EUROPE: War Machines

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The ability to foresee, to outguess, to improvise, to make the best of what you have, is absolutely necessary to the successful military "scientist." The Allies almost lost the World War because Britain's Lord Kitchener had grown stodgy, because France's Foch kept mistaking a trench "war of position" fof an open "war of maneuver," because the campaign to take the Dardanelles got under way too slowly. Britain's Sir Douglas Haig threw away a chance for a decisive breakthrough when he allowed the new invention of the tank to appear on the western front prematurely, without adequate support, in numbers far too small to be effective. If Brilliant Mind Winston Churchill and Brilliant Mind Lloyd George, whose ideas were squelched by the military men, had had full scope in 1914-18, the War might have taken a different course. And if Germany's Brilliant Mind Schlieffen had been alive to prevent the weakening of the right wing the War might have ended with the capture of Paris in October 1914.

The great unknown factor of the next war is the capacity of the minds that will devise its strategy. Brilliance on one side can make it into a quick and easy victory for either the stronger or the weaker military machine. A bad blunder on one side can turn it into disastrous defeat. Bad blunders on both sides—such as there were in the last war and are in most wars —can turn it into a military stalemate, another human holocaust, a war of economic attrition, with no victor anywhere.