A Timely Lesson from the Great War?

Adam Hochschild, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, argues that one of the reasons why the First World War was as bloody as it turned out to be was because the British, French, and German senior officers cut their military teeth on colonial wars. The British, at the Battle of Omduran, had machine guns and artillery to use on a force armed with swords, spears and blackpowder muskets.

They were all used to having massive fire superiority against underarmed and often poorly disciplined native forces. They went into the war convinced that things would be no different.

But they weren't. The Reichsheer wasn't a bunch of "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" or Boers. They had Maxim guns and heavy artillery. The British Army, still, maintained three cavalry divisions, when cavalry had been shown to be worse than useless against troops with machine guns and that the only useful purpose for horse flesh in France was as draft animals. And even though it had long since been shown that German soldiers weren't going to panic and flee, the British insisted on mass charges.[1]

But has the lesson of the First World War been learned? It was been nearly seventy years since our nation has faced, on the battlefield, a foe as equally capable. One of the lesser-known historical points from the Second World War was that, until later in the war, the Japanese pretty much kicked our asses in surface ship actions. They had better gunnery, better powder for night gunnery and their Long-Lance torpedoes cut through American destroyers like sabers through a wheel of cheese.[2] The mass daylight bombing raids, until the arrival of large numbers of long-range escorts, were turkey shoots for the Germans.

What doomed the Axis, ultimately, was that the Allies had the resources of most of the globe available to them. Germany and Japan only had what its soldiers could see. When the Enola Gay opened its bomb-bay doors over Hiroshima, there was probably about as much aviation gasoline in Japan as there was at the Army Air Force bases in the Marianas.[3]

So what happens, come the day, when our soldiers have to face a foe which is not wearing homespun robes and carrying old AKs? What happens when the enemy has drones and satellite reconnaissance? Will our own generals, then, having cut their teeth beating on Iraqi insurgents and Afghani Taliban, be mentally prepared to take on an equally-matched enemy? Or will they, like the European generals a century ago, think that their technology will be enough?
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[1] It is an enduring mystery as to why Kitchener and Haig weren't court-martialed and shot.
[2] If the Japanese had used their submarines in the way that we and the Germans did, it would have been a much different sort of war.
[3] And much better gasoline, to boot.