Killer Ap

The Steve Jobs of his day…

In 1889, The British Army invaded Matebeleland, what we would today call Zimbabwe.

The pretext for the invasion was in some ways immaterial. The driver was the belief that there were vast gold fields in Matebeleland, and the DeBeers company wanted them.

The Matebele had, by African standards, a pretty good standing army of 3,000 highly trained warriors, and an intimate knowledge of the land. It was, after all, their home.

The British came with 700 men, but they also came with something else:  a true killer ap.  The Maxim Gun.

The Maxim, named for its inventor, Hiram Maxim, an American, was the first real marriage of the industrial age to mass killing.  Up until then, infantrymen carried rifles that fired one round at a time.  The Maxim Gun could fire 500 rounds a minute.

It was a killing machine.

The Battle of Shangani River in 1893 was the first time the Maxim was used in battle.

The British mowed down the Matebele like grass on a summer day.  Literally.

In only a few minutes, 1500 Matebele were dead.  The British losses: 4.

With the Maxim gun firmly in hand, the British marched their way across most of East Africa, facing little resistance. And that resistance that they faced, they killed rather quickly.

The true climax of the Maxim was to come in Sudan in 1898.

Sudan was under the control of the Mahdi, an early Islamic Fundamentalist, not so unlike Osama Bin Laden.

The Mahdi had taken control of Sudan and raised a massive and fanatical army.  That army had defeated the first British expedition, led by General “Chinese” Gordon, and now the British were going to take care of the Mahdi and his followers once and for all.

At Omdurman, as Niall Ferguson writes, “the two civilizations clashed: on the one side, a horde of desert-dwelling Islamic Fundamentalists; on the other, the well-drilled Christian Soldiers of Greater Britain.”

Sound familiar?

The Muslims had 52,000 troops. The British, about 20,000.

But the British had the Maxim.

It was all over in a few hours.

The Muslim Army suffered 95% casualties,nearly 50,000 dead.  The British dead: 48.

But this was not the end of the story.

There were two observers of Omdurman that day. A 23-year old Winston Churchill was there as a war correspondent for The Observer.   The other, who saw it from a distance but understood it immediately, was the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who immediately ordered the Maxim be made standard issue for every German infantry regiment.

In July 1916, the British found themselves on the receiving end of the Maxim at the Battle of the Somme.  By the time the battle was over, the British casualties would number 419,654, dwarfing the killing at Matebeleland.

The reason the British suffered so many losses at the Somme, and so many other ‘battles’ in WW1 was that although they had introduced this new and powerful technology, they persisted in very old tactical thinking.  They still marched lines of their soldiers directly into the fire of the Maxims, even though they, above everyone should have understood the consequences.

Is there a lesson here for us?

There are many, but let us leave aside Afghanistan and Iraq for the moment.

No one has a monopoly on new technologies.  Anyone may possess them.  It is not the technology per se, but rather the understanding of how to use that new technology that counts in the end.

And new technologies almost always call for a complete rethinking of how things work.  This is true on the battlefield, and it is true in the world of business as well.

You see new technologies like Google or Craigslist effectively mowing down vast media empires.

The reason is that those empires cannot change their thinking fast enough.  So they keep throwing money or employees into the line of fire.

But that is not where the future lay.