Jan Gotlib Bloch - Research and Analysis of Modern Warfare

Research and Analysis of Modern Warfare

Bloch was intrigued by the devastating victory of Prussia/Germany over France in 1870, which suggested to him that the solution of diplomatic problems by warfare had become obsolete in Europe. He published his six-volume master work, Budushchaya Voina, popularized in English translation as Is War Now Impossible?, in Paris in 1898.

His mainly detailed analysis of modern warfare, its tactical, strategic and political implications, was widely read in Europe. Bloch argued that:

• New arms technology (e.g. smokeless gunpowder, improved rifle design, Maxims) had rendered maneuvers over open ground, such as bayonet and cavalry charges, obsolete. Bloch concluded that a war between the Great powers would be a war of entrenchment and that rapid attacks and decisive victories were likewise a thing of the past. He calculated that entrenched men would enjoy a fourfold advantage over infantry advancing across open ground.

• Industrial societies would have to settle the resultant stalemate by committing armies numbering in the millions, as opposed to the tens of thousands of preceding wars. An enormous battlefront would develop. A war of this type could not be resolved quickly.

• The war would become a duel of industrial might, a matter of total economic attrition. Severe economic and social dislocations would result in the imminent risk of famine, disease, the "break-up of the whole social organization" and revolutions from below.