How Britain Invented, Then Ignored, Blitzkrieg
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On August 29th, Sauron has returned. Prime Video invites you to return to Middle-earth for the epic new season. Sauron will fall. You can't kill me. War is coming to Middle-earth.

I will not stop until he is destroyed. Every soul is in peril. Shall we begin? The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power. New season, August 29th. Only on Prime Video. As the night draws in and the fire blazes on the hearth, we warn the children by telling them stories. The Hobbit teaches them not to leave the path. My stories are for the education of the grown-ups.

And my stories are all true. I'm Tim Harford. Gather close and listen to my cautionary tales. August 1916. The Western Front in the First World War. The opposing armies had dug into entrenched positions, stretching 500 miles across France and Belgium from the mountains to the sea.

Barbed wire and machine guns meant that it was all but impossible for either side to advance. The noble cavalry, long the most celebrated force in the army, were utterly useless. It was a murderous stalemate.

But a few miles behind the Allied lines, hundreds of people, both civilians and British and French army officers, had brought picnics and were waiting patiently for a demonstration of a remarkable invention. It was a pleasantly warm day and a quiet spot if you tuned out the artillery of the Somme battlefield thundering away beyond the horizon. Then another noise began to cut across that distant rumbling.

The chug of a powerful engine, the relentless metallic clattering of caterpillar tracks carrying 28 tonnes of cannon and armour plating at a walking pace. Everyone was talking and chatting when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster, but a very graceful machine with beautiful lines, lozenge-shaped, but with two clumsy-looking wheels behind it.

That's Major JFC Fuller. He's the central figure in our story. He's 37, a small man with a neatly trimmed moustache. His hairline is retreating over his crown and beginning to march down the back of his head. He could pass for a butler in a costume drama, but beneath the surface of JFC Fuller is an inner radicalism. Not long ago, he'd been friends with the notorious occultist Alistair Crowley.

Crowley called himself a wizard. One newspaper called him the wickedest man in the world. Cavorting with self-proclaimed warlocks is not the typical social pastime of a British army officer. But as we'll see, that isn't even the strangest thing about the life and the fate of JFC Fuller.

Fuller sees instantly that this new machine, the tank, is the solution to the basic tactical problem of the war, of how to cross mud and trenches and barbed wire against a storm of bullets. Nothing else has worked, not even the novel atrocity of poison gas. But the tank will do the job. And JFC Fuller can see that with absolute clarity.

The tank is the unknown X in the equation of victory. All that is necessary is to get the people to see the problem. But getting other people to see the problem was, well, perhaps that was the problem. You're listening to another cautionary tale. MUSIC

The British officer class simply adored a more traditional way of waging war, one involving stirrups and swords and big, beautiful horses.

Here's one general explaining what he regarded as the obvious disadvantage of the tank. Look into the face of individuals who deal with the horse and the faces of the men who deal with the machine. You will see in the latter what I might almost call a lack of intelligence. You keep up the high standard of intelligence in the man from his association with the horse.

If Major Fuller was going to persuade the British Army to embrace the tank, it would be a long struggle. At least he managed to get himself in the right place. He applied to transfer to the newly formed Tank Corps. When he got there, he was given a blank sheet of paper and ordered to think through what might be done with these new-fangled machines. That was the easy bit.

Fuller soon formed a clear strategic vision for tank warfare. He proposed that tanks could attack the German army's brain, the string of German headquarters miles behind the front line. New, faster tanks were being designed. They could roll across the trenches and be on the German command posts in an hour. Fuller's attack would come from nowhere.

Air support would disrupt German road and rail travel. Bad news confuses. Confusion stimulates panic. His idea was dubbed Plan 1919. By striking suddenly at the German command, Plan 1919 would cause the German army to disintegrate. It would be... The winning of the war in a single battle.

But the war ended anyway, before Fuller's astonishing idea could be tested. And it became "the most famous, unused plan in military history", according to his biographer, Brian Holden-Reed. But it's not entirely true to say that it was unused. It was used, to great effect, 20 years later, by the Germans, in a lightning war occupying much of Europe in a matter of weeks.

JFC Fuller had invented Blitzkrieg and the British Army had wasted his idea. If the spirit of this story feels faintly familiar, there's a reason. Echoes of it have been repeated again and again since the British Army stuffed Fuller's plans for Blitzkrieg into a desk drawer.

In 1970, the photocopying giant Xerox established the Palo Alto Research Centre, or PARC. Xerox PARC then developed the modern personal computer, an achievement which Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple observed with great interest. Xerox still makes photocopiers.

In 1975, a 24-year-old engineer named Steve Sasson built the world's first digital camera, the invention that was to destroy Eastman Kodak, the photography giant. What's strange is that Steve Sasson was working for Kodak.

In 1999, Sony launched one of the world's first digital music players, the memory stick Walkman. Sony was armed with the iconic Walkman brand, the world's best digital engineers, and Sony music stars from Bob Dylan to Celine Dion. All they succeeded in doing was paving the way for Apple's iPod.

And back in 1918, the British had the best tanks in the world, a clear vision of how to use them, and, in fuller, one of the world's best military strategists. Yet by the late 1930s, the British had conceded technical and tactical superiority to Adolf Hitler's new army.

When this sort of thing happens so often, you have to ask yourself if it's really a coincidence. The tank, the personal computer, the digital camera, the iPod. Why do some ideas slip out of the grasp of incumbents, then thrive in the hands of upstarts?

JFC Fuller once began an essay with an aphorism about pressing ahead when you're in a leading position. Racehorses don't pull up at the winning post. Perhaps that's true. But organisations do pull up at the winning post. Within touching distance of victory, they slow down and allow others to overtake them. For a glimpse of what Fuller was up against, consider the Battle of Cambrai late in 1917.

The British Army had finally decided, prodded on by Fuller, to use 400 tanks to lumber across German lines. The tanks could only reach a top speed of 4 miles per hour, but that was fast enough

They swept aside the barbed wire, shrugged off the machine gun fire and bridged the German trenches. Our machine guns fire incessantly and then rifle and grenade fires added, but we must admit all our efforts to stop these tanks are ineffective. We can do nothing against them.

Without exaggeration, some of the German infantry seemed to be off their heads with fright. It was impossible to obtain any clear idea of the situation. There was no chain of command and no orders. It was a stunning tactical success, but the success was squandered. The British high command decided that the gap that the tanks had opened should be exploited by the cavalry.

A great deal of clattering, galloping and shouting. And a lot of our medieval horse soldiers came charging down the street. The Germans eventually regrouped and drove back the British assault. The opportunity was wasted. And not just the tactical opportunity of that day at Cambrai, but the strategic opportunity to reshape warfare itself.

Some of the infantry who'd been there understood what had so nearly been achieved. Fuller understood too.

Before the gun smoke had cleared, he was scribbling away furiously at his desk at Tank Corps headquarters, sketching out what had been discovered and what should be done next. Those scribblings would, over the following months, become Plan 1919. He understood that the success at Cambrai was just a glimpse of what might be possible. The British High Command did not understand.

There are several explanations for these missed opportunities, but most of us don't get past the first and most obvious. People are idiots. Now we can get back to some real soldiering. So remarked one senior officer to Fuller at the end of the First World War, as though defending Britain in an existential struggle had been a frivolous distraction from tending to noble horses, bright buckles and shiny boots.

A year after the war had ended, Fuller's essay, the one that begins with the reference to racehorses, won the gold medal from a prestigious think tank, the Royal United Services Institute.

A general burst into his office. What have you done? Next year, he wrote another strategically visionary essay, this time overturning the ideas of naval warfare, and he won a second gold medal. It is rather amusing as a soldier, having beaten the sailor at his own job. Others were not amused. The top brass complained. Fuller never received his second gold medal and was forbidden from publishing his second essay.

The army also blocks publication of Fuller's books for several years. They were regarded as annoying and insubordinate. The most brilliant ideas from the most brilliant strategist were seen as less an opportunity than as a threat. The top man in the British army, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery Massingbird, didn't read Fuller's most celebrated book. It would only annoy me.

He responded to the threat of Nazi militarisation by increasing the amount spent on hay and other food for horses by a factor of 10. Cavalry officers would be provided with a second horse. Tank officers would get a horse too. As I say, people are idiots. And it's not just the British army who seem guilty of idiocy.

When Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979, he couldn't contain himself when he saw a Windows and mouse interface for the first time. Why aren't you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary. If Jobs had been teleported into the British War Office between the wars, he might well have said the same thing. But there is something about the idiot theory that feels too glib. Consider Xerox PARC.

How is it that a corporation could be smart enough to establish such a superb research centre, but then fail to take advantage? Was Kodak really run by idiots in the 1970s? Was Sony in the 1990s? No. These organisations stumbled for a reason. Management theorists have a word for the phenomenon. They call it disruption.

By disruption, they refer to an innovation that changes the world in such a way that if successful organisations keep on doing what made them successful, they're sure to fail. But why don't organisations adapt? After all, they usually have the resources, the experience and the reputation to outpace any upstarts. Kodak did. So did Xerox. So did Sony. And so did the British Army.

But for some reason, they get stuck. More horses, more hay. We've already explored the idiot hypothesis. But there is a different theory of what goes wrong. It's a famous theory too in management circles. It comes from Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. More than 20 years ago, Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma.

It told a compelling story about how new technologies creep up from below. These technologies are flawed or underdeveloped at first, so they don't appeal to existing customers. But they find niches, and slowly they improve while the incumbents are looking elsewhere. And one day, the new technology is good enough to destroy the business of the old giants.

Christensen's disruption theory is an elegant one, but there are plenty of examples that just don't fit. Think about why Xerox didn't exploit that cutting-edge research at Xerox PARC. Not because the mouse and the graphic user interface are a low-end competitor to the photocopier. They aren't. They're from a different universe. The iPod didn't sneak up on Sony from below, and Kodak not only developed the digital camera...

It made a good income from the digital camera patents. These organisations weren't slow to see the change coming. They often saw earlier than anyone else what lay ahead. Yet, they were unable to put together the right response. So it was a century ago with the tank.

Nobody could seriously call the tank a low-end competitor to the horse. And nobody could claim that the British Army hadn't noticed the tank. The British were well ahead of their rivals. So we've set aside the idiot hypothesis, and we've examined Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. It's one of the most celebrated ideas in management.

But if we want to understand why the British Army lost its advantage in tank warfare, our cautionary tale needs a new theory. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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In 1990, a young economist named Rebecca Henderson published an article that presented a different view of why it's hard to do new things in old organisations. The relevant word is the boring one – organisations. What Rebecca Henderson pointed out was that these organisations don't stumble because a new technology is radical. They stumble if it requires, well, a different type of organisation.

No matter how brilliant and how new an innovation is, if it slips snugly into the organisational chart that already exists, the dominant organisation of yesterday has a good chance of being the dominant organisation of tomorrow. Let me give you an example. IBM, the giant of old-fashioned mainframe corporate computing.

IBM is a survivor. It was top dog from the age of the punch card machine all the way through to the 1980s. Everything changed in computing over those decades. Everything, except the fact that IBM was in charge. This was because the organisational challenge of making and selling a room-sized mainframe computer to a bank in the 1970s

wasn't very different from the organisational challenge of making and selling a room-sized mechanical tabulating machine to a bank in the 1930s. But then computers crossed a threshold. They became small enough and cheap enough that they'd be bought by small businesses and hobbyists and even parents.

Now IBM faced a very different challenge. They had a corporate army ready to negotiate multi-million dollar contracts with multinational procurement departments. What were they supposed to do when a computer became a household appliance? Something more like a blender.

IBM did create a strong business in personal computers. But that business was openly aggravating the rest of the organisation, bypassing IBM's distribution division and cutting IBM's components division out of the loop. In the end, IBM's internal politics asserted itself and the personal computer division was sold off. It just didn't fit.

What had flummoxed IBM was not the pace of technological change. It had been dealing with technological change just fine for more than half a century. IBM's problem was that its old organisational structures and systems had become a liability, not an advantage.

Rebecca Henderson calls this sort of technological change an architectural innovation. And an architectural innovation demands a new organisational structure, which means that old organisations face an uphill struggle. Those organisations may have changed the world, but when they're forced to change themselves, that's a harder challenge.

Before the First World War, armies had been organised for centuries around cavalry and infantry. The mounted troops offered mobility, the foot soldiers strength in numbers and the ability to dig in defensively. Three new technologies, artillery, barbed wire and the machine gun, shaped the battlefield of the First World War. They changed everything, everything that is, except the way armies were organised.

And that was because the armies didn't need to change. Barbed wire and machine guns were used to reinforce infantry positions. The big guns of the artillery could support either cavalry or infantry from a distance. The old hierarchies were preserved. But then the tanks clanked slowly into view. And the tanks were different.

In some ways, they were like cavalry because their strength lay partly in their ability to move quickly. In other ways, they fitted with the infantry, fighting alongside foot soldiers. Or perhaps tanks were a new kind of military capability entirely. This isn't some weird philosophical argument, like whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit. It's very practical.

I spoke to a modern day general about this. He told me that the tank problem has happened again and again. After the tank, it was the helicopter. Was it a kind of plane? Should it be run by the Air Force? Is it more of a Navy thing? Or is its role to support the tanks? Now the same sort of question is arising about drones. These seem like silly questions, but they aren't. They're fundamental. From the tank, to the helicopter, to the drone,

Someone in the organisation actually needs to own the new technology. Otherwise, it will fail. So...

Where to put the tank? Tank warfare has been grafted onto a system it is intended to destroy. One possibility was that because the tank offered new capabilities, it should be in a new kind of unit. Infantry will become first a subsidiary and later a useless arm on all ground over which tanks can move. The army of the last war was pot-bellied and pea-brained. That was JFC Fuller's view.

You can just imagine the reception he got for that. The problem with setting up new, specialised tank units was that those units would be seen as a grab for power and resources within the army. A new tank regiment would have no allies and no historical tradition. So an alternative was to place the tanks with cavalry regiments, as the modern mobile strike force.

That made some sense too, and eventually tanks did end up in the old cavalry regiments. But the cavalry were never really organised around the concept of mobility. They were organised around horses. The cavalry officer loved his horse. His regiment was devoted to feeding and caring for the horses. Why should he welcome the usurper tank?

It's easy to laugh at these hidebound officers with their shiny buttons and their big moustaches, rejecting the tank in favour of their beloved horses. But the more you examine the difficulty of embracing architectural innovation, the more the problem looks like something really fundamental. Xerox PARC developed or assembled most of the features of a user-friendly personal computer.

But Xerox didn't have the organisational architecture to manufacture and market such a computer. Xerox did much better when Park developed the laser printer. The laser printer was like artillery or the machine gun for Xerox. It was an exciting new technology, but it wasn't a challenge to the organisation's architecture. The personal computer was like the tank. One challenge could easily be met. The other was insurmountable.

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Since an architectural innovation requires a painful organisational overhaul, it's a task that needs skilful diplomacy. JFC Fuller was no diplomat. He had been annoying senior officers since before the tank existed.

For example, at the start of the Great War, a British general had been concerned that if the Germans invaded, British counter-attacks would be hampered by all the sheep on the roads of rural England. He told Major Fuller to sort it out. What are some signs stating sheep must not use this road? Sir, what if the less well-educated sheep are unable to read them? Fuller was just a little too fond of his own cleverness.

Remember, it was Fuller who had clearly sketched out a vision for using tanks for lightning attacks on the enemy's command structure. It was Fuller who had won a pair of gold medals for his strategic essays. But his prize-winning writing was also dotted with spiky critiques of the army's commanders. Once he testified in front of a committee of senior officers. How many hours a day can a tank run? Thus far we have never exceeded 24.

For Fuller, this was part of the game. He reflected, I knew I should create enemies, yet without a sturdy opposition it is most difficult to explode deep-rooted absurdities. In other words, Fuller thought that the best way to argue with a stupid person was to tell him to his face that he was stupid. I'm not sure he was quite right about that.

People could see that Fuller was smart, creative, perhaps even brilliant. But nobody had a higher opinion of him than he did of himself. And let's be honest, Fuller could be pretty weird. As I told you, he'd been a disciple of the country's most infamous magician, Alistair Crowley.

Crowley was into dark rituals and sex magic. He was such a cult figure that his image later ended up on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album. After a while, he and Fuller fell out. But you can still hear echoes of the strange, spiritualistic beliefs in Fuller's arguments, even when he was lecturing in formal settings about the warfare of the future.

I saw a fleet operating against a fleet, not at sea, but on land. Cruisers and battleships and destroyers. My astral form follows one side, and I notice that it is in difficulty. It cannot see. There appears an aeroplane and gives it sight. My astral form? What's he talking about?

Yet, despite the hocus-pocus, Fuller was handed a unique opportunity to advance the cause of tanks in the British Army. He was appointed commander of a new experimental mechanised force in December 1926. There was just one problem. He would have to step away from his single-minded focus on the tank and also take command of an infantry brigade and a garrison.

That would mean taking responsibility for managing people, as well as creating ideas. In short, Fuller would have to get into the organisational headaches that surround any architectural innovation. He balked and wrote to the head of the army, demanding that these other duties be carried out by someone else so that he could focus on developing tactics for mechanised warfare. Eventually, Fuller threatened to resign.

The position was awarded to someone else, and Fuller's career never recovered. Architectural innovations can seem too much like hard work, even for those most committed to seeing them succeed. And, as we'll see, Fuller's petulance was to cost him and the British Army dearly.

This has been a story about how JFC Fuller failed to persuade the British Army to reorganise itself around the tank. Fuller's part in it will soon be coming to a painful end. But there is another side to this tragic tale. A story of how other organisations seem to find it so easy to take and use these ideas.

The personal computer, the memory stick Walkman, the digital camera, and of course, the tank and the idea of Blitzkrieg. If the inventors of these ideas, Xerox, Sony, Kodak, found it so hard to use them, why did their rivals seem to find it so easy? The answer is that it's sometimes easier to build an organisation from the ground up than to disassemble and reassemble what's already there.

The treaty signed after the First World War all but abolished the German army. It was scarcely more than a collection of officers, a head without a body, and tanks were strictly forbidden. The British army had been victorious, and it's hard to reorganise a victorious organisation. The Germans had no organisation to get in the way, no status quo to defend.

German officers paid close attention to what Fuller and his fellow tank enthusiasts were writing. They also closely watched British experiments with the tank. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and dramatically expanded the German army, secretly at first, he encountered a German military that had been preparing for tank warfare for 14 years.

Early in 1939, Hitler celebrated his 50th birthday with a parade of Germany's newly reconstructed army through the streets of Berlin. One Englishman was there to see it. For three hours, a completely mechanised and motorised army roared past the Fuhrer. Yes, JFC Fuller was there.

Indeed, he was a guest of honour at Hitler's birthday celebrations. After quitting the British Army in bitterness and frustration, he'd turned to fascism, supporting authoritarian, anti-Semitic parties both in Britain and overseas. And, of course, he felt that there was one army that had really understood and embraced his ideas, that of Adolf Hitler.

After the parade, Major General Fuller met Hitler himself in a receiving line at the Chancellery. The Führer grasped Fuller's hand. "Ich hoffe, Sie waren mit ihren Kindern zufrieden." "I hope you were pleased with your children." "Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them." In 1917, Fuller had been planning the defeat of the German army.

In 1939, he was schmoozing with Adolf Hitler himself. It's an awful little detail of history. Oh, and that piece of flattery that Fuller didn't recognise the tanks anymore? It wasn't really true, was it? He'd been describing the war of the future for two decades. And the war of the future was about to arrive. 13 months later, on Adolf Hitler's orders,

German tanks rolled through Belgium, Holland and France. A French pilot called Saint-Exupéry flew over the battlefield. If you recognise the name, then yes, it's the same guy who wrote The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry described what had happened to the French and British armies. "These armed raiders bring irreparable consequences.

In the territory they have bleached, an army may still appear intact, but it has ceased to be an army. Where once there was an organism, now this is merely a quantity of disconnected cells. Compare that to JFC Fuller's explanation. Without an active and directive brain, an army is reduced to a mob.

Germany defeated France, Belgium and the Netherlands in just 46 days, sending their battered British allies scrambling back across the English Channel. Blitzkrieg had worked exactly as Fuller had described. His superiors may not have wanted to listen, but JFC Fuller, that brilliant, bitter, strange little man, had seen it all coming.

You've been listening to Cautionary Tales. And if you want to know more about what I think about new technologies, I have written an entire book, 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. You might like it. Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me, Tim Harford. Our producers are Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer and mixer was Pascal Wise, who also composed the amazing music.

Starring in this season are Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stephens and Russell Tovey, alongside Enzo Cilente, Ed Gochan, Melanie Gutteridge, Masaya Munro and Rufus Wright. And introducing Malcolm Gladwell.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Fane, Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course, the mighty Malcolm Gladwell. And thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honour.

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