Choices: Simon Goes A-Timelining/ISOTing

The Confederate AK-47 problem.

Has one ever read an alternate history, where the dashing time travel hero goes into the past and brings, "the great change idea" that will alter a history he does not like? Samuel Clements tried his hand at it with a social satire entitled "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". One has the usual episodes, where the 'smart hero' uses astronomy and his superior black smithing skills and knowledge of sanitation and modern bureaucratic organization to outwit and supplant the ignoranti he encounters.

I always thought, that the book which Mark Twain wrote, was one of his worst.

Let us look at something small.



Does one see what I see?



Cold rolled barrels and rifling press drills were just two steps Mister Clements knew nothing about. He did not even know how his own people of his own time made spring steel, or how case hardening worked. This is practical stuff one learned by doing and not from books. I suppose that by the 14th or maybe 15th century when European metalworkers learned the tricks from Arab metal workers in the Middle East, our Connecticut Yankee could find a whole group of blacksmiths in England, who could set up the hammer mills, cold rollers and drills and cutters to make those guns in a smoothbore fashion? A wheel lock to a Paterson is about 13 steps of design evolution, but I suppose it could be done?

Gun smiths needed special EXPENSIVE steels to repair the all too often broken fragile moving parts of a repeater or a revolver. Your average sword maker or farrier did not have those steels or the knowledge of how to temper and shape and adjust those small working parts.

The solar eclipse trick, another handy dandy bit of alternate history magic, was tried out on local peoples whose cultures were as different from Europeans as one could imagine in our reality. Often it did not work, because as Pyrrhus the Red, once said, before the Romans reamed him; "The character of our barbarians does not appear to be barbarian." Our Connecticut Yankee, in his arrogance, might have tried that one in Arthurian England, except that some of those sharp cookies knew their faulty Ptolemaic astronomy at least and COULD PREDICT such things (Necessary for planting season.). He would have been burned at the stake as a con man.

The point, one laboriously makes here, is that our hero has to still contend with historical processes, capability limits and assorted (smart and stupid) characters, who will combine to produce the disaster that is WWI. It may not be our WWI, but it will look close enough to equal that catastrophe.

It is not going to be easy to change those process vectors or those idiots. Tolstoy really was on to something when he suggested that processes vomited up a Napoleon. He did not appear by "magic". One still has Nicholas II and Émile Zola to entertain and outwit.

Let us take a large matter.

There are two men, who read Mahan and did not understand him at all. One of them was Jackie Fisher. The other was Alfred Tirpitz. They became "gimmick thinkers" who were drawn like moths to a North Sea geographic flame. Each started to champion / build navies around battleships and plotted to fight each other in a "decisive battle" to determine naval mastery of the world. Both of them ignored what Mahan ACTUALLY wrote, which is that naval mastery was determined by the use and denial of the sea, and that use / denial was accomplished in "the trade war". The use / denial was where decisive battle occurred. It was not one throw of the dice. It was an arduous campaign marked by shoreline geography, trade routes maintained and interrupted, and blockade and convoy. There would not be one decisive battle at all, but several or maybe hundreds of engagements in an attrition campaign to determine whose freighters plied the seas.

Mahan would have predicted guerre de course, which is what happened.

Now suppose out hero goes back and tries to warn Fisher that he had better develop an anti-submarine capacity based on a true read of Mahan? Fisher was not exactly stupid. Neither was the rest of the Royal Navy. Yet, look at how hard it was for Lloyd George to talk common sense reason into those "gentlemen" who were enamored of Julian Corbett?

This is sort of like the Confederate AK-47 problem. One neat idea is not going to solve the complex naval problems that wrong process thinking has strait jacketed people into.

I am not sure that Empire Exclusion Trade Tariffs will not be enforced. Free trade was a difficult concept to argue in an environment where the logic of empire was "captive markets". It certainly led to the Japanese war in the Pacific.

In a war against Germany, what would the British strategy be?

1.) Roll up their colonies and sink their scattered ships based in their colonies
2.) Blockade and mine Germany, but as a means to...
3.) Lure them out and sink the High Seas Fleet in a second Trafalgar
4.) Bomb Germany
5.) Stop the Germans in Belgium and roll them back on the run with tanks, aircraft, mobile infantry and extremely formidable artillery

  Why that set of figures rather than simply relating tariffs to those the respective countries apply to British manufactured goods?