"Facts Important for Cavalry to Know"

We forget sometimes how rapidly things changed in the past, and how much difference four or five years could make. In 1910, Capt. Alonzo Gray of the 14th U.S. Cavalry, wrote:

I give it as my humble opinion that increased range of firearms and the addition of machine guns, increase the sphere of action of, and necessity for, well-organized cavalry; that bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles will prove to be only valuable auxiliaries to cavalry in transporting information back to the rear, and thus saving an unnecessary expenditure of horse flesh; and that while flying machines may bring information, by so doing they will widen the sphere of action of good cavalry; and, more than ever before, as a result of such information, it will be necessary to have good cavalry ready to move on extremely short notice.

(Alonzo Gray, Cavalry Tactics as Illustrated by The War Of The Rebellion, Together with Many Interesting Facts Important for Cavalry to Know, 1910, p. 3)

That bit about the machines guns has stuck with me since I first read it in 1985. In 1910, this may not have been an unreasonable opinion. Gray may not have had cavalry charging against machine guns in mind, though, as the Australian Light Horse would soon prove in Palestine, such a thing was possible and could succeed in the right circumstances. He probably had in mind the use of machine guns as a lightweight substitute for horse artillery, which made perfect sense and was a widely held idea.

Likewise he could not imagine motor vehicles that would move cross country. The tank was still six years off, and the Jeep about thirty. Airplanes were interesting but not yet taken seriously, least of all by the U.S. Army, which would lag well behind the Europeans.

Had he written five years later, the picture would have altered radically. By then, airplanes had proven their worth; cavalry had been immobilized by trenches and barbed wire on the Western Front, where they spent their time waiting to pursue the enemy once the infantry had broken through; machine guns had proven of more utility than horses, and, in London, Winston Churchill had convened the Landship Committee, whose ultimate product would be the tank.

As with most of us, he could not foresee what would happen as a given technology matured, but only what it could do at the time. Likewise, he could not see how the combination of several technologies would create whole new contexts and shape the future. No one could then, not even H.G. Wells. No one can now.