 And thank you for coming. You look back at World War I, you're going to get a dose of mud and Flanders and an army of war. And I'm here to tell you that there's more to it and that in a lot of ways, it's shaped by maritime things. The other issue that's worth asking about is, are we in the 1914 situation now? I mean, a lot of people think so. If you go back before World War I, I'm looking at it from a British point of view I should add. And we are more analogous to the British than, say, to the French. We're maritime power. We are not contiguous with whoever we're worried about, unless Mexico decides to suddenly attack us. If you were British before World War I, you thought a war was coming with Germany. I've been reading the British naval attaché reports. And they talk about how the German navy is whipping people up. And they're doing that in order to justify a large building program, which otherwise doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The British talk to the Germans about that. They say, this fleet is a luxury. What are you doing? And you say, well, gee, now I understand. There's this building race. The British realize the Germans are the enemy. And they go into the war. But wait a second. That isn't the way the war starts. Oh, that's kind of interesting. It gets funnier than that. I think that when the British look at Germany, they assume that something bad is going to happen. Once the war breaks out, I think that the British administration has a hard time not going into the war instantly because of that. They don't want to fight at all. It's a very pacifist administration. And they hold back. And I think the reason that Belgium mattered was it was basically saying, you can't reverse this thing. It's not going to burn itself out. This is the real thing. That isn't the usual way you look at World War I. The other thing is, why did it happen? You read a lot of novels about World War I. And it's a sort of inhuman force that eats up a whole generation of people. And they never quite explained where it came from because, obviously, it's this monster that's sitting under every pavement in Europe. You know, we're all evil war-mongering types. And I never met anybody who was really pro-war, but anti-war people would say that a lot. Well, where did it come from? And when I was younger, the popular line was Barbara Tuckman's. There was this set of interlocking alliances. And once there was a spark, the whole thing was a tinderbox. You know, it went up like smoke. And it took me a long time to think about that. I don't think it's true. I think that Barbara Tuckman's book was really about the threat of accidental nuclear war. I think it was very popular because the Kennedy administration was obsessed with preventing an accident, which I don't think was ever going to happen. If you go back to the previous administration of President Eisenhower, it occurred to him that no one was stupid enough to start a big nuclear war. Pretty obvious, you know? It's bad stuff. And he says, it's common sense. Come on, wake up. The common sense kind of dripped away in the 60s. You go back to before World War I, well, did people think there was going to be a war? And the answer is, no, most of them didn't. How come? Because they thought there was deterrence. The British, who are very commercially inclined, had been told by various economists that if there were a big war in Europe, everyone would be ruined. By the way, very accurate statement. They concluded that no one would be that stupid. If you look at the alliance structure, the alliance structure is mostly about if you do something, bad things will happen to you, which is the way deterrence work. They didn't have that language then, but it doesn't matter that they had the ideas. Well, then the question is, what was strong enough to break that deterrence, right? And by the way, the Germans were the closest trading partners of the British. A lot of people thought that that economic closeness made war impossible. Is that familiar to you? You know, the American-Chinese economy is so vital to both of us, no one would be dumb enough to break it up. Well, so how come it broke up? And the answer has to be that there was something so bad that they felt that if they didn't fight, it would be worse than peace. Well, what could be that bad? Well, if you read American and British historians, nobody proposes an answer, as far as I can tell. If you read German historians, some of them do. Because like this, and you'll really love this one. Germany was a very ramshackle type of system. They had a Reichstag, which wasn't quite a parliament. The Reichstag would pass money bills, but they couldn't initiate things. And for example, they couldn't decide who was prime minister. They couldn't do the things you do in parliaments. Until 1912, the Reichstag was fairly conservative. There was a social democratic party which got the majorities in every election after 1890, but because the Reichstag was heavily gerrymandered, it didn't matter. A lot of people at the top in Germany were very worried that something might happen, but they were able to stave it off. In the 1912 election, finally, so many people voted SDP that they got real power in the Reichstag. It may or may not be causative, but the same year the German army suddenly started getting a lot more money. A lot. It's an amazing thing that in 1912, which is a peak deal for the German Navy, they get 52% of the German defense budget. Now for a land-oriented country, that's really weird, right? After that, they don't do as well, not proportionately. Well, gee, 1912 election, 1912 money, sort of, right? Now, if you read Ernie May's book about conferences before World War I, that's the year that Kaiser holds a conference. He starts screaming about how the Russians are improving their railroads. God help us, God help us, we've got to do something. And he signs in order that they can prepare for war. Well, if you've actually been in government, you know what you're watching, right? Isn't the Kaiser's bright idea it's some aide who knows how to hop him up, right? That's how it's done. I mean, he wasn't stupid, but you know that when someone at the top suddenly gets a bright idea, somebody else fed it to him, usually, right? And in 1914, the Kaiser keeps saying, how come we're not concentrating on Russia? He hasn't quite been told that isn't the war someone wants to fight. In 1913, things get really bad. There's a very embarrassing incident in Alsace in which a junior German officer beats somebody up. And he's convicted by civilian court and then a military court exonerates him. And the Reichstag is not amused. They pass a vote of no confidence. Now, you can tell it's not a real democracy because the chancellor doesn't step down. He works for the Kaiser, he says, go to hell. But if you were worried that these socialist evil types are gonna take over the world, this is the red flag going up. Supposedly, that year, somebody on the general staff turns the guy in the foreign office and says, your job for next year is to start a world war. Oh, and by the way, make it look like we're the victims. You know, I can't draw a red line from one to the other, but it's sort of staring me in the face. Or what are you watching? You're watching first that internal factors may be a lot more important than we usually give them credit for. You're watching country where the electorate votes anti-military, the British government, which thinks the Reichstag is parliament, thinks, boys, this is encouraging. If we just list out the hotheads, things will be good. Doesn't occur to them that it's the opposite. That the people at the top may regard this victory by rational people as something you have to deal with. You never see that in any British internal statement. They don't get it. What they think is good news is actually very bad news. The other thing is, you look back at German history, and they would see wars as a way of solving an internal political problem. What do you think 1870 was? We think of wars as to gain something outside. I'm gonna steal your territory. I'm gonna get your water. Boy, I like that province with all that rich stuff in it. I'll grab it. And you look at World War I, and there were German war aims that amounted to that, but if you look at it the way I'm looking at it, what they were interested in was you had to get something sexy to tell your population that the war had been worth the effort so they'd all vote conservative. Now, that's pretty bizarre, but you're talking about pretty bizarre people. The other bizarre part is that this German navy that's utterly disconnected from what they're doing. And the British look at this navy, it's a mortal threat, it's the real thing, and they can't imagine it's being built because the Kaiser likes ships and Terpus wants to live in a navy with a lot of ships. It's weird. How do you know how weird it is? After the war, Terpus's diary from 1914 is published, and so is the diary of the head of the Admiralty's staff. They're both stuck in the Kaiser's headquarters together, they hate each other. It's like the text of a bad play. The British translate it in their internal intelligence magazine, that's how I got to see it. And they're sitting there and it's obvious there's no war plan. It's obvious they're completely disconnected from what's happened. And they're sitting around saying, well, what do we do to show that the fleet was worth paying for? You know, good navies don't usually do that. And they discover that the Kaiser's view is that the fleet is a great bargaining chip for afterwards. This doesn't go down terribly well. What a surprise. So what you're watching is a gross intelligence failure on the part of the British. Not intelligence as you don't steal somebody's secret plans, intelligence like not getting it. When you don't get it in that big a way, that's pretty bad. Well, then you say, okay, so the British come into the war, what are you gonna do? Well, the British war plan is formulated by a very smart captain named Ballard about 1907. Is a distant blockade, but the point of the distant blockade turns out to be if we close off the North Sea, the German fleet has to come out to break this blockade and then we kill them. You notice they didn't quite do that. That's because they didn't get it. The reason the British fleet is a scaper is that it's out of range of German destroyers. They thought that any sensible person would start the war with a raid on their fleet, it'd be Pearl Harbor. The Japanese tried it in 1904 and you gotta be out of range. No raid was ever contemplated. The Germans eventually send submarines up North, but it takes them quite a while to figure it out. Oh, and by the way, the British don't realize how long the submarines can go. So that's another real victory for good intelligence. Then they're fighting this war. And how do you win this war? Well, they've never thought about it beforehand because they're so sure that deterrence is gonna work. So the first problem is there's no military credibility in the government, right? They were basically pacifists. And that's a reasonable point of view. They think deterrence is working. If you knew life under Jimmy Carter, this should sound terribly familiar. At any rate, they've gotta get military credibility. Who do they get? They hire Kitchener. Kitchener is the hero of Khartoum. Kitchener is the man who won the Boer War. Now, if you know about the Boer War, thinking of the hero of the Boer War as real military competence kind of stretches it, right? But they can't get anybody else. Well, Kitchener says it's gonna be a big war. I need a big army. Okay, that's not completely crazy. Building a big army when you're paying for a big Navy is really expensive. Lloyd George says, you know, this is really gonna mess us up financially. And by the way, you're taking volunteers, all of whom are the ones who run the British economy. Ouch. So what are you gonna do with this army? And Kitchener's reply is wonderful. He says, well, if you all divorce your wives and you ditch your sweethearts, I'll know that you'll keep a secret, so I'll tell you. Otherwise, well, in real governments, that's the point at which you say it was nice knowing you've beat it. But because there's no credibility, they don't have the nerve. And if you look at Asquith as a prime minister, you see nerve is not his strong point. How do I know these things? There's a wonderful source. Asquith had a girlfriend. I don't know if she was really as mistress or just someone who was very hot on, woman named Venetia Stanley. Asquith apparently really liked young, smart women who look good. And he used to write her letters. Like every day, several times a day. And mixed in with the sweet nothings were very detailed accounts of what went on in the cabinet and what was going on with the military. And every so often in these letters, which have been published, you get lines like, this is very secret, so please don't talk about it. And you know, I can only say that the British post office must have been beyond wonderful. Because if one of these things had gone amiss, God knows. And he talks about, should we get in the war? He talks about his war aims. He's never thought about this before. It's never been real. It's not like the run up to war is everyone knows it's coming, oh my God, oh my God. It's the opposite. They don't think it's gonna happen. Once it starts happening, their own commander in France says to them, you know, by the way, the Western front is not a decisive front. Nothing I can do to the Germans here, even if you give me a lot of troops is gonna have much effect. It's all gonna depend on the East, the Russian steamroller. Once you figure that out, you suddenly realize that things like Gallipoli aren't weird little operations. They're the ones they should have pursued. But there's no mechanism which can talk seriously about the war strategy at that point. Okay? That's another lesson that says, you know, wake up, it's a good idea. But you would have guessed that without my talking about it. The shape of the war is dictated by this German naval buildup because it triggers British entry. If you're a German and you're looking for a quick nasty war, you could probably figure out a theory in which you beat the French and the Russians. It might be a bad theory, you might not make it, the strength of the defense might defeat you, the industrial depth of countries might defeat you, but you could take a shot at it. Once you get overseas, you can't get that anymore because you can't invade England easily by sea. They never really contemplate it. And that means that any war you fight is likely to be drawn out. You start realizing this late 1914, you start realizing you have to do something to defeat the British in some other way. That's where unrestricted submarine warfare comes from. The fact that the British have sea control pretty much, certainly until 1917, means that they can draw on resources outside of the UK. That means the empire, that means a lot of empire troops, you know about that. It also means the United States. So if you are serious as a German, you suddenly get terribly interested in putting us out of business or causing us to stay out of it. And you do things that are very risky. You do unrestricted submarine warfare, which is illegal. You kill Americans in ships like Lusitania. You finance sabotage of munitions plants in the United States, which is an act of war. You may be aware that there was a spectacular sabotage. There was a big power plant called Black Tom in New Jersey and they blew it up. And we knew they blew it up. And if Wilson had not been quite as prickly, that would probably have brought us into the war. When they reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, they soon will come in and they send that Zimmerman telegram to their boy in Mexico. Please come into the war. You'll have a great time and you'll get back to Southern United States. For some reason, Wilson doesn't appreciate the joke, but probably what brings us into the war is that the Germans use our diplomatic channels to send it to Mexico City. These are channels that have been made available so that they can do peace negotiations. I suspect that that drove Wilson completely around the bend. And he was a pretty stiff character and at that point he flipped. He didn't like it. That's called a maritime war, you know? Maritime usually means protracted. And I'm thinking, when I was an innocent young strategy type, World War I always stuck in my core because it was this horrible Western front meek runder. And when I looked at NATO in the 70s, all I could see was that unless someone got obliterated of the outbreak, it would be World War I, probably with tactical nuclear weapons to kill a lot more people. And surely there was some way to get out of this mess. Well, when I saw Maritime Strategy, that made me feel a whole lot better. Okay, well then the question is, how come the British do this mass attack on land, which kills a hell of a lot of people, like 600,000 or 800,000 Brits, and Australians and Canadians? Why? I mean, a lot of people are gonna get killed in World War I, but why were they British? And why have to fight on the Somme? And were those other horrible places? Well, the answer probably is that once they set Kitchener loose, they have this big army, once you have a big army and someone, one of your allies says, help, I'm sinking, you gotta use it. You can't quite say we have 350,000 men sitting on this camp, but they're not going to France. If you look at other British wars on the continent, you really get curious. The first time they fight a big World War on the continent, to me, is Napoleonic, right? You know what happens? They get kicked off the continent. They even have to make a truce with Napoleon, but they don't give up, and they eventually put together a coalition, they beat them. Coalition is an important part of that idea. Oh, so how come in 1914, Asquith and his friends don't remember anything? Didn't they learn history in high school? Maybe not. Maybe it was only Latin and Roman history. You look at 1940, they learned something. They didn't build a big army. It didn't go to France. That a moderate-sized army, they went to France. You don't completely give up, and when push came to shove, they got kicked off the continent. Oddly enough, they won the war. They wrecked coalitions. That's what seapowers can do. If you get kicked out of some place, it's not permanent. When we used to talk about maritime strategy, one of the big lines was, yeah, they can reach the channel, but the war isn't over. And the fact that the war wouldn't be over, which we publicized, would be rather sobering. Oh, you mean we can't end all our problems in three minutes? Ooh, that's not so good. That's really what World War I is about historically, that because it went maritime, the Germans couldn't exploit their big strength. Now, they came close anyway with the U-boat war, but there were solutions developed. The war might not have ended as rapidly as it did. People were very surprised the way it ended. It may have ended because they lost on the Western Front. It may not have. You can make an argument that the French sometimes make that the decisive theater turned out to be Salonica in Southern Europe because when Austria-Hungary was knocked out of the war, that left the Germans with a completely unprotected flank. Can also make an argument, which I find kind of interesting, that the most sensitive part of Germany was Eastern Germany where the Junkers had their estates. And they really cared about that. That makes schemes for operating in the Baltic a lot more rational. It really makes you angry that there wasn't any very good discussion. There wasn't a strategic, there wasn't an understanding of what the enemy might be that you use to shape your strategy. Instead, there was really no thought about what would happen. Now, if you read normal histories, there's a meeting in England in 1911 in which Asquith asks his two service chiefs what's gonna happen. And supposedly this is where the decision to go into France comes from because the Army Chief gives this terrific pitch about how he's gonna deploy in France. Famously, he shows all kinds of very nice maps. Army's are very good at making maps. And he even shows where they'll get a 10 minute pause to have a cup of coffee. I think it's a cup of coffee. Boy, these are really professional boys. The Navy Chief is a lousy speaker. He comes in, he says, look, I have my secret war plan. When the war starts, we go in there, we sink all their stuff. You gotta sink their torpedo craft because we can't control them in the North Sea. And Asquith says something like how plural. And most writers about this say, well, of course, he knew that the plans to change from close blockade to distant blockade, how could this Navy more on reverse everything? No, guys like Asquith don't know about details like that. The plural part was Wilson, who was the Admiral, was a war fighter. His idea was the worst thoughts you go in, you kill everybody you count and it's over. If you're in a deterrent frame of mind, you're interested in escalation ladders and you wanna be very calm. You want your cup of coffee when you get it. When you move the Army to France, before the war, you're stiffening the French. You're not killing anybody. And presumably what Wilson was supposed to say was, don't worry, we'll put our fleet in the North Sea and the Germans will back off. Well, they didn't back off. And what you're really watching is a frame of mind. The other thing about that meeting is that supposedly Wilson makes such an idiot of himself that the War Ministry is able to say, well, if they had any sense, they'd have a good war staff like we do in the Army. And boy, everything would work great. And it turns out that Haldane, who was the minister for war, wanted to take over the Admiralty, which was a better job. Unfortunately, he's very pro-German and Asquith couldn't give him that job. So he brings in Churchill. And normally you think of this as yet another preparation to do it right. Well, wait a minute. Churchill had been Home Secretary. Home Secretary is the FBI in justice. And if you look at European governments before World War I, they're a whole lot more concerned with internal problems than external. Well, look at my explanation for the Germans. It comes out of internal politics. It doesn't come out of who's gonna blow us up next week, except the socialists, that kind of stuff. As Home Secretary, Churchill was a mess. He was a wild man. He was known for having pushed things a lot too far. Well, if you use this as a way of putting your crazy Home Secretary into the Admiralty, what does that say about what you think the Admiralty is gonna do? Does it kind of say we took him from something real and put him in something safe? And I turned that not to be. And he brings in a whole lot of yes men. Well, if his real job is to get rid of all these fire eaters, he sort of did it, right? Very interesting. How come people don't look at that? Now it may be that the people who write this kind of history have never seen real history happening. I was in the business. That's why I keep talking about if you were in the Clinton administration, or not the Clinton, if you were in Carter's time, you recognize what's happening. Otherwise, you imagine that all these guys think differently because they're wearing funny clothes. They don't. They're us. Now, look at China. To a German, at the very top of Germany in 1913, your army is the best one in Europe. You can win wars and they have good political effects. Now, what is that in China? Well, what was their last big war? Korea, right? And then they had the little one against the Vietnamese, which wasn't a very happy war. Now, Chinese historians have written that Mao wanted to go into China as a way of exposing anti-Maoist types and killing them. A lot of his other leadership was not that happy about the idea. It kind of got what was going to happen. I don't think if you're Chinese, you regard the Korean War as a terrific success. You might not regard it as an utter disaster, but you remember a lot of people got killed. By the way, despite our idea that human waves could just be sacrificed like water, they remember how many of them got killed and they're not happy. All right, does that really incline you to think that a nice war solves all internal problems? Huh? It's not the same kind of country. And if wars don't come out of commercial rivalry and things like that, then you're not gonna see World War III happen that way. It just isn't in the cards. A lot of people talk about commercial rivalry because you can look at 18th or 17th century wars that way. This is not the 18th century, as far as I can tell. So if you were honest with yourself about World War I, you feel a lot better, which is nice.