Is War Now Impossible?
Jan Gotlib Bloch (Ivan S. Bloch), 1899 — risk.
A Warsaw railway financier with no military standing spent years computing what magazine rifles, smokeless powder and entrenchment mathematics implied, published six volumes in 1898, and issued this English abridgment in 1899 with a prefatory conversation recorded by W. T. Stead. His forecast: the next great war would open with unprecedented slaughter, freeze into entrenched stalemate, become a years-long contest of attrition, and end in famine, economic collapse and revolution for the losers. It resolved correct on every clause in 1914–1918, down to the revolutions. Bloch was heard — his work helped prompt the 1899 Hague Conference — and ignored, which is the second finding: forecast accuracy and policy uptake are different variables. The generals graded his homework in other people's blood.
Marked passages
At first there will be increased slaughter — increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.
From Stead's prefatory conversation, 1899. A mechanism-based forecast — firepower per metre of front, computed forward — published fifteen years before the Marne resolved it. The standard the Calibration Ledger holds itself to: name the mechanism, then the outcome.
It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.
The single most precise military prediction of the nineteenth century, delivered by a civilian reading logistics tables. Domain outsiders with better data beat domain insiders with better uniforms — the Tetlock result, four decades of forecasts early.
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- The Collapse of Complex Societies — Joseph Tainter, 1988
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed — Jared Diamond, 2005
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2012
- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction — Philip E. Tetlock & Dan Gardner, 2015
- The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind — Gustave Le Bon, 1895
- The Limits to Growth — Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William Behrens III, 1972
- Statistics of Deadly Quarrels — Lewis Fry Richardson, 1960
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