# How Britain Invented, Then Ignored, Blitzkrieg

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 13 Dec 2019, 36 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/2205136c-ab3c-4aa0-8ae1-ae39003fa1fa/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

In 1917, a brilliant British officer developed a way to use an emerging military technology: the tank. The British army promptly squandered the idea – but the Germans did not. Blitzkrieg, the devastating advance of German tanks across Europe in 1940, was invented by the British. This is a common story: Sony invented the forerunner of the iPod, Xerox the personal computer, and Kodak the digital camera. In each case they failed to capitalize on the idea. Why? Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. As the night draws in and the fire blazes
[0:26] Speaker 1: on the hearth. We warn the children by telling them stories.
[0:30] Speaker 1: The hobbit teaches them not to leave the path. But
[0:34] Speaker 1: my stories are for the education of the grown ups,
[0:39] Speaker 1: and my stories are all true. I'm Tim Harford. Gather
[0:44] Speaker 1: close and listen to my cautionary tales. Augustine sixteen, the
[1:10] Speaker 1: Western Front in the First World War. The opposing armies
[1:14] Speaker 1: had dug into entrenched positions stretching five hundred miles across
[1:19] Speaker 1: France and Belgium from the mountains to the sea. Barbed
[1:23] Speaker 1: Wire and machine guns meant that it was all but
[1:26] Speaker 1: impossible for either side to advance. The Noble cavalry, long
[1:32] Speaker 1: the most celebrated force in the army, were utterly useless.
[1:36] Speaker 1: It was a murderous stalemate, but a few miles behind
[1:43] Speaker 1: the Allied lines, hundreds of people, both civilians and British
[1:47] Speaker 1: and French army officers, had brought picnics and were waiting
[1:51] Speaker 1: patiently for a demonstration of a remarkable invention. It was
[1:55] Speaker 1: a pleasantly warm day and a quiet spot if you
[1:59] Speaker 1: tuned out the artillery of the somb Battlefield thundering away
[2:03] Speaker 1: beyond the horizon. Then another noise began to cut across
[2:08] Speaker 1: that distant rumbling, the chug of a powerful engine, the
[2:13] Speaker 1: relentless metallic clattering of caterpillar tracks carrying twenty eight tons
[2:19] Speaker 1: of cannon and armor plating at a walking pace. Everyone
[2:24] Speaker 1: was talking and chatting when slowly came into sight the
[2:27] Speaker 1: first tank I ever saw. Not a monster, but a
[2:31] Speaker 1: very graceful machine with beautiful lines, lozin shaped, but with
[2:37] Speaker 1: two clumsy looking wheels behind it. That's major JFC Fuller.
[2:43] Speaker 1: He's the central figure in our story. He's thirty seven,
[2:47] Speaker 1: a small man with a neatly trimmed mustache. His hairline
[2:51] Speaker 1: is retreating over his crown and beginning to march down
[2:54] Speaker 1: the back of his head. He could pass for a
[2:56] Speaker 1: butler and a costume drama, but beneath the surface of
[3:00] Speaker 1: JFC Fuller is an inner radicalism. Not long ago, he'd
[3:06] Speaker 1: been friends with the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley called
[3:11] Speaker 1: himself a wizard. One newspaper called him the wickedest man
[3:16] Speaker 1: in the world. Cavorting with self proclaimed warlocks is not
[3:21] Speaker 1: the typical social pastime of a British Army officer, but
[3:24] Speaker 1: as we'll see that isn't even the strangest thing about
[3:28] Speaker 1: the life and the fate of JFC Fuller. Fuller sees
[3:36] Speaker 1: instantly that this new machine, the tank, is the solution
[3:41] Speaker 1: to the basic tactical problem of the war of how
[3:44] Speaker 1: to cross mud and trenches and barbed wire against a
[3:48] Speaker 1: storm of bullets. Nothing else has worked, not even the
[3:53] Speaker 1: novel atrocity of poison gas. But the tank will do
[3:57] Speaker 1: the job, and JFC Fuller can see that with absolute clarity.
[4:04] Speaker 1: The tank is the unknown X in the equation of victory.
[4:07] Speaker 1: All that is necessary is to get the people to
[4:10] Speaker 1: see the problem. But getting other people to see the
[4:14] Speaker 1: problem was well, perhaps that was the problem. You're listening
[4:20] Speaker 1: to another cautionary tale. The British officer class simply adored
[4:45] Speaker 1: a more traditional way of waging war, one involving stirrups
[4:49] Speaker 1: and swords and big, beautiful horses. Here's one general explaining
[4:54] Speaker 1: what he regarded as the obvious disadvantage of the tank.
[4:58] Speaker 1: Look into the face of individuals who deal with the
[5:01] Speaker 1: horse and the faces of the men who deal with
[5:04] Speaker 1: the machine. You will see in the letter what I
[5:07] Speaker 1: might almost call a lequ of intelligence. You keep up
[5:11] Speaker 1: the high standard of intelligence in the Man from his
[5:14] Speaker 1: association with the horse. If Major Fuller was going to
[5:19] Speaker 1: persuade the British Army to embrace the tank, it would
[5:23] Speaker 1: be a long struggle. At least he managed to get
[5:25] Speaker 1: himself in the right place. He applied to transfer to
[5:28] Speaker 1: the newly formed Tank Corps. When he got there, he
[5:32] Speaker 1: was given a blank sheet of paper and ordered to
[5:34] Speaker 1: think through what might be done with these new fangled machines.
[5:39] Speaker 1: That was the easy bit. Fuller soon formed a clear
[5:42] Speaker 1: strategic vision for tank warfare. He proposed that tanks could
[5:46] Speaker 1: attack the German Army's brain, the string of German headquarters
[5:52] Speaker 1: miles behind the front line. New faster tanks were being designed.
[5:57] Speaker 1: They could roll across the trenches and be on the
[5:59] Speaker 1: German command posts in an hour. Full as attack would
[6:03] Speaker 1: come from nowhere. Air support would disrupt German road and
[6:07] Speaker 1: rail travel. Bad news confuses, confusion stimulates panic. His idea
[6:14] Speaker 1: was dubbed Plan nineteen nineteen. By striking suddenly at the
[6:19] Speaker 1: German command Plan nineteen nineteen would cause the German Army
[6:24] Speaker 1: to disintegrate. It would be the winning of the war
[6:28] Speaker 1: in a single battle, but the war ended anyway before
[6:36] Speaker 1: Fuller's astonishing idea could be tested, and it became the
[6:40] Speaker 1: most famous unused plan in military history, according to his
[6:44] Speaker 1: biographer Brian holden Reid. But it's not entirely true to
[6:50] Speaker 1: say that it was unused. It was used to great
[6:53] Speaker 1: effect twenty years later by the Germans in a lightning war,
[6:58] Speaker 1: occupying much of Europe. In a matter of weeks, JFC
[7:03] Speaker 1: Fuller had invented Blitzkrieg and the British Army had wasted
[7:09] Speaker 1: his idea. If the spirit of this story feels faintly familiar,
[7:16] Speaker 1: there's a reason echoes of it have been repeated again
[7:19] Speaker 1: and again since the British Army stuffed full As plans
[7:23] Speaker 1: for Blitzkrieg into a desk draw In nineteen seventy the
[7:27] Speaker 1: photocopying giant Xerox established the Palo Alto Research Center or Park.
[7:34] Speaker 1: Xerox Park then developed the modern personal computer, an achievement
[7:38] Speaker 1: which Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple
[7:43] Speaker 1: observed with great interest. Xerox still makes photocopiers. In nineteen
[7:50] Speaker 1: seventy five, a twenty four year old engineer named Steve
[7:54] Speaker 1: Sasson built the world's first digital camera, the invention that
[7:58] Speaker 1: was to destroy Eastman Kodak, the photography giant. What's strange
[8:04] Speaker 1: is that Steve Sasson was working for Kodak. In nineteen
[8:10] Speaker 1: ninety nine, Sony launched one of the world's first digital
[8:13] Speaker 1: music players, the memory stick Walkman. Sony was armed with
[8:18] Speaker 1: the iconic Walkman brand, the world's best digital engineers, and
[8:23] Speaker 1: Sony music stars from Bob Dylan to Celine Dion. All
[8:27] Speaker 1: they succeeded in doing was paving the way for Apple's iPod.
[8:32] Speaker 1: And back in nineteen eighteen, the British had the best
[8:37] Speaker 1: tanks in the world, a clear vision of how to
[8:39] Speaker 1: use them, and in Fuller, one of the world's best
[8:43] Speaker 1: military strategists. Yet by the late nineteen thirties, the British
[8:48] Speaker 1: had conceded technical and tactical superiority to Adolf Hitler's New Army.
[8:56] Speaker 1: When this sort of thing happens so often, you have
[8:59] Speaker 1: to ask yourself if it's really a coincidence the tank,
[9:03] Speaker 1: the personal computer, the digital camera, the iPod. Why do
[9:08] Speaker 1: some idears slip out of the grasp of incumbents then
[9:12] Speaker 1: thrive in the hands of upstarts. JFC Fuller once began
[9:17] Speaker 1: an essay with an aphorism about pressing ahead when you're
[9:21] Speaker 1: in a leading position. Race horses don't pull up at
[9:24] Speaker 1: the winning post. Perhaps that's true, but organizations do pull
[9:29] Speaker 1: up at the winning post. Within touching distance of victory,
[9:33] Speaker 1: they slow down and allow others to overtake them. For
[9:45] Speaker 1: a glimpse of what Fuller was up against, consider the
[9:48] Speaker 1: Battle of Cambrai late in nineteen seventeen. The British Army
[9:53] Speaker 1: had finally decided, prodded on by Fuller, to use four
[9:56] Speaker 1: hundred tanks to lumber across German lines. The tanks could
[10:02] Speaker 1: only reach a top speed of four miles per hour,
[10:05] Speaker 1: but that was fast enough. They swept aside the bar wire,
[10:09] Speaker 1: shrugged off the machine gun fire, and bridged the German trenches.
[10:14] Speaker 1: Our machine guns fire incessantly, unsandvisful and cornaide fires added.
[10:18] Speaker 1: But he must admit all our efforts that stops his
[10:21] Speaker 1: tanks are ineffective. We can do nothing against him. Without exaggeration,
[10:28] Speaker 1: some of the German infantry seemed to be off their
[10:30] Speaker 1: heads with fright. It was impossible to obtain any clear
[10:34] Speaker 1: idea of the situation. There was no chain of command
[10:37] Speaker 1: and no orders. It was a stunning tactical success, but
[10:43] Speaker 1: the success was squandered. The British high command decided that
[10:47] Speaker 1: the gap that the tanks had opened should be exploited
[10:51] Speaker 1: by the cavalry. A great deal of clattering, galloping and shouting,
[10:56] Speaker 1: and a lot of our medieval horse soldiers came charging
[11:00] Speaker 1: down the street. The Germans eventually regrouped and drove back
[11:04] Speaker 1: the British assault. The opportunity was wasted, and not just
[11:09] Speaker 1: the tactical opportunity of that day at Cambrai, but the
[11:12] Speaker 1: strategic opportunity to reshape warfare itself. Some of the infantry
[11:18] Speaker 1: who had been there understood what had so nearly been achieved.
[11:22] Speaker 1: Some of us had lost faith in the tanks, but
[11:25] Speaker 1: we had been there knew that one tank at the
[11:28] Speaker 1: right time, at the right place, could have avoided the
[11:31] Speaker 1: slaughter of two or three hundred men on that damp,
[11:34] Speaker 1: chilly morning. Fuller understood two before the gunsmoke had cleared.
[11:39] Speaker 1: He was scribbling away furiously at his desk at Tank
[11:43] Speaker 1: Core Headquarters, sketching out what had been discovered and what
[11:47] Speaker 1: should be done next. Those scribblings would, over the following
[11:51] Speaker 1: months become Plan nineteen nineteen. He understood that the success
[11:57] Speaker 1: at Cambrai was just a glimpse of what might be possible.
[12:01] Speaker 1: The British High Command did not. There are several explanations
[12:08] Speaker 1: for these miss opportunities, but most of us don't get
[12:11] Speaker 1: past the first and most obvious. People are idiots. Now
[12:16] Speaker 1: we can get back to some real soldier ing, so
[12:19] Speaker 1: remarked one senior officer to Fuller at the end of
[12:23] Speaker 1: the First World War, as though defending Britain in an
[12:26] Speaker 1: existential struggle had been a frivolous distraction from tending to
[12:30] Speaker 1: noble horses, bright buckles and shiny boots. A year after
[12:35] Speaker 1: the war had ended, Fuller's essay, the one that begins
[12:39] Speaker 1: with the reference to race horses, won the gold medal
[12:42] Speaker 1: from a prestigious think tank, the Royal United Services Institute.
[12:48] Speaker 1: A general burst into his office, what have you done?
[12:51] Speaker 1: Next year he wrote another strategically visionary essay, this time
[12:56] Speaker 1: overturning the ideas of naval warfare, and he won a
[13:00] Speaker 1: second gold medal. It is rather amusing as a soldier
[13:04] Speaker 1: having beaten the sailor at his own job. Others were
[13:08] Speaker 1: not amused. The top brass complained Fuller never received his
[13:13] Speaker 1: second gold medal and was forbidden from publishing his second essay.
[13:17] Speaker 1: The Army also blocks publication of Fuller's books for several years.
[13:22] Speaker 1: They were regarded as annoying and insubordinate. The most brilliant
[13:26] Speaker 1: ideas from the most brilliant strategist were seen as less
[13:31] Speaker 1: an opportunity than as a threat. The top man in
[13:35] Speaker 1: the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery massing Bird,
[13:39] Speaker 1: didn't read Fuller's most celebrated book. It would only annoy me.
[13:44] Speaker 1: He responded to the threat of Nazi militarization by increasing
[13:48] Speaker 1: the amount spent on hay and other food for horses
[13:51] Speaker 1: by a factor of ten. Cavalry officers would be provided
[13:55] Speaker 1: with a second horse. Tank officers would get a horse too.
[14:00] Speaker 1: As I say, people are idiots, and it's not just
[14:05] Speaker 1: the British Army who seemed guilty of idiocy. When Steve
[14:09] Speaker 1: Jobs visited Xerox Park in nineteen seventy nine, he couldn't
[14:13] Speaker 1: contain himself when he saw a Windows and mouse interface
[14:17] Speaker 1: for the first time. Why aren't you doing anything with this?
[14:20] Speaker 1: This is the greatest thing that is revolutionary. If Jobs
[14:23] Speaker 1: had been teleported into the British War Office between the wars.
[14:28] Speaker 1: He might well have said the same thing, But there
[14:31] Speaker 1: is something about the idiot theory that feels too glib.
[14:36] Speaker 1: Consider Xerox Park. How is it there's a corporation could
[14:40] Speaker 1: be smart enough to establish such a superb research center
[14:44] Speaker 1: but then failed to take advantage. Was Kodak really run
[14:49] Speaker 1: by idiots in the nineteen seventies, Was Sony in the
[14:52] Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. No, these organizations stumbled for a reason. Management
[15:02] Speaker 1: theorists have a word for the phenomenon. They call it disruption.
[15:07] Speaker 1: By disruption, they refer to an innovation that changes the
[15:11] Speaker 1: world in such a way that if successful organizations keep
[15:15] Speaker 1: on doing what made them successful, they're short to fail.
[15:20] Speaker 1: But why don't organizations adapt? After all, they usually have
[15:24] Speaker 1: the resources, the experience, and the reputation to outpace any upstarts.
[15:30] Speaker 1: Code acted, so did Xerox, so did Sony, and so
[15:33] Speaker 1: did the British Army. But for some reason they get stuck.
[15:38] Speaker 1: More horses more. Hey, we've already explored the idiot hypothesis,
[15:45] Speaker 1: but there is a different theory of what goes wrong.
[15:47] Speaker 1: It's a famous theory too in management circles. It comes
[15:51] Speaker 1: from Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. More than twenty
[15:55] Speaker 1: years ago, Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma. It told a
[16:00] Speaker 1: compelling story about how new technologies creep up from below.
[16:05] Speaker 1: These technologies are flawed or underdeveloped at first, so they
[16:09] Speaker 1: ownt appeal to existing customers, but they find niches and
[16:13] Speaker 1: slowly they improve while the incumbents are looking elsewhere, and
[16:18] Speaker 1: one day the new technology is good enough to destroy
[16:21] Speaker 1: the business of the old giants. Christensen's disruption theory is
[16:26] Speaker 1: an elegant one, but there are plenty of examples that
[16:29] Speaker 1: just don't fit. Think about why Xerox didn't exploit that
[16:33] Speaker 1: cutting edge research at Xerox Park. Not because the mouse
[16:37] Speaker 1: and the graphic user interface are a low end competitor
[16:40] Speaker 1: to the photocopier. They aren't. They're from a different universe.
[16:45] Speaker 1: The iPod didn't sneak up on Sony from below, and
[16:48] Speaker 1: Kodak not only developed the digital camera, it made a
[16:51] Speaker 1: good income from the digital camera patents. These organizations weren't
[16:56] Speaker 1: slow to see the change coming. They often saw earlier
[16:59] Speaker 1: than anyone else what lay ahead, yet they were unable
[17:04] Speaker 1: to put together the right response. So it was a
[17:08] Speaker 1: century ago with the tank. Nobody could seriously call the
[17:12] Speaker 1: tank a low end competitor to the horse, and nobody
[17:16] Speaker 1: could claim that the British Army hadn't noticed the tank.
[17:19] Speaker 1: The British were well ahead of their rivals. So we've
[17:23] Speaker 1: set aside the idiot hypothesis and we've examined Clayton Christiansen's
[17:27] Speaker 1: theory of disruption. It's one of the most celebrated ideas
[17:32] Speaker 1: in management. But if we want to understand why the
[17:36] Speaker 1: British Army lost its advantage in tank warfare, our cautionary
[17:40] Speaker 1: tale needs a new theory. In nineteen ninety, a young
[17:54] Speaker 1: economist named Rebecca Henderson published an article that presented a
[17:58] Speaker 1: different view of why it's hard to do new things
[18:02] Speaker 1: in old organizations. The relevant word is the boring one organizations.
[18:09] Speaker 1: What Rebecca Henderson pointed out was that these organizations don't
[18:13] Speaker 1: stumble because a new technology is radical. They stumble if
[18:17] Speaker 1: it requires well a different type of organization. No matter
[18:23] Speaker 1: how brilliant and how new an innovation is, if it
[18:27] Speaker 1: slips snugly into the organizational chart that already exists, the
[18:32] Speaker 1: dominant organization of yesterday has a good chance of being
[18:36] Speaker 1: the dominant organization of tomorrow. Let me give you an example. IBM,
[18:43] Speaker 1: the giant of old fashioned mainframe corporate computing. IBM is
[18:48] Speaker 1: a survivor. It was top dog from the age of
[18:51] Speaker 1: the punch card machine all the way through to the
[18:54] Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Everything changed in computing over those decades, everything
[18:59] Speaker 1: except the fact that IBM was in charge. This was
[19:03] Speaker 1: because the organizational challenge of making and selling a room
[19:08] Speaker 1: sized mainframe computer to a bank in the nineteen seventies
[19:12] Speaker 1: wasn't very different from the organizational challenge of making and
[19:16] Speaker 1: selling a room sized mechanical tabulating machine to a bank
[19:20] Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. But then computers crossed a threshold.
[19:25] Speaker 1: They became small enough and cheap enough that they'd be
[19:29] Speaker 1: bought by small businesses and hobbyists and even parents. Now
[19:34] Speaker 1: IBM faced a very different challenge. They had a corporate
[19:38] Speaker 1: army ready to negotiate multimillion dollar contracts with multinational procurement departments.
[19:44] Speaker 1: What were they supposed to do when a computer became
[19:47] Speaker 1: a household appliance, something more like a blender. IBM did
[19:54] Speaker 1: create a strong business in personal computers, but that business
[19:58] Speaker 1: was openly aggravating the rest of the organization bypassing IBM's
[20:03] Speaker 1: distribution division and cutting IBM's components division out of the loop.
[20:08] Speaker 1: In the end, IBM's internal politics asserted itself and the
[20:13] Speaker 1: personal computer division was sold off. It just didn't fit.
[20:20] Speaker 1: What had flummoxed IBM was not the pace of technological change.
[20:24] Speaker 1: It had been dealing with technological change just fine for
[20:28] Speaker 1: more than half a century. IBM's problem was that its
[20:32] Speaker 1: old organizational structures and systems had become a liability, not
[20:37] Speaker 1: an advantage. Rebecca Henderson calls this sort of technological change
[20:43] Speaker 1: an architectural innovation, and an architectural innovation demands a new
[20:49] Speaker 1: organizational structure, which means that old organizations face an uphill struggle.
[20:56] Speaker 1: Those organizations may have changed the world that when they're
[20:59] Speaker 1: forced to change themselves, that's a harder challenge. Before the
[21:07] Speaker 1: First World War, armies had been organized for centuries around
[21:11] Speaker 1: cavalry and infantry. The mounted troops offered mobility, the foot
[21:17] Speaker 1: soldiers strength in numbers and the ability to dig in defensively.
[21:22] Speaker 1: Three new technologies, artillery, barbed wire, and the machine gun
[21:27] Speaker 1: shaped the battlefield of the First World War. They changed everything.
[21:33] Speaker 1: Everything that is, except the way armies were organized, and
[21:37] Speaker 1: that was because the armies didn't need to change barbed
[21:41] Speaker 1: wire and machine guns were used to reinforce infantry positions.
[21:46] Speaker 1: The big guns of the artillery could support either cavalry
[21:50] Speaker 1: or infantry from a distance. The old hierarchies were preserved.
[21:56] Speaker 1: But then the tanks clanked slowly into view. And the
[22:01] Speaker 1: tanks were different. In some ways, they were like cavalry
[22:05] Speaker 1: because their strength lay partly in their ability to move quickly.
[22:09] Speaker 1: In other ways, they fitted with the infantry, fighting alongside
[22:13] Speaker 1: foot soldiers. Or perhaps tanks were a new kind of
[22:16] Speaker 1: military capability. Entirely, this isn't some weird philosophical argument, like
[22:22] Speaker 1: whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit. It's
[22:25] Speaker 1: very practical. I spoke to a modern day general about this.
[22:29] Speaker 1: He told me that the tank problem has happened again
[22:32] Speaker 1: and again. After the tank, it was the helicopter. Was
[22:36] Speaker 1: it a kind of plane? Should it be run by
[22:38] Speaker 1: the air force? Is it more of a navy thing?
[22:40] Speaker 1: Or is its role to support the tanks? Now the
[22:44] Speaker 1: same sort of question is arising about drones. These seem
[22:48] Speaker 1: like silly questions, but they aren't. They're fundamental from the
[22:53] Speaker 1: tank to the helicopter to the drone. Someone in the
[22:57] Speaker 1: organization actually needs to own the new technology, otherwise it
[23:03] Speaker 1: will fail. So where to put the tank? Tank warfare
[23:10] Speaker 1: has been grafted onto a system it is intended to destroy.
[23:14] Speaker 1: One possibility was that because the tank offered new capabilities,
[23:18] Speaker 1: it should be in a new kind of unit. Infantry
[23:22] Speaker 1: will become first a subsidiary and later a useless arm
[23:26] Speaker 1: on all ground over which tanks can move. The army
[23:30] Speaker 1: of the last war was pot bellied and b brained.
[23:34] Speaker 1: That was JFC Fuller's view. You can just imagine the
[23:38] Speaker 1: reception he got for that. The problem with setting up
[23:42] Speaker 1: new specialized tank units was that those units would be
[23:46] Speaker 1: seen as a grab for power and resources within the army.
[23:50] Speaker 1: A new tank regiment would have no allies and no
[23:54] Speaker 1: historical tradition. So an alternative was to place the tanks
[23:59] Speaker 1: with cavalry regiments as the modern mobile strike force. That
[24:03] Speaker 1: made some sense too, and eventually tanks did end up
[24:07] Speaker 1: in the old cavalry regiments. But the cavalry were never
[24:10] Speaker 1: really organized around the concept of mobility. They were organized
[24:15] Speaker 1: around horses. The cavalry officer loved his horse. His regiment
[24:20] Speaker 1: was devoted to feeding and caring for the horses, why
[24:24] Speaker 1: should he welcome the usurper tank. It's easy to laugh
[24:28] Speaker 1: at these hide bound officers with their shiny buttons and
[24:32] Speaker 1: their big mustaches, rejecting the tank in favor of their
[24:35] Speaker 1: beloved horses. But the more you examine the difficulty of
[24:39] Speaker 1: embracing architectural innovation, the more the problem looks like something
[24:45] Speaker 1: really fundamental. Xerox Park developed or assembled most of the
[24:51] Speaker 1: features of a user friendly personal computer, but Xerox didn't
[24:56] Speaker 1: have the organizational architecture to manufacture and market such a computer.
[25:01] Speaker 1: Xerox did much better when Park developed the laser printer.
[25:05] Speaker 1: The laser printer was like artillery or the machine gun
[25:08] Speaker 1: for zero. It was an exciting new technology, but it
[25:12] Speaker 1: wasn't a challenge to the organization's architecture. The personal computer
[25:17] Speaker 1: was like the tank. One challenge could easily be met,
[25:21] Speaker 1: the other was insurmountable. The politics of change are never easy.
[25:35] Speaker 1: Since an architectural innovation requires a painful organizational overhaul, it's
[25:40] Speaker 1: a task that needs skillful diplomacy. JFC Fuller was no diplomat.
[25:47] Speaker 1: He had been annoying senior officers since before the tank existed.
[25:51] Speaker 1: For example that the start of the Great War, a
[25:54] Speaker 1: British general had been concerned that if the Germans invaded,
[25:57] Speaker 1: British counterattacks would be hampered by all the sheep on
[26:00] Speaker 1: the roads of rural England. He told Major Fuller to
[26:04] Speaker 1: sort it out. All are some signs stating sheep must
[26:08] Speaker 1: not use this road, sir. What if the less well
[26:12] Speaker 1: educated sheep are unable to read them? Fuller was just
[26:17] Speaker 1: a little too fond of his own cleverness. Remember it
[26:20] Speaker 1: was Fuller who had clearly sketched out a vision for
[26:23] Speaker 1: using tanks for lightning attacks on the enemy's command structure.
[26:27] Speaker 1: It was Fuller who had won a pair of gold
[26:29] Speaker 1: medals for his strategic essays. But his prize winning writing
[26:34] Speaker 1: was also dotted with spiky critiques of the army's commanders.
[26:38] Speaker 1: Once he testified in front of a committee of senior officers,
[26:42] Speaker 1: how many hours a day can a tank run? Thus
[26:45] Speaker 1: far we have never exceeded twenty four. For Fuller, this
[26:50] Speaker 1: was part of the game. He reflected, I knew I
[26:53] Speaker 1: should create enemies, Yet without a sturdy opposition, it is
[26:57] Speaker 1: most difficult to explode deep rooted absurdities. In other words,
[27:03] Speaker 1: Fuller thought that the best way to argue with a
[27:05] Speaker 1: stupid person was to tell him to his face that
[27:08] Speaker 1: he was stupid. I'm not sure he was quite right
[27:12] Speaker 1: about that. People could see that Fuller was smart, creative,
[27:16] Speaker 1: perhaps even brilliant, but nobody had a higher opinion of
[27:20] Speaker 1: him than he did of himself. And let's be honest,
[27:25] Speaker 1: Fuller could be pretty weird. As I told you, It'd
[27:28] Speaker 1: been a disciple of the country's most infamous magician, Alister Crowley.
[27:34] Speaker 1: Crowley was into dark rituals and sex magic. He was
[27:37] Speaker 1: such a cult figure that his image later ended up
[27:41] Speaker 1: on the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album. After
[27:45] Speaker 1: a while, he and Fuller fell out, But you can
[27:48] Speaker 1: still hear echoes of the strange spiritualistic beliefs in Fuller's arguments,
[27:54] Speaker 1: even when he was lecturing in formal settings about the
[27:57] Speaker 1: warfare of the future. I saw a fleet operating against
[28:01] Speaker 1: a fleet not at sea, but on land. Cruisers and
[28:05] Speaker 1: battleships and destroyers. My astral form follows one side, and
[28:12] Speaker 1: I notice that it is indifficulty. It cannot see. There
[28:17] Speaker 1: appears an aeroplane and gives its sight my astral form.
[28:24] Speaker 1: What's he talking about? Yet? Despite the hocus pocus. Fuller
[28:32] Speaker 1: was handed a unique opportunity to advance the cause of
[28:35] Speaker 1: tanks in the British Army. He was appointed commander of
[28:39] Speaker 1: a new experimental mechanized Force in December nineteen twenty six.
[28:46] Speaker 1: There was just one problem. He would have to step
[28:50] Speaker 1: away from his single minded focus on the tank and
[28:54] Speaker 1: also take command of an infantry brigade and a garrison.
[28:59] Speaker 1: That would mean taking responsibility for managing people as well
[29:03] Speaker 1: as creating ideas. In short, Fuller would have to get
[29:07] Speaker 1: into the organizational headaches that surround any architectural innovation. He
[29:14] Speaker 1: balked and wrote to the head of the Army, demanding
[29:17] Speaker 1: that these other duties be carried out by someone else
[29:20] Speaker 1: so that he could focus on developing tactics for mechanized warfare. Eventually,
[29:27] Speaker 1: Fuller threatened to resign, The position was awarded to someone else,
[29:33] Speaker 1: and Fuller's career never recovered. Architectural innovations can seem too
[29:39] Speaker 1: much like hard work, even for those most committed to
[29:43] Speaker 1: seeing them succeed, and as we'll see, Fuller's petulance was
[29:49] Speaker 1: to cost him and the British Army dearly. This has
[30:02] Speaker 1: been a story about how JFC Fuller failed to persuade
[30:06] Speaker 1: the British Army to reorganize itself around the tank. Full
[30:10] Speaker 1: as part in It will soon be coming to a
[30:12] Speaker 1: painful end. But there is another side to this tragic tale,
[30:17] Speaker 1: a story of how other organizations seemed to find it
[30:20] Speaker 1: so easy to take and use these ideas the personal computer,
[30:25] Speaker 1: the memory stick, walkman, the digital camera, and of course
[30:29] Speaker 1: the tank and the idea of blitzkrieg. If the inventors
[30:34] Speaker 1: of these ideas, Xerox, Sony, Kodak found it so hard
[30:39] Speaker 1: to use them, why did their rivals seem to find
[30:43] Speaker 1: it so easy. The answer is that it's sometimes easier
[30:47] Speaker 1: to build an organization from the ground up than to
[30:50] Speaker 1: disassemble and reassemble what's already there. The treaty signed after
[30:56] Speaker 1: the First World War all but abolished the German Army.
[31:00] Speaker 1: It was scarcely more than a collection of officers ahead
[31:04] Speaker 1: without a body, and tanks were strictly forbidden. The British
[31:10] Speaker 1: Army had been victorious, and it's hard to reorganize a
[31:14] Speaker 1: victorious organization. The Germans had no organization to get in
[31:18] Speaker 1: the way, no status quo to defend. German officers paid
[31:24] Speaker 1: close attention to what Fuller and his fellow tank enthusiasts
[31:28] Speaker 1: were writing. They also closely watched British experiments with the
[31:32] Speaker 1: tank when Adolf Hitler came to power in nineteen thirty
[31:37] Speaker 1: three and dramatically expanded the German army secretly at first
[31:42] Speaker 1: he encountered a German military that had been preparing for
[31:46] Speaker 1: tank warfare for fourteen years. Early in nineteen thirty nine,
[31:54] Speaker 1: Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a parade of Germany's
[31:59] Speaker 1: newly reconstructed army through the streets of Berlin. One Englishman
[32:06] Speaker 1: was there to see it. For three hours, a completely
[32:10] Speaker 1: mechanized and motorized army roared past the fur Yes, JFC
[32:16] Speaker 1: Fuller was there. Indeed, he was a guest of honor
[32:21] Speaker 1: at Hitler's birthday celebrations. After quitting the British Army in
[32:26] Speaker 1: bitterness and frustration, he turned to fascism, supporting authoritarian anti
[32:33] Speaker 1: Semitic parties both in Britain and overseas. And of course
[32:38] Speaker 1: he felt that there was one army that had really
[32:42] Speaker 1: understood and embraced his ideas, that of Adolf Hitler. After
[32:50] Speaker 1: the parade, Major General Fuller met Hitler himself in a
[32:54] Speaker 1: receiving line of the chancellery. The Furer grasped Fuller's hand.
[33:01] Speaker 1: I carfer sievar and mit idenkindenzer Frieden. I hope you
[33:06] Speaker 1: were pleased with your children, your excellency. They have grown
[33:11] Speaker 1: up so quickly that I no longer recognize them. In
[33:15] Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen, Fuller had been planning the defeat of the
[33:19] Speaker 1: German army. In nineteen thirty nine, he was schmoozing with
[33:23] Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler himself. It's an awful little detail of history.
[33:29] Speaker 1: Oh and that piece of flattery that Fuller didn't recognize
[33:33] Speaker 1: the tanks anymore. It wasn't really true, was it. He'd
[33:37] Speaker 1: been describing the War of the future for two decades,
[33:41] Speaker 1: and the War of the future was about to arrive.
[33:45] Speaker 1: Thirteen months later, on Adolf Hitler's orders, German tanks rolled
[33:51] Speaker 1: through Belgium, Holland and France. A French pilot called Saint
[33:56] Speaker 1: Exupere flew over the battlefield. If you recognize the name,
[34:00] Speaker 1: then yes, it's the same guy who wrote The Little Prince.
[34:05] Speaker 1: Saint Exupere described what had happened to the French and
[34:08] Speaker 1: British army. Is these armored readers bring irreparable consequences in
[34:15] Speaker 1: the territories they have blitzed. An army may still appear intact,
[34:21] Speaker 1: but he does seems to be an army who once
[34:24] Speaker 1: there was an organism. Now this is merely a quantity
[34:29] Speaker 1: of disconnected selves. Compare that to JFC Fuller's explanation. Without
[34:36] Speaker 1: an active and directive brain, an army is reduced to
[34:40] Speaker 1: a mob. Germany defeated France, Belgium and the Netherlands in
[34:49] Speaker 1: just forty six days, sending their battered British allies scrambling
[34:54] Speaker 1: back across the English Channel. Blitzkrieg had worked exactly as
[35:00] Speaker 1: Fuller had described. His superiors may not have wanted to listen,
[35:05] Speaker 1: but JFC Fuller, that brilliant to strange little man, had
[35:11] Speaker 1: seen it all coming. You've been listening to Cautionary Tales,
[35:24] Speaker 1: and if you want to know more about what I
[35:25] Speaker 1: think about new technologies, I have written an entire book,
[35:29] Speaker 1: fifty inventions that shaped the modern Economy. You might like it.
[35:34] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me Tim Harford.
[35:38] Speaker 1: Our producers are Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
[35:42] Speaker 1: designer and mixer was Pascal Wise. Who also composed the
[35:46] Speaker 1: amazing music. Starring in this season are Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi,
[35:53] Speaker 1: Toby Stevens and Russell Tovey, alongside Enzo Chillente, Ed Gochen, Melody, Gutteridge,
[36:00] Speaker 1: Mass Siam and Rowe and rufus Wright and introducing Malcolm Gladwell.
[36:06] Speaker 1: Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Ulia Barton, Heather Fame,
[36:11] Speaker 1: Mia LaBelle, Carlie Migliori, Jacob Weisberg and of course the
[36:15] Speaker 1: mighty Malcolm Gladwell. And thanks to my colleagues at The
[36:19] Speaker 1: Financial Times

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