Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing in its absurdity. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of our 60% off promotion.
“We have the Maxim gun, and they have not.”
― Hilaire Belloc, 1898
If 1898 wasn't the peak of Europe's imperial power, it wasn't far off. "How on earth did 900 British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers manage to govern upwards of 250 million Indians?" historian Niall Ferguson asked in his 2003 book, "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World."
The answer lay only partly in the Maxim gun that Britain (and the other European powers) had, but the Africans, Indians, and other Asians had not. The Empire's "mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism," he concluded, based in greater part by maintaining an illusion of invincibility. The British Raj held together because the locals knew that, even if they somehow managed to kill one British officer, another would swiftly take his place.
Backed by the Maxim gun, of course.
The first machine gun was a British invention, courtesy of American-born British inventor Hiram Maxim in 1884. But the white man’s monopoly on heavy firepower didn’t last long. Japan's creaky Tokugawa shogunate was humiliated by the white man's appearance in 1853 — U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his flotilla of steamships Japan could not hope to match. Perry acted under orders from President Millard Fillmore to force Japan to finally open its markets to American trade.
What followed, no one could have predicted.
The Shogunate fell in 1868 to Emperor Meiji who possessed a grim determination to Westernize, modernize, and industrialize feudal Japan — and avoid further humiliations. Meiji needed two decades to fully reestablish imperial rule, re-order Japanese society, and eliminate feudalism and the samurai class. But from there, Japan's Westernization would move swiftly, indeed. It was just 25 years later — with Meiji still as Emperor — that Japan would humiliate Russia on land and sea, and for the first time in modern history, establish an Asian nation as an imperial power on par with the West.
Russia, however, was never an empire on par with Britain. With its comparatively anemic industries and semi-feudal ways, London and Paris could dismiss Moscow's loss to Tokyo... until the disasters of 1941-1942.
And Another Thing: I owe a debt of gratitude to VIP member "anon-kf6s" for inspiring this week's essay with a comment they left earlier this week on a column of mine. Like anyone else, I make plenty of mistakes and always have more to learn, but I learn so much from our VIPs — and am occasionally inspired by them — that I wouldn't have it any other way.
Americans remember Pearl Harbor, but two different events still stick in the minds — or is that craws? — of Britons and French. The French remember how the Vichy government surrendered one of the Empire's prize possessions — Indochina — to Japan after just four days of fighting in Sep. 1941. Britain's humiliation came just a few months later with the fall of Singapore in February.
Winston Churchill described the loss of Singapore, the lynchpin of British power in the South Pacific, "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history." With its fall, Japan shattered the illusion of British invincibility — and no force of arms could ever be sufficient to keep the British Empire alive, because an empire built on perception cannot survive such a visible defeat.
With speed that might have made Hiram Maxim's head spin faster than his own recoil mechanism, firepower democratized from West to East. "Modern" and "Western" would never be synonymous again.
The Maxim gun was such a beast that it was first wielded at the company or battalion level, and required a dedicated team of four to six men to operate. But it quickly evolved into the machine gun, and then the light machine gun. Firepower dispersed from the company level in World War I down to squads in World War II.
Automatic rifles like the M-16 gave the individual soldier more firepower than ever before, but the real revolution in WWII firepower was in communications.
It was said in that war that "The most dangerous thing on a battlefield is an American corporal with a radio and a map." That "mere" corporal had the power to call in every artillery gun in range, or even an airstrike — a godlike power to smite the enemy from afar.
And yet, that kind of firepower was still the province of nation-states; the real democratization of firepower wouldn't come until this century.
And Another Thing: Niall Ferguson noted in his 1998 WWI history, "The Pity of War," that Britain, France, and the U.S. failed to turn their impressive economic strength into corresponding battlefield firepower. The Germans — in both wars — were much more effective at it, which is why they came so close (twice!) to taking on the entire world and winning. A major exception was America's development of the atom bomb in 1945.
One Hollywood thriller after another hinges on the democratization of nuclear weapons — the billionaire or the terrorist group getting their hands on one. But I'd trust Elon Musk with a nuke long before I'd trust Iran. On the flip side, despite all the friction we sometimes have with France, I lose no sleep over their nukes. But I might not sleep quite as well if George Soros or Bill Gates had one.
Let's jump ahead to 1997 and "The Sovereign Individual," written by American investor (and founder of the National Taxpayers Union) James Dale Davidson and British journalist/publisher William Rees-Mogg. The authors explored how the still-young digital revolution might change life in the 21st century and, while the two got an awful lot of predictions wrong — "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" — the things they got right were uncanny.
I don't recall anyone else in the mid-'90s discussing cryptocurrencies or how technological advances and other changes would cause "governments, even in traditionally civil countries" to "turn nasty."
One of their predictions intrigued me at the time — one that hardly seemed possible: that the cost of military offensives was about to radically reduce. I looked at M1 tanks that cost five million dollars and fighter jets that cost more than $50 million, and thought, "What are these guys smoking?"
As the southern prison warden might have said, "What we have here is failure to imagine."
Let's step back a moment and consider the age-old war aim of destroying an enemy headquarters, whether military, political, or financial. Prior to WWII, you had to march your soldiers in and physically take the thing before you could blow it up.
During that war, fleets of bombers could fly hundreds of miles to rain down destruction from above, but even that was hit-or-miss. The Eighth Air Force might darken the skies with B-17s, each with a crew of 10 men, and still miss the German ball-bearing plant they were meant to rubble-ize. By the end of the war, a single B-29 could drop a single bomb and carve the heart out of Hiroshima.
And Another Thing: The Germans developed V-1 and V-2 missiles during the war, but they weren't (yet) any more accurate than America's high-level bombers that we stubbornly insisted were "precision."
But for most jobs, an atomic or thermonuclear warhead is a bit much. Smart weapons changed all that. Whether guided by GPS satellites in orbit, digital mapping, or by a soldier on the ground with a laser designator, a single jet fighter, ballistic missile, or cruise missile could make the enemy HQ go "poof."
Think, however, about the resources involved. GPS, fighter-bombers, cruise missiles, military-grade fricken laser beams — these are still (largely) the tools of major nation-states. I can't afford any one of those things, much less all the elements required to bring them all together.
That's hardly democratic, is it?
Four years after Davidson and Rees-Mogg published their book, I woke up one September morning to learn that not even two dozen men, armed with nothing more expensive than box cutters and a few weeks of flying lessons, had destroyed America's financial headquarters.
"So that's what they meant in the book," I thought after the shock wore off.
The widespread distribution of inexpensive firepower has fractured not just the state, but the very idea of one in Syria and other failed states.
Former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa heads up the new central government after sweeping aside the last remnants of the Assad regime late last year, but I doubt whether he or any other strongman will ever fully hold sway over the whole country. There are too many groups with too little sense of "Syrianess" — and too much firepower.
Once the lid comes off in countries like Syria that never enjoyed a strong national identity, it might never go back on. The Syria we knew was an amalgamation forced together by powerful outsiders — the French — and then held together, sometimes barely, by powerful insiders. When Syria finally fractured a decade ago, it was along the expected sectarian lines — very well-armed sectarian lines.
Just a few hundred miles south, the U.S. Navy can't even shut down a few Houthi tribesmen gifted ballistic missiles by Iran.
Now there are drones. A few sneaky guys with trucks could launch simultaneous attacks on five Russian airbases and take out half a dozen irreplaceable strategic bombers.
And yet — you ain't seen nothin' yet.
I don't know where the next strategic-level drone strike will fall, but it might not require men to sneak around at all. Self-driving trucks, AI-enhanced drones, a little bit of thermite, and whatever financial center, shopping mall, or military base their faraway controllers choose to destroy.
Tomorrow's firepower is digitally enhanced — all-knowing, energy-hungry LLMs, whose powers are available to anyone with 20 bucks to spend. AI's ability to increase the speed, lethality, and systemic effects of warfare has been discussed in detail by many other writers, and isn't quite germane to this essay.
What is germane is that we still haven't learned the lesson of 9/11, much less how AI might enable something worse. We tried to prevent another small-scale, big-impact attack by waging traditional, large-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — to little effect. But the next Sept. 11 won't look anything like the last one. The next one, grotesquely detailed in Kurt Schlichter's thriller, "The Attack," will look like Israel's Oct. 7 — but on a continental scale, coordinated and enhanced by AI, deepfakes, and weaponized social media.
And yet the previous administration opened our borders wide to the infiltrators who could make it happen.
America, to our great cultural and political credit, has always democratized firepower. I don't know what it would take to conquer this country militarily, but it would take an awful lot more firepower than anyone I can think of could ever muster. At least until recently. Now I wonder what it might take for jihadis, perhaps with a big assist from Beijing, to reduce a great nation to something like Syria's warring clans.
Ironically enough, the race to control this most recent democratization of firepower is between the world's two most powerful nation-states, China and the U.S.
Maybe the best outcome might be a digital version of Mutual Assured Destruction, where neither country can risk using the ultimate weapon that the other side also possesses. But that still leaves rogue states, jihadis, disgruntled loners...
...As with my first reading of "The Sovereign Individual," I sometimes wonder if I lack the imagination to understand what this ultimate democratization of firepower might bring.
But this much is certain: We have the Maxim AI, and so do they.
Previously on the Thursday Essay: Europe Invented Modernity — Now They're Dismantling It
