Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, DECEMB. 15, 1921. FUTURE WARFARE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2368, 15 December 1921, Page 2

Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, DECEMB. 15, 1921. FUTURE WARFARE.

“TREXCIf warfare is already dead," Sir Inn Hamilton exclaims in llit* book lie Inis written on tin* war. “The lank ami I lit* aeroplane ar<> inaugurating an i*ra of economic strategy which was demanded, indeed, liy llie silualion during the last war. Inn was demanded, alas! in vain. Next war maeliines will no longer he denied, and wide encircling movements, followed hy distant hat ties fought helween ('oinpara lively small forces, will he the order of the world to come. No longer will the British Fleet sit like a hooded f'aleon upon Britannia’s wrist. The old days will he revived, and the coast line of the enemy, wherever if may he, Blank Sea, Yellow Sea, Red Sea, will he our frontier.” “Numbers” are not lo he impliedly relied on; the problem before us is qualily versus quantity; efficiency can cope with numbers. We have just reached tin epochal turning point in the career of arms, a point where the armies of civilisation have got to choose helween making a big, imaginative effort and getting clean away from the armies of barbarism, or else—plod on and go down, taking with them their worn-out civilisation. Up to a point the undeveloped races can copy; certainly up to where we stand now. We have lo carry on into regions where they cannot follow us without themselves becoming so civilised that their armies will no longer he a menace. . . . We must fix our

minds upon the thought that just as men seemed to he on the very point of obliterating the Man —up he got; seized hold of an aeroplane in one hand and a lank in the other; plucked individualism out of the mud and set if once more upon its feel, in the open licid, where numbers and blind obedience are going to have less and less of an innings against science and efficiency. Outwardly the battle of the future will resemble battles which took place before the birth of Christ rather than those fields of sinister desolation and solitude where we have suffered. The area of the conflict; the use of tanks and motors as the pivot of the forces where formerly elephants and war chariots manoeuvred, will have more affinity to 500 B.C. than A.D. 1017.”