Is War Now Impossible?: Being an Abridgement of the War of the Future in Its Technical, Economic and Politics Relations

by Jan Bloch

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460 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 1991

About the author

1836-1902
Also publishes as Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch and Jean de Bloch

Reviews

[Maru Kun]

Mentioned by Barbara W. Tuchman in The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 as a visionary work having foreseen the conduct of WWI fifteen years before its outbreak.

"...Bloch was a self-educated man and converted Jew who, not satisfied with making a fortune in railroad contracting, had gone abroad to seek higher education in economics and political science...His studies and his experience in business filled him with growing apprehension that the limited war of the past was no longer possible. Because conscription could call on the pool of the entire nation, he saw wars of the future absorbing the total energies and resources of the combatant states, who, unable to achieve decisive victory on the battlefield, would fight to exhaustion until they had brought each other down in total ruin..."

Truly prophetic, especially when you remember that in 1914 the majority were still expecting the war to be over by Christmas.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting that the author predicted the destructiveness of the improvements made to the weapons of war in the late 1800s and how economically ruinous a "great war in Europe" would be, 20 years before it happened. That said, his calculations totally ignored that tactics would evolve... prime will not just continue running into machine gun fire indefinitely, as in his calculations that loss rates of current battles multiplied by gun firing rate increases equals 12M dead in a battle.