affair of rather imperfectly trained young men with rifles and horses
and old-fashioned things like that. A Mexican war on that level might be
as tedious as the South African war. But if the United States preferred
to go into Mexican affairs with what I may perhaps call a 1916 autumn
outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she seems to possess at present,
there is no reason why America should not clear up any and every Mexican
guerilla force she wanted to in a few weeks.

To do that she would need a plant of a few hundred aeroplanes, for the
most part armed with machine guns, and the motor repair vans and so
forth needed to go with the aeroplanes; she would need a comparatively
small army of infantry armed with machine guns, with motor transport,
and a few small land ironclads. Such a force could locate, overtake,
destroy and disperse any possible force that a country in the present
industrial condition of Mexico could put into the field. No sort of
entrenchment or fortification possible in Mexico could stand against
it. It could go from one end of the country to the other without serious
loss, and hunt down and capture anyone it wished....

The practical political consequence of the present development of
warfare, of the complete revolution in the conditions of warfare since
this century began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for any
peoples not able either to manufacture or procure the very complicated
appliances and munitions now needed for its prosecution. Countries like
Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia, Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no more capable
of going to war without the connivance and help of manufacturing states
than horses are capable of flying. And this makes possible such a
complete control of war by the few great states which are at the
necessary level of industrial development as not the most Utopian of us
have hitherto dared to imagine.