We have discovered that the modern economic organisation is in itself a fighting machine.It is so much so that it is capable of taking on and defeating quite easily any merely warrior people that is so rash as to pit itself against it.Within the last sixteen years methods of fighting have been elaborated that have made war an absolutely hopeless adventure for any barbaric or non-industrialised people.In the rush of larger events few people have realised the significance of the rapid squashing of the Senussi in western Egypt, and the collapse of De Wet's rebellion in South Africa.Both these struggles would have been long, tedious and uncertain even in A.D.1900.This time they have been, so to speak, child's play.
Occasionally into the writer's study there come to hand drifting fragments of the American literature upon the question of "preparedness," and American papers discussing the Mexican situation.In none of these is there evident any clear realisation of the fundamental revolution that has occurred in military methods during the last two years.It looks as if a Mexican war, for example, was thought of as an affair of rather imperfectly trained young men with rifles and horses and old-fashioned things like that.A Mexican war on that level might be as tedious as the South African war.But if the United States preferred to go into Mexican affairs with what I may perhaps call a 1916 autumn outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she seems to possess at present, there is no reason why America should not clear up any and every Mexican guerilla force she wanted to in a few weeks.
To do that she would need a plant of a few hundred aeroplanes, for the most part armed with machine guns, and the motor repair vans and so forth needed to go with the aeroplanes; she would need a comparatively small army of infantry armed with machine guns, with motor transport, and a few small land ironclads.Such a force could locate, overtake, destroy and disperse any possible force that a country in the present industrial condition of Mexico could put into the field.No sort of entrenchment or fortification possible in Mexico could stand against it.It could go from one end of the country to the other without serious loss, and hunt down and capture anyone it wished....
The practical political consequence of the present development of warfare, of the complete revolution in the conditions of warfare since this century began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for any peoples not able either to manufacture or procure the very complicated appliances and munitions now needed for its prosecution.Countries like Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia, Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no more capable of going to war without the connivance and help of manufacturing states than horses are capable of flying.And this makes possible such a complete control of war by the few great states which are at the necessary level of industrial development as not the most Utopian of us have hitherto dared to imagine.
5
Infantrymen with automobile transport, plentiful machine guns, Tanks and such-like accessories; that is the first Arm in modern war.The factory hand and all the material of the shell route from the factory to the gun constitute the second Arm.Thirdly comes the artillery, the guns and the photographic aeroplanes working with the guns.Next I suppose we must count sappers and miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased importance.The fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute for cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes supported by automobiles.Several of the French leaders with whom I talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely done with in modern warfare.There is nothing, they declared, that cavalry ever did that cannot now be done better by aeroplane.
This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and of old-fashioned British army people.The hunt across the English countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal, the race meeting, the stimulation of betting in all classes of the public; all these things depend ultimately upon the proposition that the "breed of horses" is of vital importance to the military strength of Great Britain.But if the arguments of these able French soldiers are sound, the cult of the horse ceases to be of any more value to England than the elegant activities of the Toxophilite Society.Moreover, there has been a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then employment of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the like, who would otherwise have been in the munition factories or the trenches.
To what possible use can cavalry be put? Can it be used in attack? Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen following up gunfire.Can it be used against broken infantry in the open? Not if the enemy has one or two machine guns covering their retreat.Against expose infantry the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun is far more deadly and more difficult to hit.
