Daniel Yergin

And it began, the German military position was based upon the railroad, inflexible.

But I was, you know, as people said, suddenly you had trucks, you had motorcycles, you had tanks, you had airplanes, etc.

And so a war that began with cavalry ended up with tanks and airplanes and trucks.

And it turned out that it was World War I, and my reading in the writing of the reprise is what really established oil as a strategic commodity.

And the person who became Britain's foreign secretary, foreign minister, said that the Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.

Exactly.

What the Allies had is mobility that the Germans didn't have.

Yeah.

People say that the Spanish Civil War in the second half of the 1930s was the dress rehearsal for World War II, where a lot of technologies and techniques of warfare were developed.

And I think, sadly, if you look at Ukraine today, you see that happening today.

Because on one hand, it is the advanced technologies that is...

you know, information technologies, cyber warfare, and it's of course drones, you know, in a way that hadn't been conceived that hobby drones could become agents of war.

Obviously the automation of the battlefield, but it's also, you know, World War II war and that there's been tank battles.

And it's a World War I one that is called positional warfare, trench warfare.

So you have like a whole century of warfare there, but it is certainly the beta test for new technologies.

Well, I think you would have needed to get to a scale that they could never get to.

That was one thing, the synthetic fuel, which meant making oil out of coal using a chemical process.

But...

And the other thing is that the allies bombed the plants as well.

But the way I thought, you know, I intended when I wrote the prize to write one chapter in World War II, I ended up writing five because it was just so amazing.