By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-04-13 16:23:00
Emma Brockes’ article hit the spot (It finally happened: I’m worried about AI now. And ChatGPT’s consultation failed to allay my fears, April 8). I’m reading Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch, in which the eminent French historian and soon-to-be-executed resistance fighter gives a first-hand account of the collapse of the French army in 1940. He attributes the debacle at least in part to a lack of imagination on the part of the French general staff, which was unable to grasp that technology and war had fundamentally changed since 1918.
Brockes’ article suggests that we and our leaders suffer from the same inability to understand that a technology that is currently amusingly alarming will evolve in less amusing ways – the future Marshal Ferdinand Foch, according to Bloch, had earlier dismissed airplanes as toys for hobbyists and not of military interest.
Bloch writes that the Blitzkrieg in 1940 was like a repeat of the earlier French colonial wars…
