the major offences on the German side. So when the massive French and British losses piled up, they assumed that this meant that German losses were as bad or worse. (They weren't)
And the consequence of that at the middle army management level was bragging rights about how many of your men you'd managed to get killed. Source: Hochschild, To End all Wars.
The Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) illustrated both the strength of trenches, and how they might be overcome. But the foreign military observers had all gone home before things became really interesting.
The American Civil War demonstrated the horrors of trench warfare back in the 1860s. The penultimate Union campaign in which Grant took Petersburg, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia was primarily a 10 month long series of trench maneuvers costing some 70,000 casualties on both sides. In particular, The Battle of the Crater would play on repeat 50 years laters as a mine opened a hole in the line only for thousands to be slaughtered trying to go through it. A similar scene played out a year prior when Grant assaulted Vicksburg[2].
> The American Civil War demonstrated the horrors of trench warfare back in the 1860s.
While a number of conflicts (as well as the ACW, the Maori Wars in New Zealand and the Crimean War are among the more frequently cited) involved large scale trench system and some of the other elements that, in combination, characterize “trench warfare”, they didn't involve large scale deployment of machine guns and rapid firing artillery, and some of the other aspects that planners leading into WWI did not fully account for (or even completely misjudged e
the direction of effect on successful tactics.)
It wasn't the poweder it was the rifle. Before the rifle you could have armies face each other in a sword type formation and shoot, so few bullets would hit that this wasn't that costly in lives. By the civil war a good shooter could always expect to hit where he aimed.
The civil war sometimes had 3 people reloading guns for the marksman. The faster loading guns to come latter just eliminated that.
Even today, the machine gun isnisn't expected to hit. Sharpshooters are one shot one kill and take time to aim. The machine gun is about keeping the enemy undercover while your guys do something. Anyone who dies in machines gun fire it was their own stupid fault.
> It wasn't the poweder it was the rifle. Before the rifle you could have armies face each other in a sword type formation and shoot, so few bullets would hit that this wasn't that costly in lives. By the civil war a good shooter could always expect to hit where he aimed.
While certain rifles were fairly accurate on man-sized targets at 100-150 yards (Springfield 1861 being the most common), being able to visually identify a target at 100+ yards, even at 50 yards didn't matter much after the shooting started. The black powder from a mass of rifles causes a thick fog to form on each side, obscuring individual targets. This leads to a lot of massed volley firing tactics (and most of the rifled muskets used were lethal to 300-400 yards) similar to what were used with smoothbore muskets of the previous 100 years. You can read a lot of stories were officers were picked off behind the lines or when riding between lines, largely because of the accuracy of these for a handful of shots (and a well-trained individual could fire 3-5 shots per minute), but this accuracy simply didn't matter once the literal fog of war set in.
The salient difference in technology between Napoleonic conflicts and the ACS is the rifled barrel both in small arms and in field artillery. The reason this mattered was the Napoleonic tactics were formed with the idea that outside 100 yards is relatively safe. A mass of bodies 400 yards away poses no threat, so you can casually march forward. The most famous example of this backfiring is Picket's Charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Fifteen thousand men plodded forward for several hundred yards while being mowed down by masking fire from rifled muskets. Picket's subordinates ordered the quickstep and the charge a bit earlier than convention (by 1863, both sides understood the tactics they had learned at military academies to be somewhat outdated and almost succeeded for it). This wasn't done soon enough, and resulted in their attack failing due to lack of manpower. This same masking fire made assaulting trenches nearly impossible. Sappers/miners and siege artillery were required to poke holes in the lines, and in most cases this wasn't enough. The tactics that worked were spreading thin and outflanking the lines.
It's worth noting that there were some engagements that did show the power of rapid firing machine guns and rifles with magazines to offer less reloading time. The Gatling Gun, and a few similar machine guns were designed and first deployed in the ACS. While these were rare (typically purchased privately by commanders or supporters instead of being government issue), they were devastating when in operation. The first repeating rifles were deployed effectively (again, privately purchased) by dismounted calvary at the Battle of Petersburg to offer unprecedented firepower from a small group.
"Generals are always prepared to fight the last war". For WWI machine guns forced unplanned trench-based war instead of planned (based on previous wars) cavalry/etc. attack based,. For WWII USSR and France had massive defense-in-depth systems of lines of trenches and fortifications following WWI experience - well, tanks and aircrafts reshaped the war again right in the first days of war. ... Several months ago Armenia having relative up-to-date Russian weapons including air defense systems designed to fight modern manned aircraft lost the war in matter of days to Turkish drones used by Azerbajan (the wars in Libya and Syria during 2019-2020 seems to be the first when drones were actively used against modern conventional weapon systems, and it was success, and that enabled the new approach for the Azerbajan in that 30 year old stalemate which they had tried to fight conventionally last time just in 2016 with no result).
German adoption of the LMG, et al, didn't force trench warfare: Trench warfare was the result of ossified allied thinking at the most senior levels and of placing literally zero value on infantrymen. In other words, an epic failure of leadership caused trench warfare.
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.
Currie was much liked by the British command because - while he was clever when he could be - he would fight; would sacrifice Canadian lives in diversionary attacks. (Vimy Ridge was merely a diversionary attack, believe it or don't. It succeeded because the Germans had already moved their main defenses well back.)
As for trenches, they came in with smokeless powder, and were very extensive and elaborate by the end of the U.S. Civil War.
Currie wasn't always magic, (they don't teach you about his messier, less successful battles, and you'll have to hunt for books about them) and was a profound war criminal by today's standards. In Vancouver in training Canadian soldiers were taught by him never to take a German prisoner unless specifically instructed to do so for intelligence reasons. I'm also Canadian, but I knew I was being taught pure crap about the Canadian army (and nearly everything else) in school.
Yeah, we have more than a few dirty little secrets re PoWs, even into WWII. And later. We say a good game, but sometimes the walk deviates....
(Did you know that one of the few if only cases of an ally firing on - and I think killing, but I cannot find the reference - a Soviet in WWII was a Canadian? We'd been ordered to take territory they'd been assigned. They requested our withdrawal. We demurred. We can only guess what they were thinking when they chose to press their case, but it was apparently withdrawn quickly when triggers were squeezed. At least this is how it was described in the one source I came across some time ago and cannot find. This one at least covers the basics: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/canadian-parat....)
This article has the right conclusion, but it misses nearly every significant technological change that had strengthened the defense - many of which, like smokeless powder, went back to the U.S. Civil War (which also had a lot of trenches by the end of the war.) Think railroad, telegraph, radio.
But it also misses what can change during a war. When the war began, a four-year war wasn't physically possible, because the Axis had no rich source of ammonia (beyond collecting human and horse urine) such as guano islands. But ammonia synthesis was invented during WWI, by a German chemist. Suddenly a long war was in the cards.
Everyone missed the importance as the civil war, because Europeans assumed the Americans were a bunch of hicks. WW1 was about rifles and by extension machine guns and trains.
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.
Not impressed by their historic cherry-picking. Railroads were just one of numerous advancements planners were counting on. For example, it went hand in hand with mass mobilization at a scale that was previously impossible.
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.
They repeatedly discuss railways and WW1. Repeatedly.
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.
My personal feeling is that the pendulum is very much swinging back towards ideology and the feeling that we need to "purify" society, often through state-sanctioned violence.
I guess everyone experiences it differently, but in my "bubble" most people are severely disillusioned with any utopian ideologies or concepts.
A dystopian future of some cyberpunk flavour seems inevitable.
Of course this is a very biased view and probably not reflective of reality at all.
In Adam Curtis' newest documentary series, called "Can't Get You Outta My Mind", he looks to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to identify two competing ideologies: the geopolitics of money, and nationalism. The Serbs and the Russian nationalists failed and were pulled into the orbit of the oligarchs into the globalized world of Big Money. In the absence of fascism and communism, it seems countries can only swing on the pendulum between "nationalism" and "globalism".
For those curious, here's part 1/6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME
The other parts keep getting kicked off YouTube for copyright yadda yadda, but they can be found.
"As of 2020, due to underinvestment, there is no credible Western alternative to Huawei, whose rise and adoption across broad swaths of Asia and Africa, and now Europe, has been subsidized as a national priority project of the People’s Republic of China." - to me that's a strange utterance considering 99% of global mobile OS are IOS or Android, two American innovations.
Almost every packet they send, flows over layer 3,2 and 1 devices made by Huawei in most people's world. It used to be Nortel, Nokia, Ericsson and some others. The market moved.
Android and ios devices are made in China by Foxconn. Most peoples phones run on chipsets made in China
I think they meant in the context of 5G communication which is true. There isn't a competitive Western source of this technology which is why people was bitting Huawei in the first place.
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.
On the other hand, previous leadership in the U.S. waged a trade war, believing that it would be easily winnable. So there is echo, though not a repeat.
Ian, on the you tube channel Forgotten Weapons talks about this when covering water cooled machine guns form the great war.
Nobody in the establishment knew what the mechanization of death with automatic machine guns was going to be like.
>Nobody in the establishment knew what the mechanization of death with automatic machine guns was going to be like.
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.
It's quite frankly fantasy level absurd to use the past to try to predict the future. The past was not recorded in detailed resolution, it was written by victors, it was not recorded in the first place, it was lost to time, it was the lived experiences of hundreds of millions of people...
"History" is at best a crude model of things that happen. Barely useful for describing the past and of zero value to predicting the future. This is applying technical analysis to humanity.
We can predict overconfidence, blindness, and egoism rather accurately from the past into the future. The leaders in every generation think they're the exception (think COVID planning) but they're not. We're not.
To give an example, I don't think anyone could have predicted that wearing masks would be politicized. I also don't think you could make any useful predictions such as would Biden or Trump win the election. And of course, no one could have predicted that we would even have COVID in 2020. Black swans and chaotic systems drive history, which is why you can't predict it.
You don't understand. Human nature hasn't changed. Not even after two thousand years. It's always following the same patterns. Paranoia and irrationality spread and anger (killing intent) is then directed toward a minority. The fact that human nature is so predictable is scary.
>The past was not recorded in detailed resolution, it was written by victors, it was not recorded in the first place
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.
Facts are negotiable, as the deep divide in the U.S. illustrates. Heck, look at the extensive video coverage of the attack on the Capitol, and how little agreement there is at the grass roots on what that video ultimately means.
And what does that video tell you? At best, it's a surface level observation of a framed window of space. If you watch a video of me, do you know the thoughts in my head?
Admittedly we are gaining resolution in our recording of history, but even today it's extremely sparse and I'd argue uncapturable in full.
I strongly disagree. I have spent a lot of time trying to find more esoteric details about the world wars, for the reason that I wanted to understand how we got into them (and therefor apply that gained knowledge to the goal of understanding how to avoid the next one), and I have found great value in understanding the past in this way.
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."
> For me, this mostly centers around the analysis of soft-power machiavellianism at the upper echelons of government and it's shadow coterie
I take that as a given and yes, I base that not just on my own experience but also studying history among other things but that's for my own self satisfaction and easing of general ennui. It has zero predictive value. I can't tell you who's going to win an election, I can't tell you how many people are going to die of COVID, I can't predict the future. The article we're discussing attempts to do just that, which is why I say it's bunk.
Social "science" hogwash. If the past had predictive ability, historians would be billionaires. When you can demonstrate repeatability in the predictive nature of your models, then you will be in a place to call others a "fool". Until then, realize you're standing on a house of cards.
>If the past had predictive ability, historians would be billionaires.
It only takes one person to become a billionaire. The historians that could become billionaires surely did and thus exhausted the potential for other historians to become billionaires. So this argument is pretty weak. I haven't even considered the fact that in practice there is no way for an individual historian to make billions without also being good at business and being good at business is not a unique quality of historians.
There is also the problem that nobody claimed to predict the future in an economically viable fashion. Did historians ever claim to predict the future (human nature is not the same as the future) at all? What you have built is a straw man. There are so many holes in this argument, can't you think of anything better?
We’re literally discussing a blog post where the author makes extensive and detailed predictions about the future. It has exactly as much legitimacy as astrology. It’s anti-intellectual.
If, as you say "history is always written by the victors"; wherefore do you get legitimacy to your claim this makes history a waste of time? It appears to me, in fact, you're drawing conclusions based on historical occurence to lend predictive credibility to your assertion that history is always written by the victor, and therefore, worthy of dismissing.
If I accept your assertiom, your claim is baseless and bereft of any rhetorical power whatsoever. That's before we even touch on the factual errors. Some of the best and most valuable history is not that written by the victor, but that recorded by the eventual loser. Historians hunt for, and preserve these false starts, and spend lifetimes teasing out the circumstances around them.
You want examples of predictive power?
Power vacuums:
why sometimes you don't kill the dictator you can get along with
Involuntary relications: They never end well; ever.
Regicide: Fun for the whole family
Genocide: Fun for the entire ethnic group
War:
As the atrocity of the means of conducting war increases, the stomach for employing it consistently decreases sharply.
Bugs and common defect classes: ever tracked a development teams bad habits? Great practice. Helps immensely in making you look like a psychic because you just learn where and how everything is going to break.
Numerical interpolation/integration:
History has non-human aspects as well. To ignore the impact or utility of history is to entirely dismiss the field and methods of simulation and engineering. Those mathematical constructs are underpinned by relationships that are predictive by their nature.
I mean, I can go on. Look, I was like you once. I gave the history majors I knew endless amounts of guff. Then I actually read some, and wondered why I was seeing so many old issues rearing their ugly heads.
History is critically important to ynderstanding and contextualizing the human experience. There are thoughts every human in their lifetime will think. Watch someone elses children and pick them out. Go ahead. We record history so that those that come after us can see how we reasoned, and how it turned out. That way. You don't end up repeating the mistakes of your forebearers. Which can only come to pass if you read the bloody thing and absorb it.
Techne itself is a form of historical record; a network of interrelated knowledge, contexts, and applications thereof that are composable to bring about an end.
Our history, the history of humanity, is a network of the excesses, vices, illusions of grandeur, tales of victory and crushing defeats laid bare before us. It is the path of cobbles that brought us to where we are.
You know what? Go watch Connections if you haven't. If you had, you should have managed to absorb why understanding the past informs better decisions moving forward by priming your pattern recognition faculties and breaking you of that most horrible habit of "This time it'll be different."
