Bloch displayed an impressive knowledge of the weapons’ technical capabilities that the great powers employed on land and sea. He applied this knowledge to data from recent battles to predict the cost of human life in the next major conflict between European powers, predicting catastrophic losses for all sides in the conflict due mainly to the introduction of more accurate rifles that did not emit smoke when fired. The introduction of these weapons would disrupt the typical use of large formations and give an advantage to riflemen hidden in the terrain or dug into protected positions. For this reason, he proclaimed that future wars would be long struggles for fortified positions where whole nations would be called to arms. The result, he predicted, would impose an economic and human cost that would make war prohibitively expensive.
The most interesting aspect of Bloch’s work is that his theories were tested fifteen years later during World War I. The grand strokes of his predictions hold up well. The Great War was a defensive slog that required the participants to mobilize the whole of their economies. Interestingly, Bloch’s weakness was that he did not go far enough in his predictions. He underestimated the cost of a great war, projecting that France would need to spend $1.8 billion annually to finance a conflict between Germany and Austria. The actual cost was more than $6 billion a year.
Any precise cost estimation of a future conflict is bound to be incorrect, but the magnitude of the difference between his prediction and reality displays the weakness with all forecasts.
Despite his attempt to update the lessons from regional conflicts with technical and economic data, his model could not account for all the political factors that would lead countries to go to war even when the decision guaranteed mass destruction. His assessment also failed to leave room for the possibility of further evolutions in military technology. Two years after his death, the Wright Brothers successfully launched the first heavier-than-air flight. Airplanes would not be used in conflict until the Italo-Turkish in 1911, which would have made it difficult for Bloch to recognize their importance even if he had lived to see them fly. Even with these weaknesses, Bloch showed that something as simple as a smokeless rifle can have enormous effects on how states finance future conflicts.
Leaders in the defense realm should take a page from Gibson and Bloch by studying early adopters of this technology to see how political and economic considerations may change to support AI-augmented military staff sections.
Bloch’s assessment shows the limits of trying to quantify the future. The purpose of his book, however, was not to accurately predict the future of warfare but to convince others to abandon the idea of war altogether to avoid such harmful new technologies. On that accord, he failed miserably, but his effort still shows that examining history for lessons on future warfare best reveals how the introduction of a technology can affect the entire system of warfare.
Leaders today are in need of this kind of direction. The release of large-language models to the public have brought the world to a new precipice. These technologies have enraptured the public and the media alike. The interfaces released to the general population feel like a form of magic, but the large-language models that drive them are more like the steam engine or electricity. The large-language model is a general purpose technology that will automate many of the rote tasks performed by office employees. While military leaders could be content in knowing that their staffs will run more efficiently once they integrate these models into their workflow, they should look beyond this effect to understand how greater efficiency in staff work may affect the economic and political calculations behind the next war.
Much of today’s strategy is formed by large staffs that function like any other modern office place. The introduction of ubiquitous AI will have far-reaching consequences. Talk of AI in defense circles has been rooted in the dream of fully autonomous robots, but the real transformation will occur in the offices that litter the headquarters of every echelon of the military.
While tools to increase staff productivity are not as flashy as pilotless helicopters, they will likely contribute more to the transformation of warfare by decreasing the amount of time it takes leaders to generate and analyze courses of action.
The general trends of AI integration into staff functions like intelligence is inevitable. In looking at current uses for large-language models, it seems that these models will help automate many of the bureaucratic tasks that bog down staff sections during the planning process and provide prompts for common battlefield problems. The fear that these models will completely pull humans out of the loop are unfounded; rather, they will create decision-making space by lessening the load of other tasks. These models will automatically create a common operating picture that will keep different staff sections synched even when they are not in face-to-face meetings. The timeline for this integration may be shorter than most analysts may think. Microsoft, who owns a large share of OpenAI, has already started integrating it into Microsoft Teams, the main program that staff sections in the United States use to synchronize their files.[8]
While the immediate effects are clear, the second and third order effects will take time to forecast. Leaders in the defense realm should take a page from Gibson and Bloch by studying early adopters of this technology to see how political and economic considerations may change to support AI-augmented military staff sections. While tools to increase staff productivity are not as flashy as pilotless helicopters, they will likely contribute more to the transformation of warfare by decreasing the amount of time it takes leaders to generate and analyze courses of action. Like Bloch’s smokeless rifle, it seems likely that the adoption of large-language models by military staff will make war more deadly in ways that may be hard to predict. Yet despite this difficulty, it is necessary to take the time to try to describe the second-order effects of a technology that the world does not quite understand yet.
